Am I the only one that found the thought of eating at Quizzno's right after that commercial unappetizing?
Possibly... me, I actually didn't think much of Quizno's until I saw those commercials. Now I want to give them another shot. Because after all, "We like the moon."
The worst may be ACs who fly profanely off the handle because someone accidentally said "patent" instead of "copyright..."
I mean, correct the guy, sure. But frankly, it was a minor mistake in context; I didn't even notice, probably because I expected to see "copyright" and so I didn't realize he used the wrong word. It's not like the extensive posts that go on about patent infringement and the limitations on patents and how they're abusing the patent process and will get sued under whatever patent law when they actually mean copyright...
This started with songwriters as far as I can tell. A band records a song. I respect their recording. Another band sings their song (produces new product). They can either pay for what they produced or are prohibited from distributing or performing it in public. Somehow this seems wrong to lots of people.
I'm not sure why. Your analogy about building materials doesn't hold up. Two companies can make 2x4's with very different processes, even different types of wood, and come out with a comparable product. A song (one worth covering, anyway) is a unique product. If you're a fabulous songwriter and a crappy singer, you should still be able to get *some* compensation for writing a great song, even if someone else performs it better than you do.
Granted, the current methods are overly cumbersome for most people to use, and the intimidation tactics used by lawyers for the IP owners are atrocious. But I don't agree that there's no justification for someone to hold a right on a song they wrote in the event someone else performs it.
Corporations move overseas to avoid paying higher taxes and higher wages. Since higher wages are an issue, perhaps over-unionization and price floors on wages are more to blame?
Unionization in the private sector has been steadily declining over the last 30 years, and minimum wages have been losing value relative to the CPI. So probably it's just that it's cheaper to manufacture your goods in countries where the government doesn't care how you treat workers, as long as they get tax revenue from it.
It's about time the typosquatters are getting squeezed. I'm tired of getting shipped over to some obscure "search engine" site with 45 popups and popunders.
Which has nothing to do with this story... this is about intentionally misleading people to view obscene material. As trashy as those X-10 ads may be, they're not actually obscene.
(Thank the Maker for the popup blocker in the Googlebar!)
Or for Mozilla, when you have the choice. (And for some reason, googlebar causes all sorts of hangs when I install it at work... on any machine. So,/sigh.)
So, during the price crisis, LADPW was able to buy Federally generated power below market rates, and then sell any more than it needed to cover LA at a tidy profit, merely because of its ownership.
I won't dispute that they were *able* to do this, since I don't know, but did they actually do it? Do you have any citations?
If retail electricity prices had been allowed by law to float to meet changes in gas prices, SCE and PGE could have raised rates, paid more wholesale, and nobody would have shut down their generators.
But families would have shut down their refrigerators.
If "deregulation" under Pete Wilson hadn't allowed regulated utilities to sell off all their generation capacity, the price crisis never would have happened either. SCE and PG&E played the market and lost, big time. But since power pretty much has to be a monopoly in a given area, we don't have the choice of letting them just go out of business and letting a competitor take over. Not only that, but since no one can compete with them for providing power to their customers, there is nothing *besides* government regulation to keep their prices down. Power demand is relatively inelastic. They could bleed us dry far too easily.
Thus we had another demonstration of the undisputable economic fact that price controls designed to prevent "gouging" on an "essential item" almost inevitably causes a shortage of the "essential item" instead.
It's not an undisputable economic fact, since such an analysis inevitably leaves out other important data points. Price controls (designed to cover the *normal* costs of providing an essential item plus normal profits) are critical to distribution of resources that cannot be marketed competitively. In normal markets, competition controls prices. In monopoly markets, something else has to exert that control.
Re: the 91 express lanes, it may be true that there are other private projects in CA, but this one is particularily troublesome. It seems that in order to get the private funding, the state had to agree not to expand the 91 and other adjacent roads. The state wants to do just that, but this would threaten the profit of the toll road. The owners of the 91 lanes have sued the state and have won, preventing other road projects. In the end, the state will end up buying the 91 lanes back from the private owners at massive profits to the owners. This is easily one of the biggest boondoggle's in the history of road construction.
