I'm a lot more interested in industrial exploitation. There is clean energy and resources out there for the taking.
Inaccessible? So was the American West before the railroad. The Space Elevator may be possible depending on what happens with CNT, railgun technology developed for SDI is a reasonable fallback if the Elevator proves unbuildable within a reasonable timefram.
BTW, I just metamoderated you downward, "Insightful" just didn't seem right for your post.
We can get on the moon the resources needed to build a relatively low-cost space infrastructure including things like a solar power satellite (SPS) network capable of replacing fossil fuel completely, NASA has early-stage designs for a 1 TW network. A very large part of the estimated costs for a SPS system is the cost of launch. Getting something from the moon to orbit costs a fraction of what boosting from Earth does.
So I favor going to the moon and building a lunar mining and industrial complex, not a "moon base".
Or, we can go to Mars first, get back a few hundred pounds of Mars rocks, a few gigabytes of video, and masters/PhD theses for a couple of generations of science grad students.
The other point is that with going to the Moon, we probably get even more science done. It'll be a lot easier for grad students in related discplines to do experiments in space or on the moon if universities can simply send them commercial and rent housing and lab space for them than if they have to arrange for their experiments to go to space via conventional launch facilities, and if they're around their experiments and something goes wrong, the fix will be a lot cheaper than a satellite payload.
California's "energy crisis" was a manufactured fraud on the part of the energy (Enron was prominent in this) and electric companies like PG&E. They wanted to sell less power at higher prices, so they started turning off generating capacity and lo and behold, blackouts.
You can still make your point, but find a better example.
One can assume that the end users find themselves buying at retail when the users finally have to upgrade, and find that they'll have to replace the computers themselves as well in order to make the upgrades work and they'll have to stay with MS in order to read their legacy file formats. (we should all wish them luck with this, they'll need it)
Meanwhile, MS gets its tax rebates based on the full retail price of 98SE, a product they no longer sell to anyone.
it turned out that the RIAA labels were simply pressing fewer records per album on the average, particularly for new artists. Until someone runs the numbers, we won't know what the 7.6 number actually means.
Don't take for granted that PIRACY!!! or EVIL P2P!!! has anything to do with this, unless you enjoy being hoaxed the same way our politicians have been.
Of course, they have an excuse, a politician will believe all sorts of amazing things from someone who just wrote them a nice, big campaign contribution check.
Teen girl charged with posting nude photos on Internet
PITTSBURGH (AP) ? A 15-year-old girl
The girl, whose identity was withheld, was accused of sending out photographs of herself in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts. She sent them to people she met in chat rooms on the Internet, police said.
. ..
She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography.
Rest at the URL.
So if you're a 15 year old with a Webcam. . . Ashcroft says that it is not only illegal to send out nude photos of yourself, but it is even illegal to take and keep nude photos of yourself on your own hard drive.
If the DOJ is so well funded that they can fight terror and send little girls to jail at the same time, maybe it's time to start looking into cutting their budget. They obviously don't need it to protect Americans.
If Bush manages to get himself reelected after this kind of crap, time to look for a free country.
We have better things to do in space
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 1
There's plenty of evidence that the oil is running out, and Chinese/Indian energy consumption is skyrocketing, which means that even if we adopt conservation and renewable energy, this just puts off the day when the shit hits the fan.
When our oil needs conflict with theirs, we're going to be in one hell of a lot more trouble than terrorists can put us in.
What we need to put in space is infrastructure (orbital and lunar factory sites) and a powersat project which will allow us to replace Middle East fossil fuel, and eliminate our need to be in the Middle East.
This won't make the Islamics love us, but if our economy (and that of China and India) is growing to take advantage of space-based resources, who will it matter to? If we aren't buying oil from the Middle East, anyone who's been previously getting that oil money will be too busy either trying to keep the locals happy with dwindling resources or getting the hell out instead of supporting terrorism financially.
The other point is that if we find out that space does have to be militarized in order to use it safely, if we have an infrastructure up there, big enough launch vehicles to build it or a Space Elevator or railgun launch facility, we'll be able to do this cheaply and quickly.
Solve the problem and a whole lot of people are going to be asking that. Nobody's explained why the problem can't be solved that way. Is there something that offends your religious sensibilities about format conversion?
