RE Patents, the company claims: Habeas' patent-pending Sender Warranted Email ("SWE") service works by trademarking and copyrighting a unique set of lines, known as the warrant mark, which is embedded in the headers of outgoing email, and which alerts receiving systems that the email is not spam and should be delivered.
I'm sorry, but this is just a ridiculous abuse of the patent system. THE differentiating part of their business process is copyrighting their "password." I'm sorry, but you can't grant a patent that revokes competing firms legal right to copyright materials in conjunction with carrying out their business (whether it's the name of the product or integrated into the way the product works).
I think these guys are doing a wonderful thing, but USPTO, please don't grant this patent!
Politics and Psychological Entrenchment
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 1
I have no interest in taking sides politically, but it's fascinating to see how people respond to Bush's policy statements. I think the general sentiment among us nerds is that more money for the Space program, and neater/bigger goals for NASA is "a good thing."
And yet, depending on what you previously thought of Bush, you're more than likely to ignore the meat of policy statement, and find within it a motivation that synchs up with your previous opinion of our President. IE if you dislike him, you're more than likely to find some insidious master plan behind it. Or if you like, Bush, you're more than likely to point out how this confirms that he's boldly leading the US into the next millenium.
It's a very weird psychological phenomonenon called confirmation bias... No matter how smart people are, we're all slaves to the way that our brains are hard-wired. Folks tend to focus on the facts that confirm their preconceptions, and ignore those that disconfirm them. If you think a peer is smart, and he/she does poorly on a test, you'll chalk it up to "the test was unfair." If you think the number 13 is unlucky, you'll see bad "13-related" accidents everywhere...
Maybe I'm just rambling, but it does seem that a lot of posters have found evil political motivations in a seemingly non-political objective less from the evidence being there, but more from a want of finding it...
From the article: The system, say its British creators, did just as well as biology graduate students in solving a problem in genetics, according to an article in today's issue of the journal Nature.
In other news, a calculator does just as well as a PhD mathematician at solving arithmetic problems.
Come on, it's a neat invention, but it's solving a closed problem-- not worthy of being called a scientist.
While Adobe may not have spent time developing the code itself, I'm fairly certain that this code adds to the bottom line of development costs...which also adds to the bottom line of the product cost to the end user (unless they tack that expenditure onto some other product).
In the end, we all pay for a "feature" that we don't want...even though we do pay for it
This is not how pricing decisions are made in the private sector. Pretty much the only people who base their pricing strategies off cost are those selling to the government sector (or maybe consultants) who use cost-plus pricing.
I am positive Adobe has extremely detailed knowledge about the number and type of customers who will buy at each price point (demand curve). Adding in useless features as you point out does not change the demand curve, hence it will not change their revenue/profit maximizing prices.
Dumping R&D money into this feature is practically identical to making a charitable donation in order to be seen as a good corporate citizen. Dumping money down the charity well is the responsibility of the shareholders to regulate, not the buyer. After all, nothing changed here except that the profits which would normally have been earned went towards goodwill expenses or whatever title they put it under. Dividends that shareholders would have normally earned were thus "taken away."
This is no different than if Adobe had made a donation to a children's hospital (although perhaps a little less beneficial). And again, that activity is for the shareholders to monitor...
The terrorists got their free shot. It's not going to be so easy next time.
Maybe not, but I'd be fairly concerned about a cargo jet getting hijacked. We all know how pathetic ground security is in airports. I wonder how hard would it be for a for a couple terrorists to sneak onto a FedEx jet, stowaway for awhile, and pull another 9/11?
Says the LAPD spokesman: "But it doesn't really matter what your status is. If that person feels he was wrongly interrogated or under the false pretense that these people were cops, they should contact their local police station as a victim. We'll sort it all out."
I'll bet the chances of this happening are fairly slim-- about as likely as a crack dealer calling the police to complain that his shipment was intercepted by a rival dealer.
RIAA won't get busted doing this until someone files a complaint, which they won't...
If you cut off the top 1% of your users and sample the remaining it will still look like you should cut off another 1% since they are now the top talkers.
I think the original poster is saying the ISP is correct to trim the unprofitable customers, not that you should constantly be trimming your top 1%. If you're running a software company and one of your clients is constantly tying up the free tech support line, you might think twice about continuing their contract...
