There's another point which I'll call the peacock theory. A company that can afford to spend millions of dollars on advertising must be profitable. If it's profitable then people must buy a lot of their product. If people buy a lot of their product then the product must be at least acceptable, or people wouldn't buy it.
I'm well aware that each of those assumptions can be questioned, but showy displays of quality are so hardwired into the animal genome that to argue they don't exist is, frankly, ignorant and stupid. (So don't bother replying that I'm wrong.)
He didn't say people don't respond to ads, or even that *he* doesn't respond to ads. He said the subliminal thing is hogwash.
Coke ads try to associate Coke with a good time, with youth, and with friendship. What, exactly, would they stick in there "subliminally" that they aren't trying to create an association with...liminally?
Not to mention that every study of "subliminal" advertising has debunked it as BS. I'll take my psuedo-science on astrology.com; I'd rather not have to deal with it on/.
I went for years without adblock. What finally changed my mind was when I noticed that certain sites were slow or stalled because the ad server wasn't responding. In some ways I'd rather see the ads if it means the content won't cost me anything, but not at the cost of performance.
The other thing adblock gets rid of is those obnoxious underlined context ads. Surrounding the content with banners doesn't bother me, but inserting ads directly into the content goes too far.
You should try adblock, not because you want to be a typical too-cool-for-ads poser, but because it will improve your surfing experience.
Actually, nowhere in the constitution does it say you have a right to privacy. It was a Supreme Court decision that created that right, and another SCOTUS decision could take it away.
Lets beat the metaphor to death. It's like letting your neighbor's sprinkler water your grass. If your neighbor didn't want to share the water with you he should have moved the sprinkler or put up a fence or something.
I used to perform disaster recovery testing for a very big company. There was one particular test where a critical application wouldn't run because it was registered to the CPU's serial number and the software was refusing to run on the hardware at the DR facility. I'm pretty sure that the majority of proprietary mainframe apps work this way.
The data restoration couldn't begin until the vendor fixed the license issue, which took ~45 minutes. Since we had a 12 hour recovery limit that was a long time. We worked with the vendor to make sure that our DR process wouldn't be affected by this issue, and it never happened again.
Ergo, many companies in their right minds trust their vendors, just like they trust their banks not to steal their money. The difference between Very Big Companies and you is that each VBC is worth millions of dollars to the vendor, and screwing one VBC can cause many other VBCs to defect to vendors they can trust. You, OTOH, are worth about $59.99 and if they screw you most of their other customers will never know about it.
You're obviously a sock puppet of the petro-industrial-military-capitalist-moon-landing complex who created your slashdot account to keep the truth suppressed.
/But seriously, you're trying to use logic and common sense to reason with a conspiracy theorist. Good luck with that.
You forgot about all the other ways that people waste energy. Air conditioning? Mankind lived for 100,000 years--in the desert--without it. We burn infinitely more oil to keep our houses cool than we do driving SUVs.
And vacations. Completely frivolous, and they require tons of fossil fuels to get there and back. For that matter, Disney World (and all other amusement parks, and Las Vegas) are nothing but pure fun, and as such should be considered a waste of oil.
What about toys? Toys = plastic = oil. No child should be allowed to have more than--say--five plastic toys. They can only play with one at a time anyway.
And food just makes people fat which causes them to need bigger cars, and more fuel to move them around, and more air conditioning. Every citizen of the developed world should receive ration stamps to ensure they consume no more calories than they need to stay healthy.
And speaking of food, off-season fruit is verboten as well. If you live in New England you should get locally-grown produce in the summer and then live off of root vegetables and preserves in the winter. Flying a strawberry from Chile to New York in January so some rich socialite can have chocolate-dipped strawberries off-season is an enormous waste of resources.
I could go on, but I don't want to give the people who know best how everybody else should lead their lives any more ideas.
Where you make the mistake is in assuming that car companies have convinced Americans of anything. Virtually every over-powered car and truck they make has a less-powered version available that (historically) simply doesn't sell. And they don't sell because it's more fun to drive a car with a 300 hp engine.
Now, if we had lived in Europe and gas was $4/gallon, then "fun" might have been outweighed by "economy". But when gas was $1.50 a gallon why not buy the 300 hp powerplant? I don't need a car company to tell me that power makes driving more fun.
