This might have been more cost-effective and a lot less hassle than trying to expand further in Marin County. There probably isn't that much commercial space in a single blob in the surrounding cities for sale either s buildings or developable.
Particularly since Marin is wall-to-wall NIMBY and upscale enough to make it stick both politically and in local courts. Of course I'm an ex-resident.
While land further north in Sonoma County would have been cheaper, there are certain resources in San Francisco that Lucas probably didn't want to be any further away from. The other case for the Presidio is that it's about as close to the Golden Gate Bridge as one can get, and the commute hassles involved with SF get more unpleasant as one gets further into the city... check a large scale street map and see where the freeways are and aren't to get the idea.
Even post-dot-bomb, there probably isn't enough loose commercial space in the art/media community South of Market for the company physically to fit. 850K square feet is close to 20 acres.
So if Lucas wants a reasonable commute and given the other parameters, this actually makes sense for him. Though possibly not for the park or the surrounding community.
The bad news about biometric ID has been thoroughly discussed on slashdot. Someone pointed out here that the encrypted data for the ID is on the card itself. How long before the l33t s3cr1t crypto is broken?
The other point is that the 9/11 terrorists had perfectly valid papers.
If biometric ID on border IDs gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, that makes one of us.
I think Osama's boys are laughing, and the joke is on us.
You wouldn't believe how original these games were, I was a development tech there for a while in the late 1980s. Instead of a standardized vector platform (yes, this was a good idea at the time) and a standardized raster platform with custom control interfaces for each game, each motherboard was different, and they were using lots of TTL glue chips when everyone else doing video had moved up to integrating these functions into ICs.
Worse, they were already running short of new ideas, the new/hot game there when I left was an imported Pole Position (racing game) from Japan.
It wasn't any surprise to me that they were losing money. It was cool to have worked for the engineer who did Missile Command.
It strikes me that a company that cannot manage its finances responsibly would not make a good employer either...but would you be allowed to peek at their ledger when seeking a job?
At any publically traded US corporation, you can go to the SEC EDGAR database of all Federal filings with respect to the financial condition of a company.
The suits for the most part tell the truth in these reports, because lying can get corporate officers a quick trip to Club Fed.
As an exercise, go to the EDGAR database and look up the report (either 8K annual or 10Q quarterly, I'm not sure which) in which MS discusses its potential trouble from Open Source.
If you're thinking of working for a company, it's your responsibility to get this kind of info before signing on. If they're in the kind of financial trouble that will interfere with the promises they made you before hitting you up for a credit report, be assured they won't tell you themselves.
The point your quote misses out on, however, is that there is is no "reliable" way of getting into space. It's dangerous like playing russian roulette, you go up there with several thousand pounds of explosives attached to your ass, and you come back down in the middle of a plasma fireball. Between those two events you're seperated from an intense vacuum by nothing more than a few inches of steel and some ceramic tiles.
Your arguments are even less convincing. I'm sure you could come up with equally dramatic descriptions of the environment in which early airplanes operated, and they killed people, too. Airliners are a bit safer than they were in 1910. The early sailing craft were dangerous.
The technology has improved quite a bit since the 1970s. Perhaps we do know enough now to build a shuttle craft with safety comparable to that of an airliner.
We've been putting people into space since the 1960s. Surely something has been learned since then about getting to orbit and back safely.
Every man and woman who's died in space did it with the full knowledge this was one of the most dangerous jobs they could have picked. I see no reason to insult their sacrifice by scurrying under rocks, pretending like it's only a matter of time before a 100% safe route into space evolves.
Don't insult the ability of our engineers and scientists, either. 100% safety is impossible. You can get killed on a trip to the mailbox. Humans have paid for the right to explore every new domain we have taken with their lives, and there are a few of those people buried or lying around within a few miles (kilometers) of every reader of this post. However, as a result of those sacrifices, most of us can walk safely to the mailbox without a gun and without watching our backs.
When do we get out of the human sacrifice stage with respect to the kind of trip that should have become routine with the second generation shuttle and something you buy tickets from your travel agent for the third generation available Real Soon Now? We've been putting people into orbit for 40 years. I think it's time to find out whether or not we can do it right now.
It's time to honor our pioneers and move on to the future. It's time to get out of the status quo. You know as well as I do that if we keep flying a shuttle that's been kept running longer than the average city runs a public transit bus that more and more of these vehicles are going to fall out of the sky. Will the public support NASA if one of these deathtraps hits a public building full of people?