Well, no, not at all.
First of all, OCTA bought the franchise back from the private company over a year ago. Then they contracted that same company to operate it. This was a way of ripping up the non-compete legally.
They could not have gotten the private investment without that non-compete agreement. They could not have built the lanes (when they did) without private funding. At the time, it was the only way to increase capacity *at all*.
I agree that this is not the owners fault (the state really screwed up on how they contracted this), but the profit motive for the road has still gotten in the way of transportation. And you will note that none of this has anything to do with "congestion pricing".
No, no, and no. For one thing, it *hasn't* gotten in the way of transportation. The 91 Express Lanes (there are two of them) carry 50% of the rush hour traffic on the 91... even though there's four free lanes. The pricing is structured to ensure free-flow, which improves capacity above and beyond what adding a free lane can do.
This has EVERYTHING to do with congestion pricing. People pay a premium to get a guaranteed free-flow drive. The demographics of the Express Lanes users are indistinguishable from the demographics of the commuters in the free lanes, so the fact that people think that cutting anywhere from 10-30 minutes off their commute is worth $1-$5.50 doesn't seem to have much to do with what their income is. Child care centers often charge $5.00 per minute in late fees... single mothers on tight budgets *love* the idea of paying $5.50 to avoid being 20 minutes late picking up their kid.
If you improve capacity on the free lanes, you diminish the difference between the priced lanes and the free ones, and diminish the value. At the same time, you increase capacity... meaning more cars, more emissions, more road rage, and so on. Also, capacity improvements never result in permanent reductions to traffic; the latent demand for transportation is so incredibly high that we simply can't provide as much *free* capacity as people will eat up. The story changes completely when you price things, however.
The other toll roads in the area are completely different from the 91 in how the ownership works. They are basically government owned, private, corporations that self finance.
More or less. You're correct that the 91 is the only one built by a private company (so far... AB680 allows for three more such contracts in CA). The other toll roads in Orange County were built by Joint Powers Authorities (JPAs), which are an odd hybrid of public and private companies. The good side of them is, since they exist solely to see a project get done, they get very good at that. The bad side is, when the project's done, they cease to exist... so sometimes they will work at finding new reasons why they should continue to work. This is why there's so much momentum to plan out the Claremont extension of the Metro Gold Line in LA... the JPA doesn't really want to become unemployed. Another issue with them is that they tend to be assembled out of elected officials, who frequently are not in a good position to understand whether the job is being done properly. In ten years or so, when MTA has to start running three-car trains on the Gold Line (instead of the 2-car ones they've started out with), they will have to
Only if investors pay attention to the arguments used in court and not the final outcome.
Er, no, regardless. If they *stop* distributing, that can be used as evidence against them in the IBM etc. cases. If they continue to distribute, and get sued, they will either (a) lose, because they will argue what they are currently arguing, which is ridiculous; or (b) win, because they will argue that the GPL doesn't allow Fyodor to do what he's doing, but then they *also* will screw up the other cases, since they would be admitting that the GPL is valid.
Even if Fyodor doesn't technically have the rights to do this under Section 4 (it seems subject to interpretation), SCO has a couple of choices:
- Pull NMap to avoid issues, and thereby admit that the GPL might hold up in court.
- Continue to distribute NMap, and (hopefully) get sued.
If they get sued, they can present one of two cases:
- Fyodor doesn't have the right to do this under the GPL -- a case they might win, but wouldn't fit their party line.
- The GPL is invalid and therefore code released under it is public domain -- what they've been claiming, and a case they absolutely CAN'T win.
So they're totally screwed, assuming that someone (EFF donations anyone?) pays to sue them if they keep distributing. No matter what they do, they're going to prove themselves wrong about the GPL.
Hence they are still giving away Linux sources on their linuxupdate.sco.com site, as required by the GPL for three years minimum.
Good luck with that. They broke the site when the whole MyDoom.A thing came around. It redirects to http://www.sco.com/services/upgrade/scoupdate/, then tells you that www.sco.com cannot be found. At least, that's what it does to *me* when I try the linuxupdate URL. (I think when I checked it out a few weeks ago, it gave a 403 error.)
