The astronauts selected back in those days were military test pilots who were cool and calm under extreme pressure and who could exercise good judgment in life and death situations. Kind of like Tom Brady in the super bowl times 1000.
They selected those kinds of guys because those rockets were extremely experimental. It's only 40 years later that it seems trivial what these guys accomplished. The state of the art in 1969 was so low that going to the moon in the Saturn/Apollo would be trying to paddle from LA to Australia with a rowboat and heath bars for food. A rational person wouldn't do it.
Make the harmonic balancers (my phrase) serve some other function then... perhaps they can hold fuel, or electronics, or be antennas. Just not deal weight that moves up and down.
As a programmer, I can smell a kludge from a mile a way. This is a kludge times 17
H1B's would not depress wages if they made the simple change that the H1B visa holder could change jobs at will. Right now, H1B wages are depressed precisely because the visa holder will be deported if they quit.
"Hey boss! I found out that minimum wage pays more than you pay!
Oh, sorry about that. Let me discuss your feelings with the IMS.
Oh dear, where did my 'valued' employee get to?"
The system right now pits the Visa holder against the Citizen/Resident worker which further benefits large corporations. It's not a question of visa holder versus resident; it's both of those classes of people against large corporations who are (in my opinion) using H1B's to hold low-cost workers hostage and keep the price of resident labor as well.
I don't understand your comment. You don't need to prove your identity to ride the subway. All mass transit in the world works the same way. You get on anonymously, you get off at your stop. If you were concerned about their ability to track you (presumably as a terrorist would be), then you would pay cash.
Way back when this whole thing started in the mid nineties, I said to anybody who would listen (which apparently wasn't many;) that the record companies should put their stuff out their in AM quality (64kb/s mp3/wma whatever) and put a bumper around it that said the artist's name and where to buy it. Essentially the same thing as a music video without the video part. When people would object, I pointed out that via the radio, they had been doing that anyway for decades. Then sell high quality stuff for 25-50 cents per song. Do a one-click like iTMS but without the DRM.
Instead, they thought (and still think) that the right way is to just sue people who like their music. That doesn't strike me as a long-term strategy.
Anyway, to answer your statement, yes, I believe they can survive by giving away some kinds of music and then making albums and singles more of an impulse buy so that people are buying CD's for $4 or if people are cheap, they can get the low-quality stuff with the built-in ad.
I don't think it even fundamentally changes the record company's business model. Well, perhaps that's not true. I'm convinced the old-guard at these places is trying to put a universal pay-per-listen system in place, but that's just a hunch.
It's this kind of nonsense that stopped me from contributing to the university. I figured if they had enough money for patronage to the record labels, my contribution was not going for it's intended purpose: educating young adults.
"The best part is why have Facebook and MySpace so even those of us without the brainpower to use even the simplest of markup can easily show off for the entire world what kinda of asshats we can be when we really try."
I still don't get why people even use facebook (or any social sites). Near as I can tell, it's a vestige of the adolescent misconception that you are the center of the universe and everything you do is interesting and important.
Perhaps that's not fair. It persists well into adulthood as well.
The fact that everything people do and say online lives forever and will affect you for the rest of your life seems to have not sunk in with many people. I'm glad my adolescence and early adulthood are long gone and forgotten by everyone. I can't imagine trying to explain what I did 30+ years later when I was in my mid teens.
I'm assuming this whole thing is like the hula hoop. Seemed like a good idea for a while, and then we threw them out in the late 60's.
Telecommunications under the old AT&T was such a primitive set of technologies that it hadn't changed appreciably from a consumer viewpoint in 80 years.
Yes, it was reliable, yes, the service guy came out when he said he would, but we were paying $20/month plus we paid for each extension, plus we couldn't have our own phone, so we paid $1/month for a 2nd phone. For 20 years. This is in 1960 dollars. That's like paying $100 per month for a phone today.
Oh, and long distance was dollars per minutes, lousy quality. It was so expensive, that you played games with "person to person" long distance when you wanted to let people know you'd arrived. "I'll call and if I ask for 'Thelma', everything is fine, if I ask for 'Louise', it means the car broke down and you should accept the call".