It's time to either start putting real money into the manned space program or shut it down. It's wrong to ask people to give their lives to solve problems that should be solved with money and engineering skill no matter how dedicated or brave they are. If America doesn't have the will to do this right, we don't deserve to keep our technological leadership and we won't be allowed to.
Your argument in favor of the status quo is pointless at best.
No, the burden of proof that the sales of a number 1 record as demonstrated by verified sales were harmed by the "premature" release of the album via P2P network is on YOU, and you aren't even remotely close to being able to meet it. Do you even know how record charts work? Hint: they are objective information.
Your "logic" is typical of people writing press releases for the RIAA. Is that your day job?
If you aren't on their payroll and you're trying to make propaganda for them anyway, you are an idiot.
School won't help you, you need to check into Dr. von Frankenstein's clinic for a brain transplant. Tell him to make sure the brain doesn't come out of the "abbie normal" jar.
That's very strange. In your real world, you can say that "the real world doesn't care what you think", but in his world, he has given the most cogent and insightful commentary, and has been modded up to 5. Who's lving in the real world?.
You're confusing SLASHDOT with the real world? All a mod to 5 tells me is that 3 moderators were out to lunch when they got their moderator points, and that isn't exactly uncommon around heer. I try to do a better job when I get moderator privileges.
The real world is the one where musicians use P2P to boost their record sales whether they're #1 on the charts or not even on a chart yet. Not the one where P2P doesn't make a difference.
The appearance of Eminem's latest record on P2P networks a week before release and that record's going to #1 are both verifiable facts. You claim to be an economics major and you don't know how to use google to check the mass media?
For big name artists who are already known worldwide it decreases sales because the people who might otherwise knuckle under and pay will just download instead.
Tell that to Eminem, and he'll laugh his ass off at you. His entire new album was unofficially downloadable a week before its official release.
He's laughing about "piracy" all the way to the bank.
I'm now wondering if he took matters into his own hands and ripped and uploaded the MP3s himself.
If so, whatever you think of his music, he's certainly ahead of you.
Then, of course, there's Phish and the Grateful Dead... who also have profited via letting people tape their concerts instead of trying to put people in jail over downloads.
Take off your tin-foil hat, shitcan your RIAA-fed conspiracy theories, and join the real world. Reality is bad enough without letting RIAA memes dominate your consciousness.
Congratulations. You've fallen for music industry propaganda confusing promo material (128K MP3 lo-fi) with product (CD audio mid-fi). Do you think that we should pay-per-play when we listen to the radio as well? If yes, you're right in tune with the leading-edge thinking at RIAA.
Of course, we wouldn't have a multi-billion dollar music industry if the kind of thinking you and your "friends" had prevailed at the birth of broadcast radio. Would anyone in the 1920s have been able to pay CARP style royalties at the birth of AM radio?
Why are you RIAA types (no, working for a record label PR department doesn't make you a "musician" any more than looking at an Apple ad makes me Steve Wozniak) trying to hard to kill the goose that's laid all these golden eggs for you all these years?
I advised a friend in EU who wants to promote her alternative metal albums via distributing MP3 tracks on Kazaa that she needs to have a friend local to her who's providing a Kazaa server do this because none of my friends are willing to take the legal risks involved with being a Kazaa content provider in the current legal climate.
I gave that advice about 30 seconds before I posted.
If you were a real working musician, you wouldn't have to be told that music without public exposure makes no money, or that if nobody knows about your recordings, nobody's going to buy them/
When the professional communities in India discovers that enough core functions of major US corporations have shifted to India, the next question they're likely to ask isn't "let's organize for higher wages", they're likely to ask "Just why are we producing profits for American corporate fatcats when we can run these companies ourselves and
keep the profits?"
"We've got their customer lists, we are their business procedures and workforce. Who needs their 'corporate leadership'?"
What's going to stop them? Loyalty to their US employers? They know that as soon as they start to demand and get a better living standard, that these corporations will close down the plants and move the jobs elsewhere. Someone pointed out the example of Ireland.
The difference between now and the last wave is that this is the first time US Fortune 50 companies have been outsourcing this much of their core functionality. If everything is outsourced except the executive suite and a few marketdroids, where is the value-add that makes US corporate leadership more valuable than anybody else's?
I don't see it and neither will the Indians. There are Indians just as greedy, short-sighted, and stupid as the ripest examples of US CEOs. Why not let them have a chance at the top of the corporate tree?
The difference... the CEOs will get some sort of platinum parachute as their corporations disappear, unlike their workers.