It's a little funny because this turns normal marketing tactics on its head. The 80/20 rule of marketing is that 20% of your customers will require 80% of your volume. This is probably roughly accurate with cable modem service. Normally, companies kill to acquire these 20% (high value customers). However, when you're operating in a fixed fee structure, these are your worst customers and (if they cost more than their incremental revenue) they should be moved out of your franchise.
The problem with providing the carte blanche of true unlimited service is kind of infamous: Proper pricing creates a death spiral. If you raise prices to compensate for increased usage, the only folks left will be the bandwidth hogs. You'll then need to raise your prices even more, but then only the worst offenders will be left. Health Insurance works the exact same way. If prices are very high, only the sickest (most expensive customers) will remain on a plan because the price is still advantageous for them. This in turn makes cost of coverage higher. and so on...
Here's a fantastic quote from that page (this is regarding a photographic artifact that appears in one picture):
My opinion about the object is, that there are only 3 possibilities:
1. There is a turtle-like animal living on Mars. 2. There is a turtle-like robot operating on Mars. 3. The image was manipulated by someone to let a turtle-like object appear.
I'm not gonna buy one, mostly because I don't need one, but when my Dad asks me about backing up his important info I just might tell him to get one....
GTA 3 is such a huge departure from GTA 2, I happen to think it's much more original than most non-franchise games. Yes, its the same gangland/pedestrian-killing/jacking game, but vastly further developed.
Compare to Call of Duty which is just more WWII-themed-FPS. Very fun, not original.
At a certain point, who cares about originality? I'd rather go see Return of the King than some other lame movie.
Where are the replacement jobs for Americans going to come from? Free trade is all very well - but without a dose of protectionism or socialism you're just going to have millions more Americans unemployed and in poverty, and no-one with a heart wants to see that.
greenrd,
I cannot give definitive answers to the question, but here's what I think is going to happen:
a) The dollar is slowly devaluing. This makes US goods and services less expensive in the global market and hence more competitive. Also, the Chinese yuan is totally out of whack. It makes Chinese goods way too cheap in the global market (by about 15%). Once those two issues are fixed, the trade deficit will shrink. The jobs will arise from the normal market demands, whereever they may be. If there suddenly appear two million potential hamburger flippers on the labor market, well then expect more people to start eating out. It's what happened in the 90s...
b) Our nation's total indebtedness to the rest of the world is approaching 40% of GDP. This is around the point where the rest of the world will say "hmm... maybe t-bills aren't the best investment option." Right now here's how the money flow works: Imagine you had a permanent line of credit from your back where you never had to declare when you were paying back your loans. This is essentially what is going on with China. We have a massive Trade Deficit with them- we buy cheap crap, and they buy US government t-bills. We are pretty much buying on credit, and this leads to two things: more consumption and more jobs getting shipped overseas.... You see- instead of an even balance where we send goods and services back to China, they're just putting all their money into the bank. This is an unsustainable situation-- unless they are willing to forgive all this debt (unlikely), eventually they'll have to start buying American products... The only way to fill these orders is for Americans to be making these goods and services... there's no way around it.
c) As to what kinds of jobs specifically, well, I can't say. When little towns in New England got decimated by the textile industry's flight to the South more than 100 yrs ago, most of them never recovered. People left, and they moved to other parts of the country to get better jobs than sticking around their little dead town. Same thing is happening in agriculture- as farmers becomes more productive, there are fewer jobs... Towns in the Great Plains states have been pretty much been getting smaller and smaller for the past 75 years... Those farmers and their kids are now programmers or accountants or whatever... I don't think it makes sense to maintain inefficient technologies just to eliminate the temporary pain of relocation. I can tell you for sure, people fought the trends tooth and nail, but their kids are now better off for it...
d) I think the one thing no one will fight over is the fact that free trade has winners and losers... Many more winners than losers, but for the losers, the results can be severe. All Free Trade does is equalize incomes across the world based on the talents/education each worker has.
The worst part of all of this is that our government's attention is focused on Iraq/Korea rather than important issues like the economy. The fact that we're willing to overlook the Yuan revaluation issue to get their support against North Korea is pretty short-sighted...
Take a woman from North Carolina who was an excellent seamstress who's out of work because almost no clothing is produced in the U.S. these days. She isn't going to go to Wharton for her MBA and become a manager; she's gonna end up flipping burgers if she's lucky!