Since the breakup, phone costs went down, the internet was allowed to get started because nobody could charge you $400/month for a modem line. All kinds of innovative devices are available, and now I have fiber to my house. The communications world is infinitely better off from the consumer's viewpoint than it was 20-30 years ago. I mean, it isn't even close. From all your comments, I have to assume that you worked for the old phone company? I can appreciate that it was a great place to work, but it came at a very high cost to society.
Well, sure. The government would like to know about your every activity, from breathing, eating, voiding, spending, reading, listening, talking, pretty much everything. The better to tax you, regulate you, imprison you, coerce you.
That doesn't mean we should willing give up that right, nor does it say in the supreme law of the land where the government has been given that power.
Better to let 1 million people cheat on their taxes than 250 million give up every last vestige of privacy.
If you and I talk on the phone and agree on terms and you fax over the contract, we all know what's real and what's not. If you send me something out of the blue with a signature on it without a discussion first (whether via fedex or fax), I'll call you and we'll figure out what's going on. A sensible person would not accept any signature regardless of source unless they understood the person had actually agreed to something.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've learned the hard way that a contract is not a way to compel people who disagree about basic terms. It's a way for generally agreeable people to fully respect the way they intend to do business together. Or to put it more simply, if you intend to break a contract, it really doesn't matter what you put into it or who signs it.
"The fact is, metered bandwidth is good for our own freedom"
It would be if high speed internet wasn't a monopoly or at best a duopoly. Right now, it's simply an excuse to raise prices at a time when the cable companies/telcos are raking in record profits.
And perversely, if it is metered and considered a limited resource, it gives the government the power to step in and control content. How do you think the FCC (which was only supposed to be in charge of frequency allocation) was made into a de facto censor for radio and TV? It was the limited resource argument.
If you had the means to break into emails and give the key to the government....
Think of this... If you are a government, wouldn't you like RIM to announce that their encryption is unbreakable, and then you announce how unhappy you are with them? I mean, wouldn't RIM be shooting itself in the foot to announce "Oh yes, there's a master key, and if we'll give it up under certain circumstances that we won't discuss"?
And what a great advertisement to have the government say "Even we can't snoop on your email". If you spent a billion dollars on advertising, you couldn't get that kind of great publicity.
I used to love WinAmp. I paid for it. But every 5.x version wanted to install the "Winamp Agent" to "Improve your experience". Which I declined.
Well, about 2 releases ago (or so), none of the file associations would work. I set them, and then would immediately disappear.
I checked on their support site, and the answer was... we changed WinAmp so it requires the agent because that's what actually does the associations (I suggested this was a bad idea, and a bunch of accounts accused me of "not understanding Windows"). Anyway, thinking I was clever, I installed the agent, let it set the associations, then deleted the agent.
And once I removed the agent and rebooted, you guessed it, the associations were gone. So it appeared to me that in true AOL fashion, they wanted to monitor my listening habits so I could use the software I paid for. Justin Frankel's influence is long gone from this product.
I tried the 2.x and 3.x versions, but both lack the ability to play/record flac and other non-proprietary formats. And I realized, much like the Adobe Reader, it was now so big and bloated that it took 10 seconds to start playing music when I clicked on it.
I decided Foobar2000 was actually pretty good, reasonably lightweight, and was unlikely to become spyware as I think WinAmp has become.
"companies would have a lower overhead and thus could sell for less."
Unless there is perfect competition, the overhead a company has is only marginally related to the selling price.
If I can sell a widget for $100, that's what I'll ask for it, regardless of cost. If the market is buying my widgets as quickly as I can produce them, I would be stupid to reduce the price, even as efficiencies reduce costs to produce.
It's the same incorrect argument that people make that "shoplifting costs everyone more money". No, it doesn't. Shoplifting costs the store owner money, and is morally wrong. But the shop owner can't raise prices because the store next door (who has a more efficient loss prevention program) will undercut their prices.
I think Speed Racer is great, but you don't like it because it wasn't the cartoon from your youth. Like "Transformers". I was already an adult when that came out, so I don't "get" Transformers. But that's okay, it's not my cartoon.