Whenever you see people employed in robotic tasks, look for them to be replaced by 'bots in future. I'm guessing that 90% of those jobs will be automated out of existence. The remaining 10% of the jobs will be keeping the hardware and software running.
The good news is that those jobs will require specialized skills and training... probably at the 2 year community college level... and they'll have decent wages. But they won't a major job source for the unskilled, they won't have a need for high school kids.
I'm sure that IBM would be very interested in your explanation of why they shouldn't be promoting Linux.
You need not consider that they've forgotten more about designing stable and professional enterprise-class systems than several hundred of you are capable of learning.
If your product is intended for a mass market, development costs are spread over hundreds of thousands or millions of units. The end user difference in cost between a product developed by $100K/year people and $10K/year people shouldn't be all that important.
Particularly if the low-wage people didn't quite get the specifications right or small differences in language made a very big difference in understanding or even timezone differences, i.e. only one team functioning when inter-group communication is needed... and large chunks have to be done over at the last minute by really expensive ubergeek consultants. These kinds of problems don't tend to wind up in the business press, but most of us have probably heard from someone who's seen this firsthand.
Even in the area of production, rememember that whether the product is software or hardware, if it's high-tech, we aren't supposed to have people building things unit-by-unit, people are supposed to be supervising production machinery, i.e. an hourly labor rate for a worker is supposed to be spread over dozens or hundreds or thousands of units per hour. If this isn't true, either the product or process is in need of redesign, low-wage sweatshops are simply ways of covering up managerial bungling, preferring to hire lots of cheap labor at what's often a higher total cost than to hire high-skill high wage people to do it right at what should be an equal (all costs considered) or lower or perhaps much lower price.
Would you rather hire 100 people at $1 to dig a ditch or 1 guy with a bulldozer? Yes, that guy's hourly rate might be more than $1/hour. You may now hide under the bed after hearing that.
When I say all costs, remember the price of defective product that's either bounced at the plant or returned by consumers.
Personally, I think that outsourcing is just another management fad and that the smartest companies which will wind up coming out ahead will stay home and cut costs with more efficiency and better technology. Of course, by the time this becomes obvious, the US may not have a programmer community to take advantage of it.
I'm not saying there aren't many good programmers in India, I'm saying that they should be building their own products and selling them on the world market competing against the rest of the world.
I'm not one of XM's investors.:-) Of course, they are probably the people behind this change in the hopes of getting instant profit. Typical VCs, in other words. I think they've just shot themselves in the head.
What's a person who went to the trouble and expense of getting a satellite car receiver going to do when he finds out that XM plays the same crap he can get for free? I'd cancel subscription service immediately and try the competitor if they're still around, and I suspect the average customer for aftermarket car radio will do exactly the same thing. If not, I'd try to replace the receiver with something with MP3 capability.
Science Magazine recently ran an article on future energy alternatives which discusses space-based energy programs like powersats. Making those work is going to require privatization and commercialization of space and everybody knows it.
Except you.
Science Magazine is credible. At this point, even the Raelians are more credible than you are. Though that isn't saying much.
The burden of proof that privatizing and commercializing space is a bad idea is on you, and you aren't remotely capable of meeting it.
Though if the black helicopter boys let you go today, you can provide us with entertainment by trying.
Perhaps this is just the PCI organization's way to encourage us to develop for Firewire, USB2, the serial replacement for IDE, etc. as they march into the future hand in hand with Microsoft.
At this point, most Linux users have to choose hardware devices based on what's really supported. If there are going to be no more PCI bus devices supported, we have to buy something else as end users, business, and enterprise owners.
Since the guy works for IBM, perhaps he can tell his company that the PCI vendor association no longer wants PCI supported in the Linux environment and if they want to sell IBM PC hardware that supports Linux, using the PCI bus is no longer an option.
Or I could simply publish an eBook under the context of secure DRM. If the book is successful, then I've got some capital to work with in order to bring the book to the bookshelf.
It isn't all evil, people. But this is slashdot so I'd better go screw myself, eh?
Sounds like exactly what you're planning to do. I certainly don't want to stop you if you want to give yourself the shaft.
Chances are, if your eBook goes nowhere, it'll be at least as much to do with the fact that nobody likes DRM formats as whether or not the content is crap, and since you wrote means you don't even know what's going on around you it probably will be.
DRM-broken E-books are not selling.
Didn't you learn anything from the recent discussion of the Baen Free Library? They are giving away earlier works of name authors with their permission, and the publisher and the authors are suddenly drastically more profitable than they ever have been before.
Baen makes it's ebooks available in non-protected formats.