If they are being paid to do a job, they have to do the job they way they are told to do it, or quit/get fired. Right? Why is this any different just because the employee is really a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Well... when the government is involved, it's not so simple.
I don't really know where the government comes into the situation with VeriSign. I just know that at the particular government agency where I work, I've spent the last few months poring over invoices and generating Excel spreadsheets to help a project manager convince a private contractor that they really, really, have to do their job, and they really, really, haven't been doing it. Sure, we *could* terminate the contract... but then we have to put out another RFP, go through another round of presentations and proposals in windowless secured rooms, and have to hire the company that looks best on paper. There's no guarantee that we will be able to reuse anything that's been done so far, and the contractor pretty much gets off scot-free... all their costs have been paid for, and they have no further liability.
Partly this is because this particular contract isn't written too well, but it's partly just because the huge potential for fraud and corruption in multimillion dollar government contracts leaves personal judgement completely out of the picture.
If you don't think this works this way, just look at the only private "road" in California. The '91 express lanes'. This is an example of the government, and thus the people, being abused by a private road company that want's to guarantee their profits.
Where to begin?
1) The 91 Freeway HOT lanes are NOT the only private road in California. There are several toll roads in Orange County that were built by public-private partnerships and are operated under a similar model to the 91 lanes. The 91, however, is one of only two examples of congestion pricing in California, and is also one of only two where the same route has both pay and free lanes (the other toll roads are strictly that-- you can only use that route if you pay the toll, like the 73 which circumvents the El Toro Y). The HOT lanes in San Diego County may be publicly owned (I don't know offhand) but operate in a similar way to the 91 lanes.
2) What in heck are you talking about? Government, people, abused? The 91 lanes have been a huge success by pretty much every measure I've seen. For one thing, they never would have been built without private funding, so the public wouldn't have had those lanes available anyway. For another, your incentive comment is out of whack... the whole *point* behind congestion pricing is that you can sell mobility, and charge a premium for better mobility. Before the project opened many people referred to them as "Lexus lanes" because it was assumed only rich people would pay the toll to move faster. What they find, though, is that a large proportion of the users of the 91 express lanes are occasional users from lower income brackets. Why? Because paying $5.00 to get in the express lane is cheaper than paying a $10.00 fee for picking up your kid late from childcare. Because that $3.75 toll means you'll get in one more garden job before sundown, which is $40 extra in your pocket. The assumption normally is that low-income people will almost always spend time instead of money, but this project has shown that when they have a choice, they can save money by literally buying time.
I'd love to know where you got this totally distorted perception of how the 91 express lanes operate. I'm actually going on a field trip there tomorrow with a class... we'll see if I have any more useful info to give you.
Take 20% of the money currently spent on pharmacuticals and pump it into university research projects that are not patented and you get 100% of the current rate of discoveries.
Well, dunno about the universities where you're from, but UCLA is pretty rigorous about patenting their discoveries and protecting their patents. They're just not as likely to gouge the consumer to buy the results.
The bottom line is that the current "montra" of "private enterprise is always more efficient" is literally killing thousands of people.
Perhaps more dramatic than necessary, but generally speaking, yes. Economic efficiency is only *one* of many possible ways to evaluate systems. If one takes the concept of economic efficiency to its logical conclusions, there should be no prisons... there should be work camps for the useful and death for the rest. People who are too old to work should be euthanized, not venerated. It goes on. Human beings are social and emotional creatures, and economic efficiency contradicts a whole lot of our nature. It is therefore a relatively poor method for a number of cases, and rarely emerges as the single most important criterion for judging the merits of a system.
Actually, no. Government control of public transport has simply allowed hiding the true cost behind a tax structure - it's great for those that make use of it to not have to bear the full costs - but rather unfair to all those who have no choice in the matter to foot the bill regardless. Contrarily, a privately funded system has to pay its own way, and be paid by the actual users - which is why so few such efforts are started and even fewer work.