The Transformers movie was a fun summer movie. I hope Speed Racer will be fun. The fact that somebody is taking liberties with it, who cares, as long as it's entertaining.
I'm curious why "Professor Hansen" would take a position. As an academic, I would have expected him to be neutral, or at least biased in favor of some interpretation of law. Any opinion?
Is it possible that he considered himself smarter than you because you're just a attorney and he's just a lawyer?;)
The fiscal shortfall in most states is brought about because programs are set up with reoccurring costs in good years. When the economy does poorly, revenues decreases primarily because (a) house prices fall, reducing real-estate taxes (b) less people are employed, reducing income taxes (c) yes, sales tax, but it is relatively minor compared to a & b.
Also, every state indexes their programs so there are automatic increases built into every agency and program.
Do you see the issue here?
It's not sales tax as such, it's an unrealistic attitude of government and the people they "serve".
Also Sales Tax is amongst the most regressive tax. It would make a whole lot more sense to raise income taxes and this issue goes away. But government is addicted to raising taxes like this.
I want to use FLAC everywhere, but there's a problem. Each song is about 50MB (or so). This means I can fit about 4 albums on a 2GB player. It kind of destroys the utility of a personal music player.
In practice this means that unless you have a 20+ GB player, FLAC is not terribly useful.
I agree with your point, by the way. If the iPod support WMA and FLAC, it would be perfect. As it is, it's just "really good".
I guess the market's not big enough for two companies that makes ridiculously expensive cables that have no effect on the sound. We only need one of those.
The issue is related to small systems integrators making 1,000 PC's. If they save $20/motherboard by using cheaper substitutes, then that's $20K more profit for. There is no downside to doing this from their standpoing.
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The astronauts selected back in those days were military test pilots who were cool and calm under extreme pressure and who could exercise good judgment in life and death situations. Kind of like Tom Brady in the super bowl times 1000.
They selected those kinds of guys because those rockets were extremely experimental. It's only 40 years later that it seems trivial what these guys accomplished. The state of the art in 1969 was so low that going to the moon in the Saturn/Apollo would be trying to paddle from LA to Australia with a rowboat and heath bars for food. A rational person wouldn't do it.
European aircraft design is elegant...
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-06-13-a-380-usat_x.htm
Whereas American aircraft design is clunky and not timeless:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/opinion/25mon3.html?th&emc=th
Make the harmonic balancers (my phrase) serve some other function then... perhaps they can hold fuel, or electronics, or be antennas. Just not deal weight that moves up and down.
As a programmer, I can smell a kludge from a mile a way. This is a kludge times 17
"Would you want to write code for 15K a year?"
Not when minimum wage about the same amount ($7.25/hour is $14,500/year).
As to paying engineers $8.00 per hour, I'd rather not drive over that bridge.
H1B's would not depress wages if they made the simple change that the H1B visa holder could change jobs at will. Right now, H1B wages are depressed precisely because the visa holder will be deported if they quit.
"Hey boss! I found out that minimum wage pays more than you pay!
Oh, sorry about that. Let me discuss your feelings with the IMS.
Oh dear, where did my 'valued' employee get to?"
The system right now pits the Visa holder against the Citizen/Resident worker which further benefits large corporations. It's not a question of visa holder versus resident; it's both of those classes of people against large corporations who are (in my opinion) using H1B's to hold low-cost workers hostage and keep the price of resident labor as well.
"I'd imagine that most Democrats are socialists who look towards the Nordic welfare states."
Oh, I'd imagine most Democrats don't realize the word "Nordic" refers to more than exercise equipment.
I don't understand your comment. You don't need to prove your identity to ride the subway. All mass transit in the world works the same way. You get on anonymously, you get off at your stop. If you were concerned about their ability to track you (presumably as a terrorist would be), then you would pay cash.
You're right, but wouldn't you feel better if the person responsible was punished? Other than that, what stops her from doing it the next time?
Way back when this whole thing started in the mid nineties, I said to anybody who would listen (which apparently wasn't many ;) that the record companies should put their stuff out their in AM quality (64kb/s mp3/wma whatever) and put a bumper around it that said the artist's name and where to buy it. Essentially the same thing as a music video without the video part. When people would object, I pointed out that via the radio, they had been doing that anyway for decades. Then sell high quality stuff for 25-50 cents per song. Do a one-click like iTMS but without the DRM.
