It's hard to fail Apple for not allowing music purchased from other stores to play on the iPod. It'd have required Apple to support third-party DRM (which would cost Apple money), while iirc the original iPod would play mp3, amongst other formats. Can one really demand someone else to play your resticted-play files? Especially when that other party does support various other industry standards already?
Bitten by their own DRM I'd say. Proves again that DRM stands for Digital Restrictions Management - in this case restricting to which devices may play a file. The iPod was not included. The moment they dropped this restriction from their store, the iPod could play their files just fine. Which, of course, is in part what did in DRM on music files. It's too restrictive on the sellers.
The only possibly valid claim I see is Apple not licencing their DRM system to other players.
In Europe: let them live (i.e. provide proper social security).
In the USA: let them die. Maybe extend the suffering a bit by suffocating them with bank loans they can't pay back (and in the end taking the rest of the world down with it)..
Maybe they'll have to use food banks more. Maybe they'll have to use public transport instead of a gas guzzling SUV. Maybe they have to start cooking themselves instead of buying take-away every day. Maybe they have to stop smoking and drinking. Maybe they have to make do with that over sized TV for longer than two years.
The above are just some suggestions. I don't know exactly what they're supposed to do - I don't know the American way of life well enough for detailed budget advice. All I know is that borrowing for consumption is always a bad idea.
Most people need to borrow just to eat and have shelter. What would you have them do?
If that's really the reason they borrow money, we should have a hard look at the lenders. It's simply a bad idea to lend money to people who are most likely not going to pay it back. Which of course is exactly what got us the 2008 mortgage crisis: US banks lending left, right and centre to anyone who asked (especially when it came to buying homes), without checking whether they could reasonably pay anything back.
Even if you could rent, what's wrong with financing a home via mortgage? At least then you are building equity. Your monthly shelter check becomes savings.
That should not normally get you to 100-120% debt/assets levels. Banks will normally not lend more than 70% of the home value - the rest has to come from the home buyer's down payment. Many governments will top this up to like 95% though guarantees or insurance type schemes though, for better or for worse, allowing more people to buy. This will inevitably push up home prices as well. So after buying the house you should still be under the 100% level, and that level should fall as you're paying off this mortgage, making an average level of 50% a more reasonable value. Starters near the 100% level, people who live in their property for a few decades and paid off their mortgage closer to the 0% level.
The above has been my strategy. Admittedly I've never done coding for pay, however I've been coding my web site, I've written some Android apps, etc.
When I first learned to program, it was BASIC. Later in college Turbo Pascal - which was dead easy to me as I knew BASIC, meaning I knew about the key paradigms of programming. Another decade or so later I had the need to write some small software, and in a few days I got myself going in Python - to this day my language of choice. HTML was added when the need came to design a web page, and the moment it needed more complexity the python module for Apache appeared together with MySQL. I wanted to write an app for my phone, so got myself going on Android and learned the Java that goes with it.
I've taken the same approach with my current business as tour operator. I know my way around my area well, I know many interesting hidden spots, and decided to just start doing tours. The learning how to do it, came as I went. I started by getting some general advice on the Internet, followed by just doing some tours, and see how it went. I learned a lot, really fast. I found out I miss parts of knowledge, and dove into those specific subjects.
Anyway, long story short: my general advice is to learn what you need, as you go.
Your disadvantage is that you don't know any language yet; Python is considered one of the easiest ones to learn these days, and can give you the basics of object oriented and procedural. I can't say "if you know one, you know them all", but that's not too far from the truth. All languages use, at their core, the same paradigms, and those paradigms are the hard part of programming. Understand them, and the language is just a way of expressing it. Also the more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn yet another one.
In this case, based on the comments, maybe you should start learning Swift first. Or try both, spend an afternoon browsing some tutorials in both langauges, and see which you find easiest to grasp. The moment you need the other language it'll come easy. Maybe you'll get a request to add an Android version to an existing iOS app - I'd say just take it, grab the dev kit, learn Java as you go - by then at least you already have a basic understanding of the pitfalls of mobile development, you just have to learn a new language. You may risk pissing off your first employer for Android apps because you're too slow (learning takes time) but the next such job will go a lot easier already.
It seems more and more investors are losing faith in the very possibility of producing energy with fusion.
[citation needed]
Citation: the post that I replied to.
If funds decrease, it's because investors lose interest in a project, and are less willing to invest in it. If fund decrease while research progresses (like fusion - a hot topic for decades already), obviously positive results are lacking and there is less and less hope of a successful outcome.
That, if it is technically even possible to sustain fusion on a very small scale (which may have to be really big on human scales, but really tiny compared to what's going on in the sun and other stars).