I live in North Carolina. I hear about this topic daily. The thing you need to consider is that most of these folks were earning $30k per year or more thanks to Union negotiations. Almost none of them have a high school degree. Few now have the desire to get a high school degree because (direct quote) "school is hard."
When it comes to distributive justice, do you think it's fair for an American with no high school degree to make twice as much money as a Chinese citizen with a Masters or PhD in electrical engineering? The American did very little except for being born in the US. Essentially, they did nothing except for take advantage of of the investments in capital by their predecessors. The Chinese citizen busted their hump to get an EE degree. Why then does the American deserve more? Are we not all humans? Don't we deserve to be rewarded according to the fruit of our labors and not based on where we were born?
They may have no useful education or job skills to work anywhere else in their area, there may be no other employer in their area that is hiring, or Wal-Mart might be (believe it or not) the highest paying employer they can work at.
To add to this point, Wal-mart is very much what economists would term a "monopsonist," meaning it is the only buyer, whether that be buying product or labor services. The situation is akin to an auto factory being built in a small town-- by doing so the employer isn't really subject to normal labor market forces. Wal-mart can be the same thing in a small town wrt labor dynamics. I think no one would contest that Wal-mart has monopsonistic powers wrt purchasing product...
What's funny is that people would defend Wal-mart (a monopsony) when they would not defend Microsoft (a monopoly). Both monopsony and monopoly are considered two fundamental flaws in basic market dynamics-- the sort of situation where once the market settles in, its hard to dig out of the hole. This is why anti-trust legislation was put in place. Among a few other things (pollution controls, for example), anti-monopoly enforcement is one of the rare situations where economists would say the government MUST step in to prevent disaster. Because there has really never been a behemoth like Wal-mart before, we don't really have any good legislation on the books that are the monopsony equivalent of the Sherman/Clayton Acts. IANAL, so that is to the best of my knowledge...
I wonder how long it will take before people will realise how insulting the word "consumer" is as a label for a customer. Businesses used to deal with customers, and treat them well, now they deal with consumers, and so all they feel they need to do is produce stuff for consumption
FYI, a huge number of companies use the terms customer and consumer to mean different things. A customer is a direct buyer of your product. A consumer is the business or person who "consumes" your product. Hence, if I'm making soap, the customer is a grocery store, and the consumer is the family/person that uses the soap. Businesses don't use the term consumer to "dehumanize," they use it for succinctness of communication when describing the buyers of their products. We can't just call everyone in the supply chain a customer regardless of whether we're actually dealing with them.
Speaking of dehumanizing the "customer," probably every single person who posts here calls their customers "users." IMO, that's about the most dehumanizing thing ever.
Re:Bitter Protest against Patents (n copyrights so
on
When Good Patents Go Bad
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think your essay does a real disservice to the argument against copyrights and patents.
The comparison to slavery pisses me off and it should everyone here. To put copyright/patent legislation on the same level of importance with human slavery is utterly immoral and academically incorrect. Not only does it reek of propaganda (in your next article, you might as well claim that Hitler would have supported patents), but they have zero to do with each other. From a purely economic perspective, slavery was about the confiscation of someone's income from one race to another. If anything, destroying copyrights would be about YOU confiscating income from ME. I may just as well claim that copyright destruction is the enslavement by the public of the creator of wisdom. There you go, now you're the slave master. How does it feel? Your argument based on slavery trivializes a significant human tragedy in order to make a terrible, invalid point.
95% of the substance of the essay is the narcissistic ramblings of a writer in love with his own wordage. I would hope folks here would be more intelligent consumers of information than to be persuaded by a piece of garbage wrapped up with a nice ribbon. This type of rhetoric does nothing more than alienate the 98% of folks who are sitting on the fence regarding this issue.
I'm setting up a Mini-ITX/Hauppage 350 PVR with MythTV as a front-end. It looks cool, and it'll have a lot more features (like: burn a DVD as well as the normal PVR stuff
I was considering doing this, but the screenshots on the MythTV site are just awfully ugly. Is the interface really this klunky? It seemed to me there would be no way for my wife to operate the thing once i set it up on our living room tv. People don't want to see filepaths in the final interface, and, again, it was just extremely raw looking.
I want to believe that MythTV is better than the screenshots would indicate....