If you enjoy having to google on every potential peripheral purchase to see if there are drivers that might work with your distro and configuration, or you can spend non-productive time trying to find something that might work everything is perfect in the world of Linux for you.
Most *nix machines are x86. I can live with a solution that works on that platform only. However, this may be a distinction without a difference.
When I've looked at the SANE related sites, the driver information I saw really wasn't exactly specific to the CPU of the platform the scanner peripherals were running on. For a scanner to work, it needs the same commands regardless of the OS generating them.
The output to the computer has to be formatted in some manner, and that's also irrelevant to the OS, the data's just a bunch of bytes from the point of view of the CPU manipulating it. An application running on the OS has to be able to package that output in standard format image files. What tells the computer how to rearrange the data into an image? Oddly enough, that's in the driver. That's the part a Windows driver to Linux driver translator would use.
Standard format image files are also platform-independent. I can read a JPG in *nix, Windows, MacOS, or Solaris and see the same thing.
Combine this with a way to read Windows peripheral drivers and this could solve Linux's worst usability problems. Why not?
The big problems are to make it possible for an average user to install and deinstall first applications, then, peripherals.
In general, any OS is going to need the same kind of information from any class of peripherals. Why can't someone write software to decode the Windows driver information formats and turn the information into something that can be used to configure Linux to use these peripherals?
If someone plugs a USB scanner or digital camera or printer in, why shouldn't Linux ask for, first a native Linux driver, and if this isn't available, a Windows driver disk?
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to buy peripherals based on price and performance and not have to worry if it's usable with Linux or not?
Wouldn't it be easier to write a translation application or several than for the Open Source community to write thousands of drivers individually and for the rest of us to attempt to find them and then try to figure out if that driver will actually work with the distro one is running?
The author's support of outsourcing is based on an atypical "poster child" case, suspect numbers from outsourcing companies, and I presume either inducements or pressure from major outsourcing customers and perhaps Indian outsourcers themselves.
If you want to "constructively criticize" the article, don't buy anything collabnet sells and if you're in a position where decisionmakers are depending on your recommendations to make buying decisions, find a competitor.
Isn't it interesting that we're seeing all this good news about outsourcing all of a sudden now that politicians are discussing regulating it?
Now, the claim is "outsourcing saves capitalism". If that fails, we can look for "outsourcing will save us from TERRORISM".
Outsourcing makes sense when the price of labor is a very large proportion of the cost of a product and "good enough" or "sucks" is good enough.
Dell illustrated this when they returned their customer service for corporations to America but left their small business and home users to the dubious mercies of their Indian outsourcers.
Programming? If one is doing custom software projects for a specific individual customer, if one can specify everything in advance, and if "who owns the intellectual property?" afterwards really doesn't matter, substantial savings can be realized from outsourcing.
If one expects to sell 1,000,000 units of a software product, the labor cost per unit should be pennies... using American programmers might add $0.01 cent to the cost of MS Office or Windows or whatever. Perhaps as much as a dime.
To whom would adding a potential dime per unit sale to the corporate bottom line at the expense of getting rid of American employees make a big difference outside the Third World outsourcers?
CEOs, mainly. A few cents per unit, whether real or an excuse to cook the books to show enough of an apparent growth in earnings to trigger next quarter's stock options.
If the profits of their corporation drop drastically in a few years, it really doesn't matter to them. They'll either have moved on to someplace else they can stripmine for profits or have cashed out into blissful, wealthy retirement.
The investment their corporations have made in growing a trained manpower base for their future competition from India and transferring their technology to effectively unaccountable outsourcing companies will pay off. But not here and not even to the company's stockholders who didn't know when to bail out in time while Third World outsourcing appeared to be adding to company stock value?
What's the downside? American college students are already dropping out of technology fields. Can America remain strong in the areas critical to technology, science, and military power if we no longer have a technologically trained workforce? You know the answer.
Will the stockholders of American corporations profit when Third World companies decide that US management adds nothing to the value of the products they are designing, building, and servicing customers for their American corporate customers and they decide either on unfriendly takeover offers at a fraction of book value or to simply dump their US customers, take their customer lists and the knowledge of American corporate business practices and start their own competitive companies?
Note: the only situations where outsourcing make sense are where labor costs are a substantial part of per-unit profit costs or where one is selling to a local Third World customer base. However, if one is selling to the Third World, there is still a substantial parasitic cost penalty for American corporations that Third World companies don't worry about. The price of US management itself.