A nation of children? Perhaps. 300 million people who value their own fun more than they value saving oil? Certainly. A nation of people who have been somehow "fooled" into thinking that more horses = more fun? Definitely not.
Actually, the reason there will BT throttling and other restrictions on using the PC as a media device is because almost NO ONE in America knows it. Try discussing these issues with anyone who's not a regular on/. and watch the glassy stares they give back to you.
If everyone in America knew what was happening there would be a hue and a cry to do something about it, just like with health care or gas prices.
I love my clicky keyboards. The problem is that when you surf the web ^H^H^H stop to think about work-related things everyone around you knows it because of the silence.
I hadn't considered the "severity of the punishment" angle of this. The U.S. might need a few more Jammy Thomases to make the public aware of the problem.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm not saying that breaking the law is the wrong thing to do. I'm saying complaining about the punishment is the wrong thing to do. Which is exactly what you said about being willing to accept the consequences of civil disobedience. We seem to agree.
But I would suggest that civil disobedience is to do the right thing, even if it's illegal. If the websites were linking to something like secret documents that proved Halliburton was responsible for the war in Iraq, and Halliburton used copyright law to shut the site down, then maintaining the link would be civil disobedience. But if you search for and maintain links to offshore copies of "Honk if you're Horny!"...well, maybe you aren't in the same category as MLK or Gandhi.
I agree with you, however, on the inherent badness of copyright law. I don't support it. I just think that breaking the law (in this case, and for these laws) does very little to further the cause of IP reform or abolishment.
Breaking the law and then complaining that the punishment is unfair because it leans too heavily in favor of corporate interests is not the right way to go about it. The right way is to refuse to purchase the *AA's products (thus depriving them of ammunition), and then becoming politically active about IP policy.
This isn't a situation where you need to break the law to make a living or to feed your kids. It's just music and movies. Learn to play the piano. Go see a play.
(And to strike pre-emptively, yes I know that the entire system is unfair and tilted against the little guy. But for all its warts this is the best system so far devised. And when enough people get angry the politicians will jump on the populist bandwagon, too.)
For licensed brokers, the SEC requires that a certain percentage (~33%) of all outgoing emails be monitored. I supported the system used at a large financial services firm for just this task, and the people who had to read these emails weren't doing it because they enjoyed invading other people's privacy. Their biggest wish was a spam-filterish tool that would remove all the personal emails so they would only have to read the emails that were pertinent to the business.
Of course the brokers knew that was the case when they were hired. You can't argue with the SEC.
I know that there is bad, privacy-invading snooping going on in some firms, but when I see statistics like "41%" I want to know how many were doing it because they had to vs how many were just being creeps.
Don't forget the CPU cycles the NSA needs to decrypt your email before they can analyze it. Remember: encrypting your email isn't just unpatriotic; it also wastes Mother Earth's natural resources.
It's silly, but I installed an unattractive Firefox theme on my Windows box, and removed some of my favorite extensions. Now surfing the web in Windows feels wrong, so I don't do it unless I have to.
(And surfing the web in IE always feel wrong, but I don't think I need to point that out here.)
What better way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon than engaged in pointless argument with a stranger.:-)
My original point, should you choose to go back and read it, was that the pharmas claim that they need to charge high prices for drugs to recoup their R&D cost. If they were taking the profits and plowing them back into developing new drugs then they would have a point. But they're not.
In fact, even if they didn't make any profit at all they would be recouping their R&D costs, because those are expenses. The profit is what's left over after the R&D money is already spent. So if they cut drug prices enough to cut their profits in half, it wouldn't affect their R&D spending one whit.
And share prices don't bring money into the company. So even if they cut their prices and their share price plummeted, the balance sheet and income statement would be unaffected. A high share price doesn't generate so much as one extra dollar that can be spent on developing new drugs.
Survivorship bias could make the pharmaceutical industry as a whole appear more profitable than it is, but it would be very, very unlikely to make an unprofitable industry appear to be very profitable. At least not without many, many bankruptcies. And I think I'd remember hearing about that.
Of course, the boards of these companies would be quickly replaced if they ever did something for the good of humanity rather than for the good of their shareholders. In fact, it would probably be an illegal violation of their fiduciary duty.