Instead, they thought (and still think) that the right way is to just sue people who like their music. That doesn't strike me as a long-term strategy.
Anyway, to answer your statement, yes, I believe they can survive by giving away some kinds of music and then making albums and singles more of an impulse buy so that people are buying CD's for $4 or if people are cheap, they can get the low-quality stuff with the built-in ad.
I don't think it even fundamentally changes the record company's business model. Well, perhaps that's not true. I'm convinced the old-guard at these places is trying to put a universal pay-per-listen system in place, but that's just a hunch.
It's this kind of nonsense that stopped me from contributing to the university. I figured if they had enough money for patronage to the record labels, my contribution was not going for it's intended purpose: educating young adults.
"The best part is why have Facebook and MySpace so even those of us without the brainpower to use even the simplest of markup can easily show off for the entire world what kinda of asshats we can be when we really try."
I still don't get why people even use facebook (or any social sites). Near as I can tell, it's a vestige of the adolescent misconception that you are the center of the universe and everything you do is interesting and important.
Perhaps that's not fair. It persists well into adulthood as well.
The fact that everything people do and say online lives forever and will affect you for the rest of your life seems to have not sunk in with many people. I'm glad my adolescence and early adulthood are long gone and forgotten by everyone. I can't imagine trying to explain what I did 30+ years later when I was in my mid teens.
I'm assuming this whole thing is like the hula hoop. Seemed like a good idea for a while, and then we threw them out in the late 60's.
Telecommunications under the old AT&T was such a primitive set of technologies that it hadn't changed appreciably from a consumer viewpoint in 80 years.
Yes, it was reliable, yes, the service guy came out when he said he would, but we were paying $20/month plus we paid for each extension, plus we couldn't have our own phone, so we paid $1/month for a 2nd phone. For 20 years. This is in 1960 dollars. That's like paying $100 per month for a phone today.
Oh, and long distance was dollars per minutes, lousy quality. It was so expensive, that you played games with "person to person" long distance when you wanted to let people know you'd arrived. "I'll call and if I ask for 'Thelma', everything is fine, if I ask for 'Louise', it means the car broke down and you should accept the call".
Since the breakup, phone costs went down, the internet was allowed to get started because nobody could charge you $400/month for a modem line. All kinds of innovative devices are available, and now I have fiber to my house. The communications world is infinitely better off from the consumer's viewpoint than it was 20-30 years ago. I mean, it isn't even close. From all your comments, I have to assume that you worked for the old phone company? I can appreciate that it was a great place to work, but it came at a very high cost to society.
Well, sure. The government would like to know about your every activity, from breathing, eating, voiding, spending, reading, listening, talking, pretty much everything. The better to tax you, regulate you, imprison you, coerce you.
That doesn't mean we should willing give up that right, nor does it say in the supreme law of the land where the government has been given that power.
Better to let 1 million people cheat on their taxes than 250 million give up every last vestige of privacy.
There's a practical side as well.
If you and I talk on the phone and agree on terms and you fax over the contract, we all know what's real and what's not. If you send me something out of the blue with a signature on it without a discussion first (whether via fedex or fax), I'll call you and we'll figure out what's going on. A sensible person would not accept any signature regardless of source unless they understood the person had actually agreed to something.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've learned the hard way that a contract is not a way to compel people who disagree about basic terms. It's a way for generally agreeable people to fully respect the way they intend to do business together. Or to put it more simply, if you intend to break a contract, it really doesn't matter what you put into it or who signs it.
"The fact is, metered bandwidth is good for our own freedom"
It would be if high speed internet wasn't a monopoly or at best a duopoly. Right now, it's simply an excuse to raise prices at a time when the cable companies/telcos are raking in record profits.
And perversely, if it is metered and considered a limited resource, it gives the government the power to step in and control content. How do you think the FCC (which was only supposed to be in charge of frequency allocation) was made into a de facto censor for radio and TV? It was the limited resource argument.
If you had the means to break into emails and give the key to the government....