The essential problem with privately owned/operated transit is that it's simply not profitable to provide in most circumstances. In every large city, you can probably find a handful of bus routes that collect more in fares than it costs to run them, but those routes alone do not create a usable transit network. If you dropped all the "unprofitable" lines, you would likely have trouble making ends meet, since the people who *were* riding your profitable lines were using unprofitable ones to get there.
In Los Angeles, MTA collects about 29% of its operating budget from farebox revenues, which is pitiful... other similar-sized transit agencies are closer to 50%. But on the other hand, California's 2000 budget paid three times as much for street and highway maintenance as it collected in gas taxes, license fees, and truck fees... so most large transit agencies are proportionally *less* subsidized for operations than our road system. When you take into account that the road system is used far more heavily than transit, that 2/3rds we're paying out of general revenues really adds up fast.
There have been many situations where gov't regulation has helped us, but when has the gov't taken over a previously private role and done a better job?
Well, hm. A couple years ago, we had an "energy shortage" or "power crisis" or somesuch in California. At least, that's what I heard. I never personally experienced it. Why? Because I lived in the City of Los Angeles, where the municipal DWP provided our power. While the private companies were selling off their generation facilities during the energy glut, DWP was modernizing their generation and providing more clean power. While the private companies were saving money by not upgrading their grid, DWP was increasing the reliability of their power supply. During the "energy shortage," LADWP was one of those companies *selling* power to Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric at exorbitant market rates (BTW, it wasn't possible or legal to sell for less, under the current regulatory framework).
Now I live in SCE territory, and had to get a UPS because our power goes out for at least a few seconds every few weeks through the summer. No, it's not a rolling blackout; they just can't handle the load on their outdated equipment, and they're bankrupted by the sudden change in the market, so they can't replace it. Of course, if they could just raise the rates, you see, everything would be fine... except that electricity is something that we, as a society, have decided people shouldn't really have to do without because they can't afford it, so the rates are regulated. This isn't a problem for DWP, who provides better service at lower rates than SCE in neighboring territories.
Mind you, that might be a good thing. It might force the Bush administration's conservative laissez-faire approach to Internet governance to get a dramatic overhaul and become more regulatory.
How would that be a good thing?
The internet holds a place much more similar to a public resource than private property, like a river compared to an office-park fountain. Dump whatever you like in your fountain; you have to clean it up... but if you pollute the river, the folks downstream are going to have to deal with it.
Currently, large corporations with lots of money are able to yank domain names they like out from under folks, shut down websites with a single lawyer-crafted letter, and so forth... all in the name of protecting their right to profit. If internet governance were handled in a more regulatory fashion, it would be easier to hold the folks in charge accountable for their decisions.
Which isn't to say we'd necessarily use that power... Americans are getting better and better at forgetting that *we* get to choose our government, so *we* are responsible for what they do. People seem perfectly happy to vote however the money tells them to and then whine because it works better for the money when that happens, without understanding their own role in the saga.
There is a way, it's called a "trade secret", just don't tell anyone else how you did it.
This is often impossible. There are some methods you can keep secret, but for a large proportion of inventions, all someone needs is a fully-assembled product and they can find out how you did it. How would you keep, say, a lightbulb a trade secret? What about an engine? A new spill-proof mug that attacks people when they try to clean it*?
For a lot of items, the only way to keep it secret is to not ever market it, or even let anyone see it. This sort of defeats the purpose.
*The "UCLA Library Mug," which is allegedly spill-proof and therefore allowed to be used in the library, has a top consisting of two plastic parts that snap apart with difficulty for cleaning. After I sliced open my thumb one time getting them apart, I threw away the top part of it. The thing has not one, but TWO patents on it.
You *are* correct about the ambiguity of the phrase. It seems, however, that it is liable to be interpreted as opposing whatever stance a particular person holds (but maybe that's just me).
Still, it seems that the logical palindromic feel is somewhat diminished by the logical fallacy of setting up "marriage" as equivalent to "funeral," when in fact it is the parallel of "death" (and "wedding" is the parallel of "funeral").
M$ is driven by the almighty dollar, while Linux is driven by people who want to do what's right.