You can bet that there are people in the Third World who have figured this out and intend to take advantage of this and of their superiority in ability to localize home-grown products to better meet local customer needs. The American companies who have made substantial local investments in the Third World to better sell there will be lucky to recoup their investments, let alone profit. However, that problem is the problem of their future stockholders. The CEOs responsible will have long since retired.
Will benefits trickle down to Americans below the CEO level? Don't bet on it. The CEOs aren't doing this for us any more than they're doing this for employees or stoc
One of the most useful things one can do with a CAD system is dump the Bill of Materials file into a spreadsheet. All one has to do is add a column for price for each component, get the prices, and the SUM function will tell one the materials price of the prototype. Looking at the spreadsheet can also give you hints about how to reduce the price of the system in volume production.
Not a single word in the guy's essay about the future of energy, and since the approach he advocates is essentially the "modern agriculture" approach of transforming fossil fuel into food, it appears that he thinks that we've got enough to not only feed us and enable our activities, but do this for the Third World as well.
Check the links to info on peak oil here for information a bit more current than this guy's belief system is.
I'm perfectly willing to listen to what this guy has to say about plant breeding, but his perspective is a trifle limited to make listening to anything he's got to say about ending world hunger worth the time.
As has been pointed out all over the place here, the price of food is the least important factor with respect to feeding the people of the world.
If you really want to feed everybody in the world adequately, solve the energy problem and the rest will follow. The above URL points to information on how to do that.
Once we have experience in major works of industrial engineering built in space, this issue might be worth discussing.
This stuff is just a way to get SF writers to endorse Bush and the readers to hopefully, follow along. Greg Bear and Clarke really ought to know better than to lend their names to this.
At this point, this is a bad idea even if Robert Heinlein personally returns from the grave to endorse it. I say fund studies to the extent of a megabuck or two and don't bug us about it until the people who get the money know enough to discuss the subject intelligently. Our knowledge of how to move multimegaton payloads is theoretical. After experience with building space industrial facilities like powersats and factories, we'll have some practice to build on.
We're heading for a situation where we have the kind of informational monitoring and control imposed on us that the Soviet nomenklatura could only dream of in the service of capitalism. DRM, content monitoring, "trusted" operating systems, and ridiculously dispropriate extensions of copyright both in time and penalties didn't happen because there was any public demand for them.
Throw in the restrictions of civil liberties like PATRIOT Act, CAPPSI/II, TIA we were told would "protect" us against terrorism.
How much input does a citizen who can't afford to be a major campaign contributor have on the political decisions made that affects him? What kind of meaningful choice do we have between the GOP President and his "challenger", a member of the Democratic Leadership Council that changed the Democratic Party's political message to "a kinder and gentler GOP policy"?
How long before the average American citizen has no more freedom for meaningful political action than a Soviet Union citizen had?
People generally ignore laws when they know that there's no meaningful way to get them fixed. In a democracy, if public behavior doesn't fit the laws, it's the laws are supposed to get changed. If the laws don't change, something's wrong with the democracy. The fact that this bill is being taken seriously because the *AA organizations have paid off quite a few politicians rather suggests that things have gone radically wrong.
f shared music becomes a form of advertising, then you would see businesses start up to take advantage of the situation.
You don't have to go as far out of the mainstream music industry as Magnatune to find those businesses.
Big Champagne tracks P2P downloads for the marketing departments of the major record labels. This allows them to tweak their marketing programs in practically real time, unlike Arbitron ratings that take weeks to turn around.
The record labels know that in effect, P2P means music lover distributing broadcast-quality copies of their musicians' music substantially identical to what they pay to get played on the radio (Google on payola) on their own bandwidth dimes. This distribution leads to sales of the actual product, assuming it's worth buying to begin with. If an album is shit, admittedly advance P2P distribution means a record will be DOA when it hits the record stores. This recently happened to Madonna, and she's been publically whining about P2P. If an album is worth buying, record sales are boosted by P2P. Enimen's latest CD was unofficially pre-released over P2P a month before it hit the record stores. It immediately hit #1.
What the hell kind of theft results in the "victim" getting richer as a result?
Perhaps there's something other than what you and the RIAA define as theft going on here.
Any band can now afford to do their own online CD distribution. All it takes is having something to distribute.