It seems more and more investors are losing faith in the very possibility of producing energy with fusion. Fusion as such of course we know can be done, but sustaining a contained fusion reaction and tapping the energy it produced, that part not so much.
10.3TWh in the first half of 2014. Over the same period, Scotland generated 7.8TWh from nuclear, 5.6TWh from coal and 1.4TWh from gas,
So that's 10.3 TWh renewables vs 14.8 TWh from non-renewable sources.
Interesting numbers game. Certainly only by lumping all the renewables together, and splitting out the other sources, they could make it work. Not exactly a fair comparison. Nevertheless impressive that they are now at about 40% overall coming from renewable sources.
Finding stories about artists screwed and finally bankrupted by the music industry directly is easy - there are many more of those. I was looking for stories of artists that actually suffered direct, attributable losses to megaupload and related file sharing sites.
Well, of course! After all that, how could he pay for those legal costs? Not to mention the fact that they cut off his main source of income - megaupload.com.
Without having to defend himself from all that legislation I'm sure he wouldn't have been bankrupt now. Or at least, not yet.
Just think of all those musicians he has driven into bankruptcy by his unfettered permission of copyright infringements, like ehm... well... I'm sure we can come up with at least someone... anyone? Please?
There are scheduled outages caused by energy shortage, and they work hard on solving that. However unscheduled outages through events like the weather are very rare.
Even China has a far more reliable power supply than the USA. Virtually no outages due to normal storms or lightning or so; occasional outage after a particularly destructive typhoon (hurricane on your side of the Pacific) or a massive earthquake.
Can't really call China a small country.
It's just the sad truth that the richest country in the world has one of the most unreliable power supplies.
What do you need these volunteers for? If you can't do something yourself, you have to hire someone to do it for you, however most businesses start off as a one-man shop. Many of those never grow beyond that, they provide the owner a good income and that's it. Many owners may not even have the ambition to grow further, to start having to manage people instead of doing the real work (which they enjoy doing). That accounts for all businesses, including software businesses, this are just businesses where a person is self employed, selling his services directly to the people that need exactly that.
OP doesn't even mention what kind of software he wants to do (other than that he can't write software himself). There's web design, there's database development, there's custom application development. All these things can be done by a single person. I've done just that for my own business: I'm a tour operator and I happen to be pretty computer savvy, so for that my business set up a web site (to promote my tours), an online booking system (accepts credit cards - using PayPal as payment processor), a MySQL database to store all the tours and bookings, a front-end for me to manage tours and bookings. I've designed promotional leaflets and a presentation for use during the tours, explaining geological processes that took place. Besides all that, I'm operating the actual tours, and no way I'd hire someone to do that for me as that's the fun part of the business.
Yet still I'm a one man shop. I haven't hired anyone to do this for me. I haven't even set up a company for that (not legally required as long as I operate using my own name). The only thing that I outsource is stuff that I don't have the equipment for such as the printing of leaflets, and I'm renting a cloud server to run my website on.
What you're thinking of, is far more difficult to make money with. You have to have a unique idea, have to be the first, have to implement it well, have to get the idea out to the people.
On the other hand, there are lots of huge, established markets (such as tourism - what I'm currently involved in) with many businesses providing income for many people. The trick is to get into such a market, and make some of that money flow your way. It usually won't make you super rich, it won't make you a second Google or Facebook, but the chances that you can make some good money in such a market are good, while the chances of making it super rich are very, very, very small. Buying a lot in the lottery gives you a better chance to strike it rich than hoping for a unique product that takes off massively.
The summary is a bit short on detail, but one thing is lacking: a business plan. I've never run a software business, but am running my own business now so have a bit of experience in setting it up. What do you want to program? Who are your customers? Where's the demand?
You're already talking about hiring multiple people - this means you must have a decent outline of a piece of software to develop, and it's going to be a quite big project. Do you have customers for that already? Without customers, you're going to run dry very very soon, and you won't be able to get any funding. No customers, no future for whatever you want to do. Just saying "let's set up a software shop" is a one-way street to bankruptcy. You need to have potential customers before you start producing anything, really. You need to know the demand is there. You need to have your income sources. You'll have to find customers who need a product, and who believe you can deliver what they need at good price and quality.
Hiring people is very expensive for a shop without income. I've always started up on my own, do everything in house until you have too much to do that you have to start getting other people involved. In the meantime this also means that revenue is there.