Which comes to an interesting issue: Open Source Software operates much as a public good, and in a similar way, is liable to be underproduced. Proprietary software operates more traditionally within the market economy, and so is more likely to find an equilibrium price at which the amount suppliers are willing to produce matches the demand of consumers.
Which isn't to say that it's unworkable; many items are public goods because when they're privately held they're non-functional. The journal entries I linked above go into more detail about how digital data and OSS might work in spite of the normal economy. Still, it's an important point to understand, especially if you want to see OSS go mainstream.
Where do you think unions came from? How do you think they gained power? Why do you think they were allowed to persist? Violence and the threat of violence.
Uh, no, actually.
Where unions came from was the exploitation of individual workers by companies. They *lost* a good deal of power by violence... check out labor legislation around the Molly Maguire era, and you'll find that there were NO rights at all, and that many elements of union activity currently protected by labor law were forbidden.
Where their power came from was the *economic* threat of labor unrest and strikes. The Wagner Act was passed not because unions were violent and hurting people, but because strikes threatened the stability of the economy and production. Then the pendulum swung the other way, with the post-WWII strike wave which brought us the Taft-Hartley Act, and limited the powers of unions... again to ward off economic instability.
They are allowed to persist in part because the law protects them, and in part because they are losing power in an increasingly global economy, so they cause less of a threat to the well-being of businesses.
In the 20 weeks of the supermarket strike here in SoCal, there's been one violent incident... some guys jumped some picketers. In the MTA strike that lasted five weeks through October and November, there was lots of name-calling, but no violence at all.
If you consider withholding factors of production (i.e. labor) in order to cause economic damage to be violence, I guess your statement was correct, but your definition of violence seems a little more broad than is strictly speaking practical.
Marriage is a ritual. So are funerals. If you don't have a funeral, you're still dead, right?
Marriage is an "institution." Weddings are rituals. You can be married without a wedding, as you can be dead without a funeral. However, until you have a death certificate issued by the local authority, your beneficiaries cannot collect death benefits, your creditors won't stop hounding you, and your spouse can't remarry... so *legally*, you're not dead, no matter how stiff and cold you are.
Until you get a marriage certificate, *legally* you're not married, no matter how you feel about each other. You cannot collect any of the benefits of marriage (joint tax filing, automatic inheritance without probate, spousal SSI and pension benefits, etc.)
Anyone even slightly familiar with the story and even vaguely patriotic probably hates Jane Fonda.
Of course, we could come up with all sorts of examples, and you would be able to say "no, slightly *more* familiar than that" or "no, slightly *less* vaguely patriotic." Nice wiggle-room you've left yourself.
I'm wishing my dad was alive to weigh in. Not only was he a professional historian his entire career, he was also awarded a Purple Heart in Korea, where he served in the Marines. He didn't talk a lot about war or politics, but from the little he did say it was clear he didn't support what our country did.
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Is this a new business model or a non existant one?
This is a pretty old business model, but it's been cleverly retooled to remove the reliance on pilfering of underpants.
Am I the only one that found the thought of eating at Quizzno's right after that commercial unappetizing?
Possibly... me, I actually didn't think much of Quizno's until I saw those commercials. Now I want to give them another shot. Because after all, "We like the moon."
I don't know who is worse...
The worst may be ACs who fly profanely off the handle because someone accidentally said "patent" instead of "copyright..."
I mean, correct the guy, sure. But frankly, it was a minor mistake in context; I didn't even notice, probably because I expected to see "copyright" and so I didn't realize he used the wrong word. It's not like the extensive posts that go on about patent infringement and the limitations on patents and how they're abusing the patent process and will get sued under whatever patent law when they actually mean copyright...
This started with songwriters as far as I can tell. A band records a song. I respect their recording. Another band sings their song (produces new product). They can either pay for what they produced or are prohibited from distributing or performing it in public. Somehow this seems wrong to lots of people.
I'm not sure why. Your analogy about building materials doesn't hold up. Two companies can make 2x4's with very different processes, even different types of wood, and come out with a comparable product. A song (one worth covering, anyway) is a unique product. If you're a fabulous songwriter and a crappy singer, you should still be able to get *some* compensation for writing a great song, even if someone else performs it better than you do.