SwiftCD will allow you to set up an account with them which will do everything including collecting from customer credit cards and shipping to them via a store page for zero setup costs, you send them a copy of your physical CD master and upload the artwork. The CDs are a bit overpriced (CD+packaging about $12, you choose what your profit margin is going to be when you set the sale price) but that's the nature of custom manufacturing.
Or if you can make professional-looking CD-R packages or can afford to do a short production run of CD-Rs or pressed CDs, setting up with CD Baby, IIRC, total setup cost is $35 plus $20 for a required barcode if one wants to sell digital music tracks via iTunes, Rhapsody, BuyMusic, Emusic, the new Napster, AOL's MusicNet, MusicMatch, etc.
The problem isn't a lack of trained and educated people as recent reports from the IEEE showing increased unemployment demonstrate.
The problem is a lack of trained and educated people willing to work for minimum wage.
Your repeating industry propaganda uncritically serves nobody except your advertisers. We expect better from Wired News.
When I tried to send this to Wired News via their contact form, the above is part of 1 of the 12 bounce messages I sent. Perhaps Wired News needs some trained and educated people to run their own computer systems. Before people start asking questions about the competence of Wired News to address technological issues. Of course, one doesn't have to have competent reporters willing to do research if their news source is recycled corporate press releases.
The article itself is just pro-outsourcing spin control. The essential industry complaint is that nobody in the USA is stupid enough to put 4 years into getting a degree that will entitle its owner to a minimum wage gig. If US companies actually want kids to study high tech, they will provide a reasonable assurance that middle-class jobs will be available for kids who study technology when they graduate from college. That's all they have to do. Instead, they are pushing college kids out of technology fields by doing the opposite. The kind of bullshit reassurances they're getting from people like Bill Gates, whose encouraging words can be translated to "Go to school and get your degree, we'll cherry-pick the best 5% of you and the rest of you have wasted tens of thousands of dollars and hours in vain pursuit of a degree which will entitle you to flip burgers" are not going to be bought by anyone smart enough to get a tech degree to begin with.
However, the best attack on outsourcing is that it is indeed a high-risk strategy. All we generally hear about from the mass media and business magazines are the "good news" stories about how wonderful it is and how it's a competitive necessity. Here are some stories about outsourcing gone bad. Some of the companies discussed in the collection of articles this links to. . . are no longer with us and there's no question that their decision to outsource was responsible. It is apparent that outsourcing is being pushed without due diligence and often without regard for long-term consequences even to the companies whose investors are supposed to profit from this.
if you think we aren't going to need to replace fossil fuel with something in 50 years.
Personally, I'd rather see somebody solving the problem, and if it takes paying off the aerospace industry to do it, I can live with that. Though I think the bulk of the payments will come from the energy industry as soon as a proof-of-concept is working. What's not to like about a zero-pollution source of energy that doesn't require buying fuel from anybody?
I think a permanent solution to the energy crisis that leaves the US with no need for a Middle East political presence that costs a few hundred billion and creates millions of jobs can be sold to the American people.
I do not think that the American people either can or should be sold on a program which will mainly bring back some cool video of people wandering around collecting Mars rocks and the rocks themselves.
If we build a space industrial infrastructure, we will know how to get to Mars cheaply, comfortably, and safely.
We need space as a place to put industry. If we get industry up there, doing science up there will be cheap... it's a lot cheaper to send science grad students up if there's lab and housing space up there for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Inaccessible? So was the American West before the railroad. The Space Elevator may be possible depending on what happens with CNT, railgun technology developed for SDI is a reasonable fallback if the Elevator proves unbuildable within a reasonable timefram.
BTW, I just metamoderated you downward, "Insightful" just didn't seem right for your post.
So I favor going to the moon and building a lunar mining and industrial complex, not a "moon base".
For more information, go here
Or, we can go to Mars first, get back a few hundred pounds of Mars rocks, a few gigabytes of video, and masters/PhD theses for a couple of generations of science grad students.
The other point is that with going to the Moon, we probably get even more science done. It'll be a lot easier for grad students in related discplines to do experiments in space or on the moon if universities can simply send them commercial and rent housing and lab space for them than if they have to arrange for their experiments to go to space via conventional launch facilities, and if they're around their experiments and something goes wrong, the fix will be a lot cheaper than a satellite payload.
You can still make your point, but find a better example.