So to restate my argument, these companies are lying when they claim that high prices for their successful drugs fund the R&D spending on all the other unsuccessful drugs. Lowering drug prices can't cut into the money available for R&D until after the profits are removed. It's basic math.
High prices keep the board members from getting voted off the board. They keep the C-level officers from being fired. They keep the shareholders happy. But none of those are necessary to fund R&D. The companies' self-interest is at cross-purposes with the self-interest of the general population.
Finally, I don't know what my retirement has to do with drug company profits, but I hope that you also enjoy your retirement in good health, surrounded by close family, and free from financial insecurity.
I can't believe I went and looked this up to satisfy a rambling, incoherent./er. But I did.
According to the 2008 Fortune 500 the pharmaceutical industry was ranked #3 (out of 75 industries) in Return on Revenue, and #6 in Return on Assets. I stand by my statement, except for the "I don't have actual facts" part.
If Fortune's website was easier to use and it wasn't almost 1:00 AM I'd check other years, but it's not worth it.
If drug companies earned very small profits, then I would agree that the high prices of the drugs are required to recoup their R&D investment. But (and I'm relying on memory, not actual facts or anything) drug companies have historically been really, really profitable. And consistently profitable. So the high prices are getting redistributed to their shareholders, not to the common good.
It's possible that the high profits were the reason that there was so much money for R&D in the first place, but if there was ever a case where a free-trade believer like me could justify using everybody's money (via taxes) to subsidize the development of drugs that can benefit the sick, then this would probably be that case.
Even without 30% raises etc, having a significant portion of the staff in India hurts worker happiness in the office. First the timezone differences, the communication difficulties, and the cultural issues undermine cohesion. Then the US workers start to complain openly about their Indian co-workers who aren't there (or even awake) to defend themselves. But since the workers in India are there because US management wants it that way, the US workers get punished for not being team players. The relationship can work, but it's not easy and ideally requires a lot of time in airplanes to make sure that people know each other as people rather than as "stupid Arun in Bangalore".
And I'm sure that the Indian workers suffer from these things even more than the US workers do. The guy in the cubicle next to me usually can see when I'm busy and understands why I might be ignoring him or giving him slapped-together work. Arun in Bangalore just sees that I send him crappy specs and won't respond to his pleas for clarification. If management would let him talk directly to the users or manage some of these projects he knows he could do a better job than the lazy US-based workers.
Slashdot Mirror
COBOL doesn't have functions, it has "paragraphs" that are just glorified GOSUBs.
You don't have to be a fanatic. You have to be 11 years old.
I deserved that. :-)
There's another point which I'll call the peacock theory. A company that can afford to spend millions of dollars on advertising must be profitable. If it's profitable then people must buy a lot of their product. If people buy a lot of their product then the product must be at least acceptable, or people wouldn't buy it.
I'm well aware that each of those assumptions can be questioned, but showy displays of quality are so hardwired into the animal genome that to argue they don't exist is, frankly, ignorant and stupid. (So don't bother replying that I'm wrong.)
He didn't say people don't respond to ads, or even that *he* doesn't respond to ads. He said the subliminal thing is hogwash.
Coke ads try to associate Coke with a good time, with youth, and with friendship. What, exactly, would they stick in there "subliminally" that they aren't trying to create an association with...liminally?
Not to mention that every study of "subliminal" advertising has debunked it as BS. I'll take my psuedo-science on astrology.com; I'd rather not have to deal with it on /.
I went for years without adblock. What finally changed my mind was when I noticed that certain sites were slow or stalled because the ad server wasn't responding. In some ways I'd rather see the ads if it means the content won't cost me anything, but not at the cost of performance.
The other thing adblock gets rid of is those obnoxious underlined context ads. Surrounding the content with banners doesn't bother me, but inserting ads directly into the content goes too far.
You should try adblock, not because you want to be a typical too-cool-for-ads poser, but because it will improve your surfing experience.
(just my $.02 )
Actually, nowhere in the constitution does it say you have a right to privacy. It was a Supreme Court decision that created that right, and another SCOTUS decision could take it away.
Lets beat the metaphor to death. It's like letting your neighbor's sprinkler water your grass. If your neighbor didn't want to share the water with you he should have moved the sprinkler or put up a fence or something.