Getting started is hard: no-one knows you, and hiring you (the new kid on the block) for some big, expensive software project (the kind a single person can't handle) won't happen. They'll go to the ones they know that can handle it. You'll have to start small, slowly get your way into the market, get your name out, get your product out, let the people know you're there and you're good. Then you may get bigger projects, then you may start hiring people and setting up an office that's not part of your living room.
What's the solution? To pay the farmers more. Right now, Cocoa sells for approx $2800/ton and in my opinion it should be closer to $10,000 - $20,000 / ton.
My feeling says that if the shortage of cocoa is as bad as TFS suggests, market forces will soon enough take care of that.
If there is no Internet available in the area, it's not likely you can find a working hotspot at Starbuck's or the local library or where-ever you would expect to find one in your home country.
There is more to GM seeds than short-term feeding of people.
There's the patents - putting too much power in the hands of a handful of people. In the end we may be stuck with eating Soylent Green.
Then there's the problem of plants grown from hybrid seeds, which do not produce viable seeds themselves, so you have to buy seeds every time. You can't use seeds you harvest from your own crops any more. Cross-breeding between hybrid and traditional strains (this will happen, if only accidentally) introduces these hybrids to traditionals, so the traditional strains may lose their ability to produce good seed. In time, we may only have these hybrid seeds available. The genetic variation in the crops goes down, local varieties disappear as they can not produce their own seeds any more.
All that then has to happen is some plant disease to appear, against which the hybrid strains (we don't have anything else any more) is not immune, and we have a world-wide famine, with little to no option to recover.
Remember that patents are location bound, so only if they're patented in that specific country AND that country accepts that accidental cross-breeding falls under the patents, big ag may be able to do something.
But don't overstate air traffic - it's still quite low capacity compared to trains and buses, which are the transport method of choice for all those migrant workers. Even in the US, if 20% of your population is on the move, 90% of those will have to take other transport than planes.
I'm more used to hearing about numbers in the tune of 200-300 million people travelling over the New Year holidays - China's most important celebration. That's mostly migrant workers travelling back home, plus some tens of millions of tourists.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to fail Apple for not allowing music purchased from other stores to play on the iPod. It'd have required Apple to support third-party DRM (which would cost Apple money), while iirc the original iPod would play mp3, amongst other formats. Can one really demand someone else to play your resticted-play files? Especially when that other party does support various other industry standards already?
Bitten by their own DRM I'd say. Proves again that DRM stands for Digital Restrictions Management - in this case restricting to which devices may play a file. The iPod was not included. The moment they dropped this restriction from their store, the iPod could play their files just fine. Which, of course, is in part what did in DRM on music files. It's too restrictive on the sellers.
The only possibly valid claim I see is Apple not licencing their DRM system to other players.
It seems the choice has been made already.
In Europe: let them live (i.e. provide proper social security).
In the USA: let them die. Maybe extend the suffering a bit by suffocating them with bank loans they can't pay back (and in the end taking the rest of the world down with it)..
Maybe they'll have to use food banks more. Maybe they'll have to use public transport instead of a gas guzzling SUV. Maybe they have to start cooking themselves instead of buying take-away every day. Maybe they have to stop smoking and drinking. Maybe they have to make do with that over sized TV for longer than two years.
The above are just some suggestions. I don't know exactly what they're supposed to do - I don't know the American way of life well enough for detailed budget advice. All I know is that borrowing for consumption is always a bad idea.
Most people need to borrow just to eat and have shelter. What would you have them do?
If that's really the reason they borrow money, we should have a hard look at the lenders. It's simply a bad idea to lend money to people who are most likely not going to pay it back. Which of course is exactly what got us the 2008 mortgage crisis: US banks lending left, right and centre to anyone who asked (especially when it came to buying homes), without checking whether they could reasonably pay anything back.
Even if you could rent, what's wrong with financing a home via mortgage? At least then you are building equity. Your monthly shelter check becomes savings.
That should not normally get you to 100-120% debt/assets levels. Banks will normally not lend more than 70% of the home value - the rest has to come from the home buyer's down payment. Many governments will top this up to like 95% though guarantees or insurance type schemes though, for better or for worse, allowing more people to buy. This will inevitably push up home prices as well. So after buying the house you should still be under the 100% level, and that level should fall as you're paying off this mortgage, making an average level of 50% a more reasonable value. Starters near the 100% level, people who live in their property for a few decades and paid off their mortgage closer to the 0% level.
The above has been my strategy. Admittedly I've never done coding for pay, however I've been coding my web site, I've written some Android apps, etc.