Meanwhile, MS gets its tax rebates based on the full retail price of 98SE, a product they no longer sell to anyone.
I hope to see lawsuits against the town that approved these lights once the accidents start happening.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get any info as to when this will be other than Customer Service saying Real Soon Now.
Don't take for granted that PIRACY!!! or EVIL P2P!!! has anything to do with this, unless you enjoy being hoaxed the same way our politicians have been.
Of course, they have an excuse, a politician will believe all sorts of amazing things from someone who just wrote them a nice, big campaign contribution check.
PITTSBURGH (AP) ? A 15-year-old girl The girl, whose identity was withheld, was accused of sending out photographs of herself in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts. She sent them to people she met in chat rooms on the Internet, police said.
. . .
She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography.
Rest at the URL.
So if you're a 15 year old with a Webcam. . . Ashcroft says that it is not only illegal to send out nude photos of yourself, but it is even illegal to take and keep nude photos of yourself on your own hard drive.
If the DOJ is so well funded that they can fight terror and send little girls to jail at the same time, maybe it's time to start looking into cutting their budget. They obviously don't need it to protect Americans.
If Bush manages to get himself reelected after this kind of crap, time to look for a free country.
When our oil needs conflict with theirs, we're going to be in one hell of a lot more trouble than terrorists can put us in.
What we need to put in space is infrastructure (orbital and lunar factory sites) and a powersat project which will allow us to replace Middle East fossil fuel, and eliminate our need to be in the Middle East.
This won't make the Islamics love us, but if our economy (and that of China and India) is growing to take advantage of space-based resources, who will it matter to? If we aren't buying oil from the Middle East, anyone who's been previously getting that oil money will be too busy either trying to keep the locals happy with dwindling resources or getting the hell out instead of supporting terrorism financially.
The other point is that if we find out that space does have to be militarized in order to use it safely, if we have an infrastructure up there, big enough launch vehicles to build it or a Space Elevator or railgun launch facility, we'll be able to do this cheaply and quickly.
For more information, click here
If you enjoy having to google on every potential peripheral purchase to see if there are drivers that might work with your distro and configuration, or you can spend non-productive time trying to find something that might work everything is perfect in the world of Linux for you.
When I've looked at the SANE related sites, the driver information I saw really wasn't exactly specific to the CPU of the platform the scanner peripherals were running on. For a scanner to work, it needs the same commands regardless of the OS generating them.
The output to the computer has to be formatted in some manner, and that's also irrelevant to the OS, the data's just a bunch of bytes from the point of view of the CPU manipulating it. An application running on the OS has to be able to package that output in standard format image files. What tells the computer how to rearrange the data into an image? Oddly enough, that's in the driver. That's the part a Windows driver to Linux driver translator would use.
Standard format image files are also platform-independent. I can read a JPG in *nix, Windows, MacOS, or Solaris and see the same thing.
The big problems are to make it possible for an average user to install and deinstall first applications, then, peripherals.
In general, any OS is going to need the same kind of information from any class of peripherals. Why can't someone write software to decode the Windows driver information formats and turn the information into something that can be used to configure Linux to use these peripherals?
If someone plugs a USB scanner or digital camera or printer in, why shouldn't Linux ask for, first a native Linux driver, and if this isn't available, a Windows driver disk?
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to buy peripherals based on price and performance and not have to worry if it's usable with Linux or not?
Wouldn't it be easier to write a translation application or several than for the Open Source community to write thousands of drivers individually and for the rest of us to attempt to find them and then try to figure out if that driver will actually work with the distro one is running?
I've got hundreds of drawings in Corel Draw 8, and there is nothing I can do with them in any current Linux app that I know of.
If you want to "constructively criticize" the article, don't buy anything collabnet sells and if you're in a position where decisionmakers are depending on your recommendations to make buying decisions, find a competitor.
Now, the claim is "outsourcing saves capitalism". If that fails, we can look for "outsourcing will save us from TERRORISM".
Outsourcing makes sense when the price of labor is a very large proportion of the cost of a product and "good enough" or "sucks" is good enough.
Dell illustrated this when they returned their customer service for corporations to America but left their small business and home users to the dubious mercies of their Indian outsourcers.
Programming? If one is doing custom software projects for a specific individual customer, if one can specify everything in advance, and if "who owns the intellectual property?" afterwards really doesn't matter, substantial savings can be realized from outsourcing.