Granted, the current methods are overly cumbersome for most people to use, and the intimidation tactics used by lawyers for the IP owners are atrocious. But I don't agree that there's no justification for someone to hold a right on a song they wrote in the event someone else performs it.
Corporations move overseas to avoid paying higher taxes and higher wages. Since higher wages are an issue, perhaps over-unionization and price floors on wages are more to blame?
Unionization in the private sector has been steadily declining over the last 30 years, and minimum wages have been losing value relative to the CPI. So probably it's just that it's cheaper to manufacture your goods in countries where the government doesn't care how you treat workers, as long as they get tax revenue from it.
It's about time the typosquatters are getting squeezed. I'm tired of getting shipped over to some obscure "search engine" site with 45 popups and popunders.
/sigh.)
Which has nothing to do with this story... this is about intentionally misleading people to view obscene material. As trashy as those X-10 ads may be, they're not actually obscene.
(Thank the Maker for the popup blocker in the Googlebar!)
Or for Mozilla, when you have the choice. (And for some reason, googlebar causes all sorts of hangs when I install it at work... on any machine. So,
So, during the price crisis, LADPW was able to buy Federally generated power below market rates, and then sell any more than it needed to cover LA at a tidy profit, merely because of its ownership.
I won't dispute that they were *able* to do this, since I don't know, but did they actually do it? Do you have any citations?
If retail electricity prices had been allowed by law to float to meet changes in gas prices, SCE and PGE could have raised rates, paid more wholesale, and nobody would have shut down their generators.
But families would have shut down their refrigerators.
If "deregulation" under Pete Wilson hadn't allowed regulated utilities to sell off all their generation capacity, the price crisis never would have happened either. SCE and PG&E played the market and lost, big time. But since power pretty much has to be a monopoly in a given area, we don't have the choice of letting them just go out of business and letting a competitor take over. Not only that, but since no one can compete with them for providing power to their customers, there is nothing *besides* government regulation to keep their prices down. Power demand is relatively inelastic. They could bleed us dry far too easily.
Thus we had another demonstration of the undisputable economic fact that price controls designed to prevent "gouging" on an "essential item" almost inevitably causes a shortage of the "essential item" instead.
It's not an undisputable economic fact, since such an analysis inevitably leaves out other important data points. Price controls (designed to cover the *normal* costs of providing an essential item plus normal profits) are critical to distribution of resources that cannot be marketed competitively. In normal markets, competition controls prices. In monopoly markets, something else has to exert that control.
Re: the 91 express lanes, it may be true that there are other private projects in CA, but this one is particularily troublesome. It seems that in order to get the private funding, the state had to agree not to expand the 91 and other adjacent roads. The state wants to do just that, but this would threaten the profit of the toll road. The owners of the 91 lanes have sued the state and have won, preventing other road projects. In the end, the state will end up buying the 91 lanes back from the private owners at massive profits to the owners. This is easily one of the biggest boondoggle's in the history of road construction.
Well, no, not at all.
First of all, OCTA bought the franchise back from the private company over a year ago. Then they contracted that same company to operate it. This was a way of ripping up the non-compete legally.
They could not have gotten the private investment without that non-compete agreement. They could not have built the lanes (when they did) without private funding. At the time, it was the only way to increase capacity *at all*.
I agree that this is not the owners fault (the state really screwed up on how they contracted this), but the profit motive for the road has still gotten in the way of transportation. And you will note that none of this has anything to do with "congestion pricing".
No, no, and no. For one thing, it *hasn't* gotten in the way of transportation. The 91 Express Lanes (there are two of them) carry 50% of the rush hour traffic on the 91... even though there's four free lanes. The pricing is structured to ensure free-flow, which improves capacity above and beyond what adding a free lane can do.