You wouldn't recognize the sky falling if a large chunk of it hit you on the head and crushed you. What's wrong with the Hollywood cartel political package for computers and the Internet has received extensive coverage here and all over the Internet.
It's an attack on not just civil liberties, but the high-tech economy. If you want to live in a nation of burger-flippers, you're pro-Hollywood.
Search here or try google if you know how.
Of course, in your case, "You want fries with that?" is probably your on-the-job reality, you aren't a programmer worried about the economy tanking so badly that service industry might be where you'll eventually wind up.
Giving to the EFF or any other 501(c)3 (non-profit) activist organization under these circumstances is like taking aspirin for an illness that's life-threatening without treatment. You feel better. Then you die.
Well, it's only our freedom to use our computers as we please and our ability to create innovation that we and our nations will profit from that's at risk right now.
Ultimately, all our civil liberties are at risk and so is our economy as a whole. If it becomes impossible to create innovation without getting it approved by a Hollywood committee whose members represent companies who can't even keep a simple Website online without it getting hacked to death, that innovation will NOT be happening in the USA. Remember that the other major component of the Hollywood cartel companies is represented by the guy who said the VCR would kill the movie industry. The innovations will be made everywhere that Hollywood doesn't control and the jobs will go with them.
If the Hollywood cartel and other major corporate interests have the power to censor everything that conflicts with their agendas using the DMCA, where is the information flow we need to become informed voters? How can we discuss political activism if corporations can arbitrarily decide that their public activities are secret? Even where copyright is irrelevant, most people can't tell corporate lawyers to go fuck themselves in response to a C&D.
Court cases are the symptoms of bad laws.
The bad laws that concern us are made by politicians who work for their major contributors, not the people who vote for them.
The cure for these bad laws is to kick the politician's asses out of office and keep kicking them out until the survivors and the replacements get the message.
Non-profit organizations can't buy politicians.
The fact that non-profits can't make campaign contributors makes them a non-starter as far as the only possible solution to the problem of preventing bad laws from being made. Contribute $0, $1000, or $1,000,000,000 to the EFF, it makes no difference.
Contributing to the EFF gets you respect among your peers and a nice tax deduction to boot and the feeling that YOU HAVE DONE SOMETHING.However, the problem as it affects us as a group can't be solved by trying to stop bad law from taking effect, the problem is to stop the stream of bad laws from being made.
The EFF can not do this, only a credible PAC to represent our interests along the lines of the AARP/NRA model can.
I once believed that the high-tech community had the brains and the guts to organize a credible effort (as in PAC) to take out (not ON) Hollywood and/or the vendor community would have sense enough to spend a portion of their profits comparable to what Hollywood is spending to protect their ability to do R&D and manufacturing in the USA. If this had been done, DRM would probably be dead and everybody including Hollywood would probably be making a lot more money.
The high-tech community has told itself that contributing to the EFF is all we need to do and I'll believe the vendor community will do something when I see them doing it.
Well, I estimate we're a month or so from the day when it simply won't be possible to get the paperwork (filings with the FEC and the state election authorities in all 50 states) needed to make it possible for a national PAC to do business in the 2004 election cycle, i.e. the day that no amount of money can buy our freedom. If this problem isn't resolved in the current election cycle, game over.
If you have about $1-2M you're willing to risk on making America free again or can pass the hat to a handful of friends to raise that amount of money, start an anti-Hollywood PAC NOW, don't waste the money on the EFF.
Unfortunately, no smaller amount of money can make a difference in terms of stopping the Hollywood cartel, any PAC capable of making a difference is going to have to appear on the scene with a national-level presence and credibility. That takes enough money to get into the game, and my $1-2M estimate may be optimistic.
Note that this is startup money that will need to be spent before a single dollar is spent in making serious campaign contributions, the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars needed will come from people who want to be able to send contributions to an organization designed to fight bad politicians, not bad laws.. However, I think this is most of us. Enough of us sending in $10 and $100 and $1000 donations and some corporate contributions and we've got a war chest big enough to take on Hollywood and win.
Your only other alternative for spending your money on freedom from bad law like the DMCA and the upcoming CBDTPA and worse legislation, law and administrative regulations based on the Broadcast Working Group recommendations is to save it for an emigration fund, moving overseas to somewhere that the government doesn't take orders from the Hollywood cartel is expensive. If a people doesn't have the will to do what's needed to protect their freedom, they will lose it. This process is already underway.