If one expects to sell 1,000,000 units of a software product, the labor cost per unit should be pennies... using American programmers might add $0.01 cent to the cost of MS Office or Windows or whatever. Perhaps as much as a dime.
To whom would adding a potential dime per unit sale to the corporate bottom line at the expense of getting rid of American employees make a big difference outside the Third World outsourcers?
CEOs, mainly. A few cents per unit, whether real or an excuse to cook the books to show enough of an apparent growth in earnings to trigger next quarter's stock options.
If the profits of their corporation drop drastically in a few years, it really doesn't matter to them. They'll either have moved on to someplace else they can stripmine for profits or have cashed out into blissful, wealthy retirement.
The investment their corporations have made in growing a trained manpower base for their future competition from India and transferring their technology to effectively unaccountable outsourcing companies will pay off. But not here and not even to the company's stockholders who didn't know when to bail out in time while Third World outsourcing appeared to be adding to company stock value?
What's the downside? American college students are already dropping out of technology fields. Can America remain strong in the areas critical to technology, science, and military power if we no longer have a technologically trained workforce? You know the answer.
Will the stockholders of American corporations profit when Third World companies decide that US management adds nothing to the value of the products they are designing, building, and servicing customers for their American corporate customers and they decide either on unfriendly takeover offers at a fraction of book value or to simply dump their US customers, take their customer lists and the knowledge of American corporate business practices and start their own competitive companies?
Note: the only situations where outsourcing make sense are where labor costs are a substantial part of per-unit profit costs or where one is selling to a local Third World customer base. However, if one is selling to the Third World, there is still a substantial parasitic cost penalty for American corporations that Third World companies don't worry about. The price of US management itself.
You can bet that there are people in the Third World who have figured this out and intend to take advantage of this and of their superiority in ability to localize home-grown products to better meet local customer needs. The American companies who have made substantial local investments in the Third World to better sell there will be lucky to recoup their investments, let alone profit. However, that problem is the problem of their future stockholders. The CEOs responsible will have long since retired.
Will benefits trickle down to Americans below the CEO level? Don't bet on it. The CEOs aren't doing this for us any more than they're doing this for employees or stoc
What's the downside to that?
Check the links to info on peak oil here for information a bit more current than this guy's belief system is.
I'm perfectly willing to listen to what this guy has to say about plant breeding, but his perspective is a trifle limited to make listening to anything he's got to say about ending world hunger worth the time.
As has been pointed out all over the place here, the price of food is the least important factor with respect to feeding the people of the world.
If you really want to feed everybody in the world adequately, solve the energy problem and the rest will follow. The above URL points to information on how to do that.
That's something I'd like to see again, preferably during his next press conference.
Once we have experience in major works of industrial engineering built in space, this issue might be worth discussing.
This stuff is just a way to get SF writers to endorse Bush and the readers to hopefully, follow along. Greg Bear and Clarke really ought to know better than to lend their names to this.
At this point, this is a bad idea even if Robert Heinlein personally returns from the grave to endorse it. I say fund studies to the extent of a megabuck or two and don't bug us about it until the people who get the money know enough to discuss the subject intelligently. Our knowledge of how to move multimegaton payloads is theoretical. After experience with building space industrial facilities like powersats and factories, we'll have some practice to build on.
Throw in the restrictions of civil liberties like PATRIOT Act, CAPPSI/II, TIA we were told would "protect" us against terrorism.
How much input does a citizen who can't afford to be a major campaign contributor have on the political decisions made that affects him? What kind of meaningful choice do we have between the GOP President and his "challenger", a member of the Democratic Leadership Council that changed the Democratic Party's political message to "a kinder and gentler GOP policy"?
How long before the average American citizen has no more freedom for meaningful political action than a Soviet Union citizen had?
People generally ignore laws when they know that there's no meaningful way to get them fixed. In a democracy, if public behavior doesn't fit the laws, it's the laws are supposed to get changed. If the laws don't change, something's wrong with the democracy. The fact that this bill is being taken seriously because the *AA organizations have paid off quite a few politicians rather suggests that things have gone radically wrong.
You don't have to go as far out of the mainstream music industry as Magnatune to find those businesses.
Big Champagne tracks P2P downloads for the marketing departments of the major record labels. This allows them to tweak their marketing programs in practically real time, unlike Arbitron ratings that take weeks to turn around.