I used to perform disaster recovery testing for a very big company. There was one particular test where a critical application wouldn't run because it was registered to the CPU's serial number and the software was refusing to run on the hardware at the DR facility. I'm pretty sure that the majority of proprietary mainframe apps work this way.
The data restoration couldn't begin until the vendor fixed the license issue, which took ~45 minutes. Since we had a 12 hour recovery limit that was a long time. We worked with the vendor to make sure that our DR process wouldn't be affected by this issue, and it never happened again.
Ergo, many companies in their right minds trust their vendors, just like they trust their banks not to steal their money. The difference between Very Big Companies and you is that each VBC is worth millions of dollars to the vendor, and screwing one VBC can cause many other VBCs to defect to vendors they can trust. You, OTOH, are worth about $59.99 and if they screw you most of their other customers will never know about it.
You forgot about all the other ways that people waste energy. Air conditioning? Mankind lived for 100,000 years--in the desert--without it. We burn infinitely more oil to keep our houses cool than we do driving SUVs.
And vacations. Completely frivolous, and they require tons of fossil fuels to get there and back. For that matter, Disney World (and all other amusement parks, and Las Vegas) are nothing but pure fun, and as such should be considered a waste of oil.
What about toys? Toys = plastic = oil. No child should be allowed to have more than--say--five plastic toys. They can only play with one at a time anyway.
And food just makes people fat which causes them to need bigger cars, and more fuel to move them around, and more air conditioning. Every citizen of the developed world should receive ration stamps to ensure they consume no more calories than they need to stay healthy.
And speaking of food, off-season fruit is verboten as well. If you live in New England you should get locally-grown produce in the summer and then live off of root vegetables and preserves in the winter. Flying a strawberry from Chile to New York in January so some rich socialite can have chocolate-dipped strawberries off-season is an enormous waste of resources.
I could go on, but I don't want to give the people who know best how everybody else should lead their lives any more ideas.
Where you make the mistake is in assuming that car companies have convinced Americans of anything. Virtually every over-powered car and truck they make has a less-powered version available that (historically) simply doesn't sell. And they don't sell because it's more fun to drive a car with a 300 hp engine.
Now, if we had lived in Europe and gas was $4/gallon, then "fun" might have been outweighed by "economy". But when gas was $1.50 a gallon why not buy the 300 hp powerplant? I don't need a car company to tell me that power makes driving more fun.
A nation of children? Perhaps. 300 million people who value their own fun more than they value saving oil? Certainly. A nation of people who have been somehow "fooled" into thinking that more horses = more fun? Definitely not.
Actually, the reason there will BT throttling and other restrictions on using the PC as a media device is because almost NO ONE in America knows it. Try discussing these issues with anyone who's not a regular on /. and watch the glassy stares they give back to you.
If everyone in America knew what was happening there would be a hue and a cry to do something about it, just like with health care or gas prices.
I love my clicky keyboards. The problem is that when you surf the web ^H^H^H stop to think about work-related things everyone around you knows it because of the silence.
I hadn't considered the "severity of the punishment" angle of this. The U.S. might need a few more Jammy Thomases to make the public aware of the problem.
I stand corrected. Thanks!
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm not saying that breaking the law is the wrong thing to do. I'm saying complaining about the punishment is the wrong thing to do. Which is exactly what you said about being willing to accept the consequences of civil disobedience. We seem to agree.
But I would suggest that civil disobedience is to do the right thing, even if it's illegal. If the websites were linking to something like secret documents that proved Halliburton was responsible for the war in Iraq, and Halliburton used copyright law to shut the site down, then maintaining the link would be civil disobedience. But if you search for and maintain links to offshore copies of "Honk if you're Horny!"...well, maybe you aren't in the same category as MLK or Gandhi.
I agree with you, however, on the inherent badness of copyright law. I don't support it. I just think that breaking the law (in this case, and for these laws) does very little to further the cause of IP reform or abolishment.
(My favorite solution is to just tax IP.)
I agree.
Breaking the law and then complaining that the punishment is unfair because it leans too heavily in favor of corporate interests is not the right way to go about it. The right way is to refuse to purchase the *AA's products (thus depriving them of ammunition), and then becoming politically active about IP policy.
This isn't a situation where you need to break the law to make a living or to feed your kids. It's just music and movies. Learn to play the piano. Go see a play.