The good news is that you may not have to move to India or China, the EU member nations don't seem to be in any hurry to adopt the EU Copyright Directive intended to give them their version of the DMCA, and perhaps persuading politicians that all they need to about the EU Copyright Directive in order to give their nations a drastic competitive advantage over the USA is to do nothing will work.
So... it's up to you as it always was. If we can't get our shit together to buy Congress out from under Hollywood, maybe I'll see those of you who decided to stay in high-tech instead of in the US flipping burgers in an expat bar in London or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or New Delhi.
threaten academic/scientific (but not corporate) research
jeopardizes fair use
Just what is there on this list that major corporations, particularly Hollywood content providers would object to? What is there on this list that regardless of stated goals, your Congressasshole would care about?
If it interfered with the profits of major campaign contributors, it would have been repealed days after passage. All it interferes with are the rights of the people and small companies.
I see no Unintended Consequences here.
I think it's going to interfere with corporate profits eventually, but given that suits don't look forward more than a quarter in terms of where things are going, this is also a non-starter.
As far as I'm concerned, a Skeptic is just a member of a cult as dangerous to rationality as the Religious Right is, and any dogmatic statements made by one are just as open to "Prove it" as anything said by a person who believes "Creation Science" about biology.
It's like the difference between libertarian and Libertarian when applied to a person.
If MS is really losing money over the X-Box and Linux will run on it... sounds like a nice way to get lots of cheap CPU cycles in nice, small boxes for a large Web server, render farm, game server, or even... a Beowulf cluster.
If anyone comes up with workable methods to use 12, 24, 100 of these boxes at a time and actually does it... this is the place to post them.
If the geek community had something serious enough to be listed there, we could afford to be a lot calmer about this situation. The geeks never even made a serious attempt to buy Congress.
The nearest public mental health clinic. If you believe this, you probably need to be... separated from the rest of us for a while until you've gotten the professional help you need. Go now, while you've still got a choice in the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Particularly since Marin is wall-to-wall NIMBY and upscale enough to make it stick both politically and in local courts. Of course I'm an ex-resident.
While land further north in Sonoma County would have been cheaper, there are certain resources in San Francisco that Lucas probably didn't want to be any further away from. The other case for the Presidio is that it's about as close to the Golden Gate Bridge as one can get, and the commute hassles involved with SF get more unpleasant as one gets further into the city... check a large scale street map and see where the freeways are and aren't to get the idea.
Even post-dot-bomb, there probably isn't enough loose commercial space in the art/media community South of Market for the company physically to fit. 850K square feet is close to 20 acres.
So if Lucas wants a reasonable commute and given the other parameters, this actually makes sense for him. Though possibly not for the park or the surrounding community.
The other point is that the 9/11 terrorists had perfectly valid papers.
If biometric ID on border IDs gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, that makes one of us.
I think Osama's boys are laughing, and the joke is on us.
Worse, they were already running short of new ideas, the new/hot game there when I left was an imported Pole Position (racing game) from Japan.
It wasn't any surprise to me that they were losing money. It was cool to have worked for the engineer who did Missile Command.
At any publically traded US corporation, you can go to the SEC EDGAR database of all Federal filings with respect to the financial condition of a company.
The suits for the most part tell the truth in these reports, because lying can get corporate officers a quick trip to Club Fed.
As an exercise, go to the EDGAR database and look up the report (either 8K annual or 10Q quarterly, I'm not sure which) in which MS discusses its potential trouble from Open Source.
If you're thinking of working for a company, it's your responsibility to get this kind of info before signing on. If they're in the kind of financial trouble that will interfere with the promises they made you before hitting you up for a credit report, be assured they won't tell you themselves.
Your arguments are even less convincing. I'm sure you could come up with equally dramatic descriptions of the environment in which early airplanes operated, and they killed people, too. Airliners are a bit safer than they were in 1910. The early sailing craft were dangerous.
The technology has improved quite a bit since the 1970s. Perhaps we do know enough now to build a shuttle craft with safety comparable to that of an airliner.
We've been putting people into space since the 1960s. Surely something has been learned since then about getting to orbit and back safely.
Every man and woman who's died in space did it with the full knowledge this was one of the most dangerous jobs they could have picked. I see no reason to insult their sacrifice by scurrying under rocks, pretending like it's only a matter of time before a 100% safe route into space evolves.
Don't insult the ability of our engineers and scientists, either. 100% safety is impossible. You can get killed on a trip to the mailbox. Humans have paid for the right to explore every new domain we have taken with their lives, and there are a few of those people buried or lying around within a few miles (kilometers) of every reader of this post. However, as a result of those sacrifices, most of us can walk safely to the mailbox without a gun and without watching our backs.