The record labels know that in effect, P2P means music lover distributing broadcast-quality copies of their musicians' music substantially identical to what they pay to get played on the radio (Google on payola) on their own bandwidth dimes. This distribution leads to sales of the actual product, assuming it's worth buying to begin with. If an album is shit, admittedly advance P2P distribution means a record will be DOA when it hits the record stores. This recently happened to Madonna, and she's been publically whining about P2P. If an album is worth buying, record sales are boosted by P2P. Enimen's latest CD was unofficially pre-released over P2P a month before it hit the record stores. It immediately hit #1.
What the hell kind of theft results in the "victim" getting richer as a result?
Perhaps there's something other than what you and the RIAA define as theft going on here.
SwiftCD will allow you to set up an account with them which will do everything including collecting from customer credit cards and shipping to them via a store page for zero setup costs, you send them a copy of your physical CD master and upload the artwork. The CDs are a bit overpriced (CD+packaging about $12, you choose what your profit margin is going to be when you set the sale price) but that's the nature of custom manufacturing.
Or if you can make professional-looking CD-R packages or can afford to do a short production run of CD-Rs or pressed CDs, setting up with CD Baby, IIRC, total setup cost is $35 plus $20 for a required barcode if one wants to sell digital music tracks via iTunes, Rhapsody, BuyMusic, Emusic, the new Napster, AOL's MusicNet, MusicMatch, etc.
Just how easy does this have to get?
Subject: Wired: feedback: re: Outsourcing report blames schools
From: "A. Lizard"
The problem isn't a lack of trained and educated people as recent reports from the IEEE showing increased unemployment demonstrate.
The problem is a lack of trained and educated people willing to work for minimum wage.
Your repeating industry propaganda uncritically serves nobody except your advertisers. We expect better from Wired News.
When I tried to send this to Wired News via their contact form, the above is part of 1 of the 12 bounce messages I sent. Perhaps Wired News needs some trained and educated people to run their own computer systems. Before people start asking questions about the competence of Wired News to address technological issues. Of course, one doesn't have to have competent reporters willing to do research if their news source is recycled corporate press releases.
The article itself is just pro-outsourcing spin control. The essential industry complaint is that nobody in the USA is stupid enough to put 4 years into getting a degree that will entitle its owner to a minimum wage gig. If US companies actually want kids to study high tech, they will provide a reasonable assurance that middle-class jobs will be available for kids who study technology when they graduate from college. That's all they have to do. Instead, they are pushing college kids out of technology fields by doing the opposite. The kind of bullshit reassurances they're getting from people like Bill Gates, whose encouraging words can be translated to "Go to school and get your degree, we'll cherry-pick the best 5% of you and the rest of you have wasted tens of thousands of dollars and hours in vain pursuit of a degree which will entitle you to flip burgers" are not going to be bought by anyone smart enough to get a tech degree to begin with.
However, the best attack on outsourcing is that it is indeed a high-risk strategy. All we generally hear about from the mass media and business magazines are the "good news" stories about how wonderful it is and how it's a competitive necessity. Here are some stories about outsourcing gone bad. Some of the companies discussed in the collection of articles this links to. . . are no longer with us and there's no question that their decision to outsource was responsible. It is apparent that outsourcing is being pushed without due diligence and often without regard for long-term consequences even to the companies whose investors are supposed to profit from this.
Personally, I'd rather see somebody solving the problem, and if it takes paying off the aerospace industry to do it, I can live with that. Though I think the bulk of the payments will come from the energy industry as soon as a proof-of-concept is working. What's not to like about a zero-pollution source of energy that doesn't require buying fuel from anybody?
You'd rather spend the money on more oil wars until there is no longer any oil to fight for?
You can tell us that renewable energy is the answer for everybody, if you enjoy being laughed at rudely.
I think a permanent solution to the energy crisis that leaves the US with no need for a Middle East political presence that costs a few hundred billion and creates millions of jobs can be sold to the American people.
I do not think that the American people either can or should be sold on a program which will mainly bring back some cool video of people wandering around collecting Mars rocks and the rocks themselves.
If we build a space industrial infrastructure, we will know how to get to Mars cheaply, comfortably, and safely.
We need space as a place to put industry. If we get industry up there, doing science up there will be cheap... it's a lot cheaper to send science grad students up if there's lab and housing space up there for them.