When I first learned to program, it was BASIC. Later in college Turbo Pascal - which was dead easy to me as I knew BASIC, meaning I knew about the key paradigms of programming. Another decade or so later I had the need to write some small software, and in a few days I got myself going in Python - to this day my language of choice. HTML was added when the need came to design a web page, and the moment it needed more complexity the python module for Apache appeared together with MySQL. I wanted to write an app for my phone, so got myself going on Android and learned the Java that goes with it.
I've taken the same approach with my current business as tour operator. I know my way around my area well, I know many interesting hidden spots, and decided to just start doing tours. The learning how to do it, came as I went. I started by getting some general advice on the Internet, followed by just doing some tours, and see how it went. I learned a lot, really fast. I found out I miss parts of knowledge, and dove into those specific subjects.
Anyway, long story short: my general advice is to learn what you need, as you go.
Your disadvantage is that you don't know any language yet; Python is considered one of the easiest ones to learn these days, and can give you the basics of object oriented and procedural. I can't say "if you know one, you know them all", but that's not too far from the truth. All languages use, at their core, the same paradigms, and those paradigms are the hard part of programming. Understand them, and the language is just a way of expressing it. Also the more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn yet another one.
In this case, based on the comments, maybe you should start learning Swift first. Or try both, spend an afternoon browsing some tutorials in both langauges, and see which you find easiest to grasp. The moment you need the other language it'll come easy. Maybe you'll get a request to add an Android version to an existing iOS app - I'd say just take it, grab the dev kit, learn Java as you go - by then at least you already have a basic understanding of the pitfalls of mobile development, you just have to learn a new language. You may risk pissing off your first employer for Android apps because you're too slow (learning takes time) but the next such job will go a lot easier already.
It seems more and more investors are losing faith in the very possibility of producing energy with fusion.
[citation needed]
Citation: the post that I replied to.
If funds decrease, it's because investors lose interest in a project, and are less willing to invest in it. If fund decrease while research progresses (like fusion - a hot topic for decades already), obviously positive results are lacking and there is less and less hope of a successful outcome.
That, if it is technically even possible to sustain fusion on a very small scale (which may have to be really big on human scales, but really tiny compared to what's going on in the sun and other stars).
It seems more and more investors are losing faith in the very possibility of producing energy with fusion. Fusion as such of course we know can be done, but sustaining a contained fusion reaction and tapping the energy it produced, that part not so much.
10.3TWh in the first half of 2014. Over the same period, Scotland generated 7.8TWh from nuclear, 5.6TWh from coal and 1.4TWh from gas,
So that's 10.3 TWh renewables vs 14.8 TWh from non-renewable sources.
Interesting numbers game. Certainly only by lumping all the renewables together, and splitting out the other sources, they could make it work. Not exactly a fair comparison. Nevertheless impressive that they are now at about 40% overall coming from renewable sources.
Finding stories about artists screwed and finally bankrupted by the music industry directly is easy - there are many more of those. I was looking for stories of artists that actually suffered direct, attributable losses to megaupload and related file sharing sites.
Read-only, sure. Just like Linux may have read-only access to Windows' NTFS drives. And a shared FAT32 partition (rw for both OSes) to exchange files.
And copyright terms will expire before even your 2nd generation of lossy recoding happens.
Somehow I doubt this. Unless the 2nd generation of recoding happens after humans have become extinct.
Well, of course! After all that, how could he pay for those legal costs? Not to mention the fact that they cut off his main source of income - megaupload.com.
Without having to defend himself from all that legislation I'm sure he wouldn't have been bankrupt now. Or at least, not yet.
It's just an eye for an eye.
Just think of all those musicians he has driven into bankruptcy by his unfettered permission of copyright infringements, like ehm... well... I'm sure we can come up with at least someone... anyone? Please?
There are scheduled outages caused by energy shortage, and they work hard on solving that. However unscheduled outages through events like the weather are very rare.
Even China has a far more reliable power supply than the USA. Virtually no outages due to normal storms or lightning or so; occasional outage after a particularly destructive typhoon (hurricane on your side of the Pacific) or a massive earthquake.
Can't really call China a small country.
It's just the sad truth that the richest country in the world has one of the most unreliable power supplies.
What do you need these volunteers for? If you can't do something yourself, you have to hire someone to do it for you, however most businesses start off as a one-man shop. Many of those never grow beyond that, they provide the owner a good income and that's it. Many owners may not even have the ambition to grow further, to start having to manage people instead of doing the real work (which they enjoy doing). That accounts for all businesses, including software businesses, this are just businesses where a person is self employed, selling his services directly to the people that need exactly that.