As you suggest I'm pretty sure Red Hat's new strategy is fatally flawed. They failed to appreciate that the success of the Enterprise edition is pretty intimately tied to the success of their brand and being a leader. Their boxed set is an integral part of their brand whether they like it or not.
A lot of people have responded this way to RH's recent strategy. I'm kind of on the fence. No one has ever done a good job backing up their arguments, either Red Hat or Slashdot posters...
Is there any data out there to show that shrink-wrapped boxes translate into enterprise sales? I know RH is making big inroads into the financial community. Do the bigwigs there make their decision based on the brand equity of the desktop distro? If they do, aren't they shirking their responsibility to make a rational decision? I certainly don't have any good numbers pro or con, but i'd like to hear them if someone has them...
If anything parallel comes to mind, it's MS trying to penetrate the server market. The general crappiness of Windows for the desktop made it more difficult for them to get into servers-- buyers & executives would have flashbacks to that BSOD they got at home trying to help their kid load up a game.
What would be nice is if it was bluetooth enabled, you could just have your iPod on constant broadcast mode, let people walking by snoop in on your listening...
This is a pretty fantastic idea... I'm sure our friends at the RIAA would like it too...
The reason why I made the free sample analogy with Coke is because MS did not charge incrementally or separately for IE. If Microsoft had required purchase of IE with Windows, that would have met the legal requirement for tying. That was the only point i was making in response to the original poster, that integrating IE is not tying...
Analysis of MS's pricing has pretty much shown that IE didn't cause the price of Windows to rise faster than inflation. And this makes sense- no consumer in their right mind would pay for a browser considering how many are available for free. Granted, people paid for Netscape for a while, but that was before the flood of alternatives.
Now really... Before you get too high up on your horse with your bold print and rhetoric, you'll at least try to realize that my point was that some folks in certain circles (academia, etc) believe this.
Believe it or not, there's a whole world outside of the microcosm that is Slashdot, and some folks don't all agree with you. Many of them (the academics I spoke of) know far more about the competitive dynamics and legal aspects of the Tech industry the guys who post here.
Just so you know, the world of anti-trust can't be held to the same high standards of, say, a murder trial. Simply because an outcome happens does not guarantee that the defendant was actually guilty or innocent. Executives rarely go to jail, so the outcomes sometimes are politically motivated. I happen to know of a recent antitrust case which was prosecuted by the DOJ in order to damage a European company-- all to get revenge for a decision that went against a US company in Europe! Rarely do the judges who decide the case know anything at all about economics. They know the letter of the law and that is about it. Every DRM case out there ought to make it blatantly clear that Federal judges are woefully unprepared to decide anything that has to do with business activities or technology.
What I'm trying to get at is that the slap on the wrist MS got was a signal by the Judicial system that they were unsure of the gravity of MS's actions. Microsoft did the all time worst job ever of defending themselves (PR and in the courtroom), gave practically no political handouts, and got a slap on the wrist! What do you think is going to happen the next time a case comes up and they actually have learned some lessons from this past case?
China has a serious "Not Invented Here" problem... Half of their "innovation" pet projects are the brainchild of some bureaucratic PHB, which i'm guessing are worse than the standard garden variety PHB.
The Sherman Act prohibits the use of a monopoly to leverage entry into other markets, and it'll be a clear violation of the Act if they bundle their music download service with WMP.
I'm not sure this is exactly true. Sherman Section 1 prohibits "tying" when it's used in restraint of trade. Unless MS is requiring that you join the MSN music service, they're not by definition tying. Coke dropping a free sample in my mailbox is analogous-- the product is sitting in my lap (for free) but by no means am I required to buy Coke at the store...
FYI, there's actually a lot of backlash against the MS anti-trust case right now in academic circles. I am by no means an MS apologist, but a lot of what went on behind the scenes was IBM/Oracle/Sun coopting the political/legal system to hamstring their chief competitor. In America at least, I'm not sure there's any gaurantee that a similar case (substitue WMP for IE) would necessarily get interpreted the same way. MS has learned how to play the game (read political donations), i think...
Slashdot Mirror
RE Patents, the company claims:
Habeas' patent-pending Sender Warranted Email ("SWE") service works by trademarking and copyrighting a unique set of lines, known as the warrant mark, which is embedded in the headers of outgoing email, and which alerts receiving systems that the email is not spam and should be delivered.