Think of this... If you are a government, wouldn't you like RIM to announce that their encryption is unbreakable, and then you announce how unhappy you are with them? I mean, wouldn't RIM be shooting itself in the foot to announce "Oh yes, there's a master key, and if we'll give it up under certain circumstances that we won't discuss"?
And what a great advertisement to have the government say "Even we can't snoop on your email". If you spent a billion dollars on advertising, you couldn't get that kind of great publicity.
It all seems to.... "convenient".
You are correct. Verizon FIOS apparently does not cache if this pages does what it claims to do. I didn't look at the source.
I used to love WinAmp. I paid for it. But every 5.x version wanted to install the "Winamp Agent" to "Improve your experience". Which I declined.
Well, about 2 releases ago (or so), none of the file associations would work. I set them, and then would immediately disappear.
I checked on their support site, and the answer was... we changed WinAmp so it requires the agent because that's what actually does the associations (I suggested this was a bad idea, and a bunch of accounts accused me of "not understanding Windows"). Anyway, thinking I was clever, I installed the agent, let it set the associations, then deleted the agent.
And once I removed the agent and rebooted, you guessed it, the associations were gone. So it appeared to me that in true AOL fashion, they wanted to monitor my listening habits so I could use the software I paid for. Justin Frankel's influence is long gone from this product.
I tried the 2.x and 3.x versions, but both lack the ability to play/record flac and other non-proprietary formats. And I realized, much like the Adobe Reader, it was now so big and bloated that it took 10 seconds to start playing music when I clicked on it.
I decided Foobar2000 was actually pretty good, reasonably lightweight, and was unlikely to become spyware as I think WinAmp has become.
"companies would have a lower overhead and thus could sell for less."
Unless there is perfect competition, the overhead a company has is only marginally related to the selling price.
If I can sell a widget for $100, that's what I'll ask for it, regardless of cost. If the market is buying my widgets as quickly as I can produce them, I would be stupid to reduce the price, even as efficiencies reduce costs to produce.
It's the same incorrect argument that people make that "shoplifting costs everyone more money". No, it doesn't. Shoplifting costs the store owner money, and is morally wrong. But the shop owner can't raise prices because the store next door (who has a more efficient loss prevention program) will undercut their prices.
I think Speed Racer is great, but you don't like it because it wasn't the cartoon from your youth. Like "Transformers". I was already an adult when that came out, so I don't "get" Transformers. But that's okay, it's not my cartoon.
The Transformers movie was a fun summer movie. I hope Speed Racer will be fun. The fact that somebody is taking liberties with it, who cares, as long as it's entertaining.
I'm curious why "Professor Hansen" would take a position. As an academic, I would have expected him to be neutral, or at least biased in favor of some interpretation of law. Any opinion?
;)
Is it possible that he considered himself smarter than you because you're just a attorney and he's just a lawyer?
The fiscal shortfall in most states is brought about because programs are set up with reoccurring costs in good years. When the economy does poorly, revenues decreases primarily because (a) house prices fall, reducing real-estate taxes (b) less people are employed, reducing income taxes (c) yes, sales tax, but it is relatively minor compared to a & b.
Also, every state indexes their programs so there are automatic increases built into every agency and program.
Do you see the issue here?
It's not sales tax as such, it's an unrealistic attitude of government and the people they "serve".
Also Sales Tax is amongst the most regressive tax. It would make a whole lot more sense to raise income taxes and this issue goes away. But government is addicted to raising taxes like this.
I want to use FLAC everywhere, but there's a problem. Each song is about 50MB (or so). This means I can fit about 4 albums on a 2GB player. It kind of destroys the utility of a personal music player.
In practice this means that unless you have a 20+ GB player, FLAC is not terribly useful.
I agree with your point, by the way. If the iPod support WMA and FLAC, it would be perfect. As it is, it's just "really good".
I guess the market's not big enough for two companies that makes ridiculously expensive cables that have no effect on the sound. We only need one of those.
The issue isn't Nancy Nerd making her PC.
The issue is related to small systems integrators making 1,000 PC's. If they save $20/motherboard by using cheaper substitutes, then that's $20K more profit for. There is no downside to doing this from their standpoing.