OP doesn't even mention what kind of software he wants to do (other than that he can't write software himself). There's web design, there's database development, there's custom application development. All these things can be done by a single person. I've done just that for my own business: I'm a tour operator and I happen to be pretty computer savvy, so for that my business set up a web site (to promote my tours), an online booking system (accepts credit cards - using PayPal as payment processor), a MySQL database to store all the tours and bookings, a front-end for me to manage tours and bookings. I've designed promotional leaflets and a presentation for use during the tours, explaining geological processes that took place. Besides all that, I'm operating the actual tours, and no way I'd hire someone to do that for me as that's the fun part of the business.
Yet still I'm a one man shop. I haven't hired anyone to do this for me. I haven't even set up a company for that (not legally required as long as I operate using my own name). The only thing that I outsource is stuff that I don't have the equipment for such as the printing of leaflets, and I'm renting a cloud server to run my website on.
What you're thinking of, is far more difficult to make money with. You have to have a unique idea, have to be the first, have to implement it well, have to get the idea out to the people.
On the other hand, there are lots of huge, established markets (such as tourism - what I'm currently involved in) with many businesses providing income for many people. The trick is to get into such a market, and make some of that money flow your way. It usually won't make you super rich, it won't make you a second Google or Facebook, but the chances that you can make some good money in such a market are good, while the chances of making it super rich are very, very, very small. Buying a lot in the lottery gives you a better chance to strike it rich than hoping for a unique product that takes off massively.
That for six out of at least six million businesses the amount of sales and customers doesn't matter too much, doesn't make it the new rule.
Yes, they're big. But no, you won't be one of them. Unless you somehow win the lottery when it comes to having the right idea at just the right time.
The summary is a bit short on detail, but one thing is lacking: a business plan. I've never run a software business, but am running my own business now so have a bit of experience in setting it up. What do you want to program? Who are your customers? Where's the demand?
You're already talking about hiring multiple people - this means you must have a decent outline of a piece of software to develop, and it's going to be a quite big project. Do you have customers for that already? Without customers, you're going to run dry very very soon, and you won't be able to get any funding. No customers, no future for whatever you want to do. Just saying "let's set up a software shop" is a one-way street to bankruptcy. You need to have potential customers before you start producing anything, really. You need to know the demand is there. You need to have your income sources. You'll have to find customers who need a product, and who believe you can deliver what they need at good price and quality.
Hiring people is very expensive for a shop without income. I've always started up on my own, do everything in house until you have too much to do that you have to start getting other people involved. In the meantime this also means that revenue is there.
Getting started is hard: no-one knows you, and hiring you (the new kid on the block) for some big, expensive software project (the kind a single person can't handle) won't happen. They'll go to the ones they know that can handle it. You'll have to start small, slowly get your way into the market, get your name out, get your product out, let the people know you're there and you're good. Then you may get bigger projects, then you may start hiring people and setting up an office that's not part of your living room.
Good luck with it all!
What's the solution? To pay the farmers more. Right now, Cocoa sells for approx $2800/ton and in my opinion it should be closer to $10,000 - $20,000 / ton.
My feeling says that if the shortage of cocoa is as bad as TFS suggests, market forces will soon enough take care of that.
If there is no Internet available in the area, it's not likely you can find a working hotspot at Starbuck's or the local library or where-ever you would expect to find one in your home country.
There is more to GM seeds than short-term feeding of people.
There's the patents - putting too much power in the hands of a handful of people. In the end we may be stuck with eating Soylent Green.
Then there's the problem of plants grown from hybrid seeds, which do not produce viable seeds themselves, so you have to buy seeds every time. You can't use seeds you harvest from your own crops any more. Cross-breeding between hybrid and traditional strains (this will happen, if only accidentally) introduces these hybrids to traditionals, so the traditional strains may lose their ability to produce good seed. In time, we may only have these hybrid seeds available. The genetic variation in the crops goes down, local varieties disappear as they can not produce their own seeds any more.
All that then has to happen is some plant disease to appear, against which the hybrid strains (we don't have anything else any more) is not immune, and we have a world-wide famine, with little to no option to recover.
Remember that patents are location bound, so only if they're patented in that specific country AND that country accepts that accidental cross-breeding falls under the patents, big ag may be able to do something.
It's probably counted like that indeed.
But don't overstate air traffic - it's still quite low capacity compared to trains and buses, which are the transport method of choice for all those migrant workers. Even in the US, if 20% of your population is on the move, 90% of those will have to take other transport than planes.
I'm more used to hearing about numbers in the tune of 200-300 million people travelling over the New Year holidays - China's most important celebration. That's mostly migrant workers travelling back home, plus some tens of millions of tourists.
No matter what, this are huge numbers.
That are all second and third (illegal) children. Plus of course all the second wives (aka mistresses).