I'm sorry, but this is just a ridiculous abuse of the patent system. THE differentiating part of their business process is copyrighting their "password." I'm sorry, but you can't grant a patent that revokes competing firms legal right to copyright materials in conjunction with carrying out their business (whether it's the name of the product or integrated into the way the product works).
I think these guys are doing a wonderful thing, but USPTO, please don't grant this patent!
I have no interest in taking sides politically, but it's fascinating to see how people respond to Bush's policy statements. I think the general sentiment among us nerds is that more money for the Space program, and neater/bigger goals for NASA is "a good thing."
And yet, depending on what you previously thought of Bush, you're more than likely to ignore the meat of policy statement, and find within it a motivation that synchs up with your previous opinion of our President. IE if you dislike him, you're more than likely to find some insidious master plan behind it. Or if you like, Bush, you're more than likely to point out how this confirms that he's boldly leading the US into the next millenium.
It's a very weird psychological phenomonenon called confirmation bias... No matter how smart people are, we're all slaves to the way that our brains are hard-wired. Folks tend to focus on the facts that confirm their preconceptions, and ignore those that disconfirm them. If you think a peer is smart, and he/she does poorly on a test, you'll chalk it up to "the test was unfair." If you think the number 13 is unlucky, you'll see bad "13-related" accidents everywhere...
Maybe I'm just rambling, but it does seem that a lot of posters have found evil political motivations in a seemingly non-political objective less from the evidence being there, but more from a want of finding it...
From the article:
The system, say its British creators, did just as well as biology graduate students in solving a problem in genetics, according to an article in today's issue of the journal Nature.
In other news, a calculator does just as well as a PhD mathematician at solving arithmetic problems.
Come on, it's a neat invention, but it's solving a closed problem-- not worthy of being called a scientist.
While Adobe may not have spent time developing the code itself, I'm fairly certain that this code adds to the bottom line of development costs...which also adds to the bottom line of the product cost to the end user (unless they tack that expenditure onto some other product).
In the end, we all pay for a "feature" that we don't want...even though we do pay for it
This is not how pricing decisions are made in the private sector. Pretty much the only people who base their pricing strategies off cost are those selling to the government sector (or maybe consultants) who use cost-plus pricing.
I am positive Adobe has extremely detailed knowledge about the number and type of customers who will buy at each price point (demand curve). Adding in useless features as you point out does not change the demand curve, hence it will not change their revenue/profit maximizing prices.
Dumping R&D money into this feature is practically identical to making a charitable donation in order to be seen as a good corporate citizen. Dumping money down the charity well is the responsibility of the shareholders to regulate, not the buyer. After all, nothing changed here except that the profits which would normally have been earned went towards goodwill expenses or whatever title they put it under. Dividends that shareholders would have normally earned were thus "taken away."
This is no different than if Adobe had made a donation to a children's hospital (although perhaps a little less beneficial). And again, that activity is for the shareholders to monitor...
The terrorists got their free shot. It's not going to be so easy next time.
Maybe not, but I'd be fairly concerned about a cargo jet getting hijacked. We all know how pathetic ground security is in airports. I wonder how hard would it be for a for a couple terrorists to sneak onto a FedEx jet, stowaway for awhile, and pull another 9/11?
Says the LAPD spokesman: "But it doesn't really matter what your status is. If that person feels he was wrongly interrogated or under the false pretense that these people were cops, they should contact their local police station as a victim. We'll sort it all out."
I'll bet the chances of this happening are fairly slim-- about as likely as a crack dealer calling the police to complain that his shipment was intercepted by a rival dealer.
RIAA won't get busted doing this until someone files a complaint, which they won't...
If you cut off the top 1% of your users and sample the remaining it will still look like you should cut off another 1% since they are now the top talkers.
I think the original poster is saying the ISP is correct to trim the unprofitable customers, not that you should constantly be trimming your top 1%. If you're running a software company and one of your clients is constantly tying up the free tech support line, you might think twice about continuing their contract...
It's a little funny because this turns normal marketing tactics on its head. The 80/20 rule of marketing is that 20% of your customers will require 80% of your volume. This is probably roughly accurate with cable modem service. Normally, companies kill to acquire these 20% (high value customers). However, when you're operating in a fixed fee structure, these are your worst customers and (if they cost more than their incremental revenue) they should be moved out of your franchise.