When do we get out of the human sacrifice stage with respect to the kind of trip that should have become routine with the second generation shuttle and something you buy tickets from your travel agent for the third generation available Real Soon Now? We've been putting people into orbit for 40 years. I think it's time to find out whether or not we can do it right now.
It's time to honor our pioneers and move on to the future. It's time to get out of the status quo. You know as well as I do that if we keep flying a shuttle that's been kept running longer than the average city runs a public transit bus that more and more of these vehicles are going to fall out of the sky. Will the public support NASA if one of these deathtraps hits a public building full of people?
It's time to either start putting real money into the manned space program or shut it down. It's wrong to ask people to give their lives to solve problems that should be solved with money and engineering skill no matter how dedicated or brave they are. If America doesn't have the will to do this right, we don't deserve to keep our technological leadership and we won't be allowed to.
Your argument in favor of the status quo is pointless at best.
Your "logic" is typical of people writing press releases for the RIAA. Is that your day job?
If you aren't on their payroll and you're trying to make propaganda for them anyway, you are an idiot.
School won't help you, you need to check into Dr. von Frankenstein's clinic for a brain transplant. Tell him to make sure the brain doesn't come out of the "abbie normal" jar.
You're confusing SLASHDOT with the real world? All a mod to 5 tells me is that 3 moderators were out to lunch when they got their moderator points, and that isn't exactly uncommon around heer. I try to do a better job when I get moderator privileges.
The real world is the one where musicians use P2P to boost their record sales whether they're #1 on the charts or not even on a chart yet. Not the one where P2P doesn't make a difference.
The appearance of Eminem's latest record on P2P networks a week before release and that record's going to #1 are both verifiable facts. You claim to be an economics major and you don't know how to use google to check the mass media?
Grow a brain. Get a life.
Tell that to Eminem, and he'll laugh his ass off at you. His entire new album was unofficially downloadable a week before its official release.
He's laughing about "piracy" all the way to the bank.
I'm now wondering if he took matters into his own hands and ripped and uploaded the MP3s himself.
If so, whatever you think of his music, he's certainly ahead of you.
Then, of course, there's Phish and the Grateful Dead... who also have profited via letting people tape their concerts instead of trying to put people in jail over downloads.
Take off your tin-foil hat, shitcan your RIAA-fed conspiracy theories, and join the real world. Reality is bad enough without letting RIAA memes dominate your consciousness.
Of course, we wouldn't have a multi-billion dollar music industry if the kind of thinking you and your "friends" had prevailed at the birth of broadcast radio. Would anyone in the 1920s have been able to pay CARP style royalties at the birth of AM radio?
Why are you RIAA types (no, working for a record label PR department doesn't make you a "musician" any more than looking at an Apple ad makes me Steve Wozniak) trying to hard to kill the goose that's laid all these golden eggs for you all these years?
I advised a friend in EU who wants to promote her alternative metal albums via distributing MP3 tracks on Kazaa that she needs to have a friend local to her who's providing a Kazaa server do this because none of my friends are willing to take the legal risks involved with being a Kazaa content provider in the current legal climate.
I gave that advice about 30 seconds before I posted.
If you were a real working musician, you wouldn't have to be told that music without public exposure makes no money, or that if nobody knows about your recordings, nobody's going to buy them/
keep the profits?"
"We've got their customer lists, we are their business procedures and workforce. Who needs their 'corporate leadership'?"
What's going to stop them? Loyalty to their US employers? They know that as soon as they start to demand and get a better living standard, that these corporations will close down the plants and move the jobs elsewhere. Someone pointed out the example of Ireland.
The difference between now and the last wave is that this is the first time US Fortune 50 companies have been outsourcing this much of their core functionality. If everything is outsourced except the executive suite and a few marketdroids, where is the value-add that makes US corporate leadership more valuable than anybody else's?
I don't see it and neither will the Indians. There are Indians just as greedy, short-sighted, and stupid as the ripest examples of US CEOs. Why not let them have a chance at the top of the corporate tree?
The difference... the CEOs will get some sort of platinum parachute as their corporations disappear, unlike their workers.
The good news is that those jobs will require specialized skills and training... probably at the 2 year community college level... and they'll have decent wages. But they won't a major job source for the unskilled, they won't have a need for high school kids.
You need not consider that they've forgotten more about designing stable and professional enterprise-class systems than several hundred of you are capable of learning.