(And to strike pre-emptively, yes I know that the entire system is unfair and tilted against the little guy. But for all its warts this is the best system so far devised. And when enough people get angry the politicians will jump on the populist bandwagon, too.)
For licensed brokers, the SEC requires that a certain percentage (~33%) of all outgoing emails be monitored. I supported the system used at a large financial services firm for just this task, and the people who had to read these emails weren't doing it because they enjoyed invading other people's privacy. Their biggest wish was a spam-filterish tool that would remove all the personal emails so they would only have to read the emails that were pertinent to the business.
Of course the brokers knew that was the case when they were hired. You can't argue with the SEC.
I know that there is bad, privacy-invading snooping going on in some firms, but when I see statistics like "41%" I want to know how many were doing it because they had to vs how many were just being creeps.
Don't forget the CPU cycles the NSA needs to decrypt your email before they can analyze it. Remember: encrypting your email isn't just unpatriotic; it also wastes Mother Earth's natural resources.
It's silly, but I installed an unattractive Firefox theme on my Windows box, and removed some of my favorite extensions. Now surfing the web in Windows feels wrong, so I don't do it unless I have to.
(And surfing the web in IE always feel wrong, but I don't think I need to point that out here.)
What better way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon than engaged in pointless argument with a stranger. :-)
My original point, should you choose to go back and read it, was that the pharmas claim that they need to charge high prices for drugs to recoup their R&D cost. If they were taking the profits and plowing them back into developing new drugs then they would have a point. But they're not.
In fact, even if they didn't make any profit at all they would be recouping their R&D costs, because those are expenses. The profit is what's left over after the R&D money is already spent. So if they cut drug prices enough to cut their profits in half, it wouldn't affect their R&D spending one whit.
And share prices don't bring money into the company. So even if they cut their prices and their share price plummeted, the balance sheet and income statement would be unaffected. A high share price doesn't generate so much as one extra dollar that can be spent on developing new drugs.
Survivorship bias could make the pharmaceutical industry as a whole appear more profitable than it is, but it would be very, very unlikely to make an unprofitable industry appear to be very profitable. At least not without many, many bankruptcies. And I think I'd remember hearing about that.
Of course, the boards of these companies would be quickly replaced if they ever did something for the good of humanity rather than for the good of their shareholders. In fact, it would probably be an illegal violation of their fiduciary duty.
So to restate my argument, these companies are lying when they claim that high prices for their successful drugs fund the R&D spending on all the other unsuccessful drugs. Lowering drug prices can't cut into the money available for R&D until after the profits are removed. It's basic math.
High prices keep the board members from getting voted off the board. They keep the C-level officers from being fired. They keep the shareholders happy. But none of those are necessary to fund R&D. The companies' self-interest is at cross-purposes with the self-interest of the general population.
Finally, I don't know what my retirement has to do with drug company profits, but I hope that you also enjoy your retirement in good health, surrounded by close family, and free from financial insecurity.
It's called "survivor bias", and you make a fair point.
I can't believe I went and looked this up to satisfy a rambling, incoherent ./er. But I did.
According to the 2008 Fortune 500 the pharmaceutical industry was ranked #3 (out of 75 industries) in Return on Revenue, and #6 in Return on Assets. I stand by my statement, except for the "I don't have actual facts" part.
If Fortune's website was easier to use and it wasn't almost 1:00 AM I'd check other years, but it's not worth it.
If drug companies earned very small profits, then I would agree that the high prices of the drugs are required to recoup their R&D investment. But (and I'm relying on memory, not actual facts or anything) drug companies have historically been really, really profitable. And consistently profitable. So the high prices are getting redistributed to their shareholders, not to the common good.
It's possible that the high profits were the reason that there was so much money for R&D in the first place, but if there was ever a case where a free-trade believer like me could justify using everybody's money (via taxes) to subsidize the development of drugs that can benefit the sick, then this would probably be that case.
And I'm sure that the Indian workers suffer from these things even more than the US workers do. The guy in the cubicle next to me usually can see when I'm busy and understands why I might be ignoring him or giving him slapped-together work. Arun in Bangalore just sees that I send him crappy specs and won't respond to his pleas for clarification. If management would let him talk directly to the users or manage some of these projects he knows he could do a better job than the lazy US-based workers.