The problem with providing the carte blanche of true unlimited service is kind of infamous: Proper pricing creates a death spiral. If you raise prices to compensate for increased usage, the only folks left will be the bandwidth hogs. You'll then need to raise your prices even more, but then only the worst offenders will be left. Health Insurance works the exact same way. If prices are very high, only the sickest (most expensive customers) will remain on a plan because the price is still advantageous for them. This in turn makes cost of coverage higher. and so on...
Here's a fantastic quote from that page (this is regarding a photographic artifact that appears in one picture):
My opinion about the object is, that there are only 3 possibilities:
1. There is a turtle-like animal living on Mars.
2. There is a turtle-like robot operating on Mars.
3. The image was manipulated by someone to let a turtle-like object appear.
Mmm... turtles...
I've been told to kill Germans in tons of World War II games and no one's complained about that...
Great post... You know the US Government itself sponsored America's Army where the whole point was to kill Arab terrorists.
Very good game on the whole. Probably one of the best games out there with practically no buzz.
SexyKellyOsbourne wrote:
I'm not gonna buy one, mostly because I don't need one, but when my Dad asks me about backing up his important info I just might tell him to get one....
What are Ozzy's backup requirements anyways?
GTA 3 is such a huge departure from GTA 2, I happen to think it's much more original than most non-franchise games. Yes, its the same gangland/pedestrian-killing/jacking game, but vastly further developed.
Compare to Call of Duty which is just more WWII-themed-FPS. Very fun, not original.
At a certain point, who cares about originality? I'd rather go see Return of the King than some other lame movie.
Why can't you be more like Diablo Canyon 2?
Where are the replacement jobs for Americans going to come from? Free trade is all very well - but without a dose of protectionism or socialism you're just going to have millions more Americans unemployed and in poverty, and no-one with a heart wants to see that.
greenrd,
I cannot give definitive answers to the question, but here's what I think is going to happen:
a) The dollar is slowly devaluing. This makes US goods and services less expensive in the global market and hence more competitive. Also, the Chinese yuan is totally out of whack. It makes Chinese goods way too cheap in the global market (by about 15%). Once those two issues are fixed, the trade deficit will shrink. The jobs will arise from the normal market demands, whereever they may be. If there suddenly appear two million potential hamburger flippers on the labor market, well then expect more people to start eating out. It's what happened in the 90s...
b) Our nation's total indebtedness to the rest of the world is approaching 40% of GDP. This is around the point where the rest of the world will say "hmm... maybe t-bills aren't the best investment option." Right now here's how the money flow works: Imagine you had a permanent line of credit from your back where you never had to declare when you were paying back your loans. This is essentially what is going on with China. We have a massive Trade Deficit with them- we buy cheap crap, and they buy US government t-bills. We are pretty much buying on credit, and this leads to two things: more consumption and more jobs getting shipped overseas.... You see- instead of an even balance where we send goods and services back to China, they're just putting all their money into the bank. This is an unsustainable situation-- unless they are willing to forgive all this debt (unlikely), eventually they'll have to start buying American products... The only way to fill these orders is for Americans to be making these goods and services... there's no way around it.
c) As to what kinds of jobs specifically, well, I can't say. When little towns in New England got decimated by the textile industry's flight to the South more than 100 yrs ago, most of them never recovered. People left, and they moved to other parts of the country to get better jobs than sticking around their little dead town. Same thing is happening in agriculture- as farmers becomes more productive, there are fewer jobs... Towns in the Great Plains states have been pretty much been getting smaller and smaller for the past 75 years... Those farmers and their kids are now programmers or accountants or whatever... I don't think it makes sense to maintain inefficient technologies just to eliminate the temporary pain of relocation. I can tell you for sure, people fought the trends tooth and nail, but their kids are now better off for it...
d) I think the one thing no one will fight over is the fact that free trade has winners and losers... Many more winners than losers, but for the losers, the results can be severe. All Free Trade does is equalize incomes across the world based on the talents/education each worker has.
The worst part of all of this is that our government's attention is focused on Iraq/Korea rather than important issues like the economy. The fact that we're willing to overlook the Yuan revaluation issue to get their support against North Korea is pretty short-sighted...
Take a woman from North Carolina who was an excellent seamstress who's out of work because almost no clothing is produced in the U.S. these days. She isn't going to go to Wharton for her MBA and become a manager; she's gonna end up flipping burgers if she's lucky!