Particularly if the low-wage people didn't quite get the specifications right or small differences in language made a very big difference in understanding or even timezone differences, i.e. only one team functioning when inter-group communication is needed... and large chunks have to be done over at the last minute by really expensive ubergeek consultants. These kinds of problems don't tend to wind up in the business press, but most of us have probably heard from someone who's seen this firsthand.
Even in the area of production, rememember that whether the product is software or hardware, if it's high-tech, we aren't supposed to have people building things unit-by-unit, people are supposed to be supervising production machinery, i.e. an hourly labor rate for a worker is supposed to be spread over dozens or hundreds or thousands of units per hour. If this isn't true, either the product or process is in need of redesign, low-wage sweatshops are simply ways of covering up managerial bungling, preferring to hire lots of cheap labor at what's often a higher total cost than to hire high-skill high wage people to do it right at what should be an equal (all costs considered) or lower or perhaps much lower price.
Would you rather hire 100 people at $1 to dig a ditch or 1 guy with a bulldozer? Yes, that guy's hourly rate might be more than $1/hour. You may now hide under the bed after hearing that.
When I say all costs, remember the price of defective product that's either bounced at the plant or returned by consumers.
Personally, I think that outsourcing is just another management fad and that the smartest companies which will wind up coming out ahead will stay home and cut costs with more efficiency and better technology. Of course, by the time this becomes obvious, the US may not have a programmer community to take advantage of it.
I'm not saying there aren't many good programmers in India, I'm saying that they should be building their own products and selling them on the world market competing against the rest of the world.
What's a person who went to the trouble and expense of getting a satellite car receiver going to do when he finds out that XM plays the same crap he can get for free? I'd cancel subscription service immediately and try the competitor if they're still around, and I suspect the average customer for aftermarket car radio will do exactly the same thing. If not, I'd try to replace the receiver with something with MP3 capability.
Except you.
Science Magazine is credible. At this point, even the Raelians are more credible than you are. Though that isn't saying much.
The burden of proof that privatizing and commercializing space is a bad idea is on you, and you aren't remotely capable of meeting it.
Though if the black helicopter boys let you go today, you can provide us with entertainment by trying.
At this point, most Linux users have to choose hardware devices based on what's really supported. If there are going to be no more PCI bus devices supported, we have to buy something else as end users, business, and enterprise owners.
Since the guy works for IBM, perhaps he can tell his company that the PCI vendor association no longer wants PCI supported in the Linux environment and if they want to sell IBM PC hardware that supports Linux, using the PCI bus is no longer an option.
That way, everybody wins, right?
It isn't all evil, people. But this is slashdot so I'd better go screw myself, eh?
Sounds like exactly what you're planning to do. I certainly don't want to stop you if you want to give yourself the shaft.
Chances are, if your eBook goes nowhere, it'll be at least as much to do with the fact that nobody likes DRM formats as whether or not the content is crap, and since you wrote means you don't even know what's going on around you it probably will be.
DRM-broken E-books are not selling.
Didn't you learn anything from the recent discussion of the Baen Free Library? They are giving away earlier works of name authors with their permission, and the publisher and the authors are suddenly drastically more profitable than they ever have been before.
Baen makes it's ebooks available in non-protected formats.
It's an attack on not just civil liberties, but the high-tech economy. If you want to live in a nation of burger-flippers, you're pro-Hollywood.
Search here or try google if you know how.
Of course, in your case, "You want fries with that?" is probably your on-the-job reality, you aren't a programmer worried about the economy tanking so badly that service industry might be where you'll eventually wind up.
Well, it's only our freedom to use our computers as we please and our ability to create innovation that we and our nations will profit from that's at risk right now.
Ultimately, all our civil liberties are at risk and so is our economy as a whole. If it becomes impossible to create innovation without getting it approved by a Hollywood committee whose members represent companies who can't even keep a simple Website online without it getting hacked to death, that innovation will NOT be happening in the USA. Remember that the other major component of the Hollywood cartel companies is represented by the guy who said the VCR would kill the movie industry. The innovations will be made everywhere that Hollywood doesn't control and the jobs will go with them.
If the Hollywood cartel and other major corporate interests have the power to censor everything that conflicts with their agendas using the DMCA, where is the information flow we need to become informed voters? How can we discuss political activism if corporations can arbitrarily decide that their public activities are secret? Even where copyright is irrelevant, most people can't tell corporate lawyers to go fuck themselves in response to a C&D.
- Court cases are the symptoms of bad laws.
- The bad laws that concern us are made by politicians who work for their major contributors, not the people who vote for them.
- The cure for these bad laws is to kick the politician's asses out of office and keep kicking them out until the survivors and the replacements get the message.
- Non-profit organizations can't buy politicians.
The fact that non-profits can't make campaign contributors makes them a non-starter as far as the only possible solution to the problem of preventing bad laws from being made. Contribute $0, $1000, or $1,000,000,000 to the EFF, it makes no difference.Contributing to the EFF gets you respect among your peers and a nice tax deduction to boot and the feeling that YOU HAVE DONE SOMETHING.However, the problem as it affects us as a group can't be solved by trying to stop bad law from taking effect, the problem is to stop the stream of bad laws from being made.
The EFF can not do this, only a credible PAC to represent our interests along the lines of the AARP/NRA model can.
I once believed that the high-tech community had the brains and the guts to organize a credible effort (as in PAC) to take out (not ON) Hollywood and/or the vendor community would have sense enough to spend a portion of their profits comparable to what Hollywood is spending to protect their ability to do R&D and manufacturing in the USA. If this had been done, DRM would probably be dead and everybody including Hollywood would probably be making a lot more money.
The high-tech community has told itself that contributing to the EFF is all we need to do and I'll believe the vendor community will do something when I see them doing it.
Well, I estimate we're a month or so from the day when it simply won't be possible to get the paperwork (filings with the FEC and the state election authorities in all 50 states) needed to make it possible for a national PAC to do business in the 2004 election cycle, i.e. the day that no amount of money can buy our freedom. If this problem isn't resolved in the current election cycle, game over.
If you have about $1-2M you're willing to risk on making America free again or can pass the hat to a handful of friends to raise that amount of money, start an anti-Hollywood PAC NOW, don't waste the money on the EFF.
Unfortunately, no smaller amount of money can make a difference in terms of stopping the Hollywood cartel, any PAC capable of making a difference is going to have to appear on the scene with a national-level presence and credibility. That takes enough money to get into the game, and my $1-2M estimate may be optimistic.
Note that this is startup money that will need to be spent before a single dollar is spent in making serious campaign contributions, the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars needed will come from people who want to be able to send contributions to an organization designed to fight bad politicians, not bad laws.. However, I think this is most of us. Enough of us sending in $10 and $100 and $1000 donations and some corporate contributions and we've got a war chest big enough to take on Hollywood and win.
Your only other alternative for spending your money on freedom from bad law like the DMCA and the upcoming CBDTPA and worse legislation, law and administrative regulations based on the Broadcast Working Group recommendations is to save it for an emigration fund, moving overseas to somewhere that the government doesn't take orders from the Hollywood cartel is expensive. If a people doesn't have the will to do what's needed to protect their freedom, they will lose it. This process is already underway.
The good news is that you may not have to move to India or China, the EU member nations don't seem to be in any hurry to adopt the EU Copyright Directive intended to give them their version of the DMCA, and perhaps persuading politicians that all they need to about the EU Copyright Directive in order to give their nations a drastic competitive advantage over the USA is to do nothing will work.
So... it's up to you as it always was. If we can't get our shit together to buy Congress out from under Hollywood, maybe I'll see those of you who decided to stay in high-tech instead of in the US flipping burgers in an expat bar in London or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or New Delhi.
- stifle innovation
- censor free speech
- threaten academic/scientific (but not corporate) research
- jeopardizes fair use
Just what is there on this list that major corporations, particularly Hollywood content providers would object to? What is there on this list that regardless of stated goals, your Congressasshole would care about?If it interfered with the profits of major campaign contributors, it would have been repealed days after passage. All it interferes with are the rights of the people and small companies.
I see no Unintended Consequences here.
I think it's going to interfere with corporate profits eventually, but given that suits don't look forward more than a quarter in terms of where things are going, this is also a non-starter.
As far as I'm concerned, a Skeptic is just a member of a cult as dangerous to rationality as the Religious Right is, and any dogmatic statements made by one are just as open to "Prove it" as anything said by a person who believes "Creation Science" about biology.
It's like the difference between libertarian and Libertarian when applied to a person.
If anyone comes up with workable methods to use 12, 24, 100 of these boxes at a time and actually does it... this is the place to post them.
If the geek community had something serious enough to be listed there, we could afford to be a lot calmer about this situation. The geeks never even made a serious attempt to buy Congress.
The nearest public mental health clinic. If you believe this, you probably need to be... separated from the rest of us for a while until you've gotten the professional help you need. Go now, while you've still got a choice in the matter.
oh, and Shockwave Rider is still worth reading.