I live in North Carolina. I hear about this topic daily. The thing you need to consider is that most of these folks were earning $30k per year or more thanks to Union negotiations. Almost none of them have a high school degree. Few now have the desire to get a high school degree because (direct quote) "school is hard."
When it comes to distributive justice, do you think it's fair for an American with no high school degree to make twice as much money as a Chinese citizen with a Masters or PhD in electrical engineering? The American did very little except for being born in the US. Essentially, they did nothing except for take advantage of of the investments in capital by their predecessors. The Chinese citizen busted their hump to get an EE degree. Why then does the American deserve more? Are we not all humans? Don't we deserve to be rewarded according to the fruit of our labors and not based on where we were born?
They may have no useful education or job skills to work anywhere else in their area, there may be no other employer in their area that is hiring, or Wal-Mart might be (believe it or not) the highest paying employer they can work at.
To add to this point, Wal-mart is very much what economists would term a "monopsonist," meaning it is the only buyer, whether that be buying product or labor services. The situation is akin to an auto factory being built in a small town-- by doing so the employer isn't really subject to normal labor market forces. Wal-mart can be the same thing in a small town wrt labor dynamics. I think no one would contest that Wal-mart has monopsonistic powers wrt purchasing product...
What's funny is that people would defend Wal-mart (a monopsony) when they would not defend Microsoft (a monopoly). Both monopsony and monopoly are considered two fundamental flaws in basic market dynamics-- the sort of situation where once the market settles in, its hard to dig out of the hole. This is why anti-trust legislation was put in place. Among a few other things (pollution controls, for example), anti-monopoly enforcement is one of the rare situations where economists would say the government MUST step in to prevent disaster. Because there has really never been a behemoth like Wal-mart before, we don't really have any good legislation on the books that are the monopsony equivalent of the Sherman/Clayton Acts. IANAL, so that is to the best of my knowledge...
I wonder how long it will take before people will realise how insulting the word "consumer" is as a label for a customer. Businesses used to deal with customers, and treat them well, now they deal with consumers, and so all they feel they need to do is produce stuff for consumption
FYI, a huge number of companies use the terms customer and consumer to mean different things. A customer is a direct buyer of your product. A consumer is the business or person who "consumes" your product. Hence, if I'm making soap, the customer is a grocery store, and the consumer is the family/person that uses the soap. Businesses don't use the term consumer to "dehumanize," they use it for succinctness of communication when describing the buyers of their products. We can't just call everyone in the supply chain a customer regardless of whether we're actually dealing with them.
Speaking of dehumanizing the "customer," probably every single person who posts here calls their customers "users." IMO, that's about the most dehumanizing thing ever.
I think your essay does a real disservice to the argument against copyrights and patents.
The comparison to slavery pisses me off and it should everyone here. To put copyright/patent legislation on the same level of importance with human slavery is utterly immoral and academically incorrect. Not only does it reek of propaganda (in your next article, you might as well claim that Hitler would have supported patents), but they have zero to do with each other. From a purely economic perspective, slavery was about the confiscation of someone's income from one race to another. If anything, destroying copyrights would be about YOU confiscating income from ME. I may just as well claim that copyright destruction is the enslavement by the public of the creator of wisdom. There you go, now you're the slave master. How does it feel? Your argument based on slavery trivializes a significant human tragedy in order to make a terrible, invalid point.
95% of the substance of the essay is the narcissistic ramblings of a writer in love with his own wordage. I would hope folks here would be more intelligent consumers of information than to be persuaded by a piece of garbage wrapped up with a nice ribbon. This type of rhetoric does nothing more than alienate the 98% of folks who are sitting on the fence regarding this issue.
I'm setting up a Mini-ITX/Hauppage 350 PVR with MythTV as a front-end. It looks cool, and it'll have a lot more features (like: burn a DVD as well as the normal PVR stuff
I was considering doing this, but the screenshots on the MythTV site are just awfully ugly. Is the interface really this klunky? It seemed to me there would be no way for my wife to operate the thing once i set it up on our living room tv. People don't want to see filepaths in the final interface, and, again, it was just extremely raw looking.
I want to believe that MythTV is better than the screenshots would indicate....
As you suggest I'm pretty sure Red Hat's new strategy is fatally flawed. They failed to appreciate that the success of the Enterprise edition is pretty intimately tied to the success of their brand and being a leader. Their boxed set is an integral part of their brand whether they like it or not.
A lot of people have responded this way to RH's recent strategy. I'm kind of on the fence. No one has ever done a good job backing up their arguments, either Red Hat or Slashdot posters...
Is there any data out there to show that shrink-wrapped boxes translate into enterprise sales? I know RH is making big inroads into the financial community. Do the bigwigs there make their decision based on the brand equity of the desktop distro? If they do, aren't they shirking their responsibility to make a rational decision? I certainly don't have any good numbers pro or con, but i'd like to hear them if someone has them...
If anything parallel comes to mind, it's MS trying to penetrate the server market. The general crappiness of Windows for the desktop made it more difficult for them to get into servers-- buyers & executives would have flashbacks to that BSOD they got at home trying to help their kid load up a game.
What would be nice is if it was bluetooth enabled, you could just have your iPod on constant broadcast mode, let people walking by snoop in on your listening...
This is a pretty fantastic idea... I'm sure our friends at the RIAA would like it too...
Space.com says that mining specialists and space engineers, who gathered at the latest Space Resources Roundtable, think the answer is yes.
If they said no, would they be out of job?
- Hey, who has better vacation ideas than AAA?
- According to the publisher of this AAA guidebook, no one.
At least we agree on one thing.
The reason why I made the free sample analogy with Coke is because MS did not charge incrementally or separately for IE. If Microsoft had required purchase of IE with Windows, that would have met the legal requirement for tying. That was the only point i was making in response to the original poster, that integrating IE is not tying...
Analysis of MS's pricing has pretty much shown that IE didn't cause the price of Windows to rise faster than inflation. And this makes sense- no consumer in their right mind would pay for a browser considering how many are available for free. Granted, people paid for Netscape for a while, but that was before the flood of alternatives.
Now really... Before you get too high up on your horse with your bold print and rhetoric, you'll at least try to realize that my point was that some folks in certain circles (academia, etc) believe this.
Believe it or not, there's a whole world outside of the microcosm that is Slashdot, and some folks don't all agree with you. Many of them (the academics I spoke of) know far more about the competitive dynamics and legal aspects of the Tech industry the guys who post here.
Just so you know, the world of anti-trust can't be held to the same high standards of, say, a murder trial. Simply because an outcome happens does not guarantee that the defendant was actually guilty or innocent. Executives rarely go to jail, so the outcomes sometimes are politically motivated. I happen to know of a recent antitrust case which was prosecuted by the DOJ in order to damage a European company-- all to get revenge for a decision that went against a US company in Europe! Rarely do the judges who decide the case know anything at all about economics. They know the letter of the law and that is about it. Every DRM case out there ought to make it blatantly clear that Federal judges are woefully unprepared to decide anything that has to do with business activities or technology.
What I'm trying to get at is that the slap on the wrist MS got was a signal by the Judicial system that they were unsure of the gravity of MS's actions. Microsoft did the all time worst job ever of defending themselves (PR and in the courtroom), gave practically no political handouts, and got a slap on the wrist! What do you think is going to happen the next time a case comes up and they actually have learned some lessons from this past case?
Don't count on another anti-trust victory...
China has a serious "Not Invented Here" problem... Half of their "innovation" pet projects are the brainchild of some bureaucratic PHB, which i'm guessing are worse than the standard garden variety PHB.
The Sherman Act prohibits the use of a monopoly to leverage entry into other markets, and it'll be a clear violation of the Act if they bundle their music download service with WMP.
I'm not sure this is exactly true. Sherman Section 1 prohibits "tying" when it's used in restraint of trade. Unless MS is requiring that you join the MSN music service, they're not by definition tying. Coke dropping a free sample in my mailbox is analogous-- the product is sitting in my lap (for free) but by no means am I required to buy Coke at the store...
FYI, there's actually a lot of backlash against the MS anti-trust case right now in academic circles. I am by no means an MS apologist, but a lot of what went on behind the scenes was IBM/Oracle/Sun coopting the political/legal system to hamstring their chief competitor. In America at least, I'm not sure there's any gaurantee that a similar case (substitue WMP for IE) would necessarily get interpreted the same way. MS has learned how to play the game (read political donations), i think...