This has EVERYTHING to do with congestion pricing. People pay a premium to get a guaranteed free-flow drive. The demographics of the Express Lanes users are indistinguishable from the demographics of the commuters in the free lanes, so the fact that people think that cutting anywhere from 10-30 minutes off their commute is worth $1-$5.50 doesn't seem to have much to do with what their income is. Child care centers often charge $5.00 per minute in late fees... single mothers on tight budgets *love* the idea of paying $5.50 to avoid being 20 minutes late picking up their kid.
If you improve capacity on the free lanes, you diminish the difference between the priced lanes and the free ones, and diminish the value. At the same time, you increase capacity... meaning more cars, more emissions, more road rage, and so on. Also, capacity improvements never result in permanent reductions to traffic; the latent demand for transportation is so incredibly high that we simply can't provide as much *free* capacity as people will eat up. The story changes completely when you price things, however.
The other toll roads in the area are completely different from the 91 in how the ownership works. They are basically government owned, private, corporations that self finance.
More or less. You're correct that the 91 is the only one built by a private company (so far... AB680 allows for three more such contracts in CA). The other toll roads in Orange County were built by Joint Powers Authorities (JPAs), which are an odd hybrid of public and private companies. The good side of them is, since they exist solely to see a project get done, they get very good at that. The bad side is, when the project's done, they cease to exist... so sometimes they will work at finding new reasons why they should continue to work. This is why there's so much momentum to plan out the Claremont extension of the Metro Gold Line in LA... the JPA doesn't really want to become unemployed. Another issue with them is that they tend to be assembled out of elected officials, who frequently are not in a good position to understand whether the job is being done properly. In ten years or so, when MTA has to start running three-car trains on the Gold Line (instead of the 2-car ones they've started out with), they will have to
> So they're totally screwed
Only if investors pay attention to the arguments used in court and not the final outcome.
Er, no, regardless. If they *stop* distributing, that can be used as evidence against them in the IBM etc. cases. If they continue to distribute, and get sued, they will either (a) lose, because they will argue what they are currently arguing, which is ridiculous; or (b) win, because they will argue that the GPL doesn't allow Fyodor to do what he's doing, but then they *also* will screw up the other cases, since they would be admitting that the GPL is valid.
> The GPL is invalid and therefore code released under it is public domain
not even that - if the GPL is invalid, it falls back to being Fyodor's personal copyright, and he can sue them for that instead.
Yes, yes, *we* know that. But that's not what SCO is maintaining.
Even if Fyodor doesn't technically have the rights to do this under Section 4 (it seems subject to interpretation), SCO has a couple of choices:
- Pull NMap to avoid issues, and thereby admit that the GPL might hold up in court.
- Continue to distribute NMap, and (hopefully) get sued.
If they get sued, they can present one of two cases:
- Fyodor doesn't have the right to do this under the GPL -- a case they might win, but wouldn't fit their party line.
- The GPL is invalid and therefore code released under it is public domain -- what they've been claiming, and a case they absolutely CAN'T win.
So they're totally screwed, assuming that someone (EFF donations anyone?) pays to sue them if they keep distributing. No matter what they do, they're going to prove themselves wrong about the GPL.
To what extent would Apache, Samba, and NMap explicitly preventing SCO from distributing those packages affect SCO customers?
If they took similar action to Fyodor, they would also pull *support* for the UNIXWare and OpenServer, which would definitely affect SCO customers.
Hence they are still giving away Linux sources on their linuxupdate.sco.com site, as required by the GPL for three years minimum.
Good luck with that. They broke the site when the whole MyDoom.A thing came around. It redirects to http://www.sco.com/services/upgrade/scoupdate/, then tells you that www.sco.com cannot be found. At least, that's what it does to *me* when I try the linuxupdate URL. (I think when I checked it out a few weeks ago, it gave a 403 error.)
If they are being paid to do a job, they have to do the job they way they are told to do it, or quit/get fired. Right? Why is this any different just because the employee is really a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Well... when the government is involved, it's not so simple.
I don't really know where the government comes into the situation with VeriSign. I just know that at the particular government agency where I work, I've spent the last few months poring over invoices and generating Excel spreadsheets to help a project manager convince a private contractor that they really, really, have to do their job, and they really, really, haven't been doing it. Sure, we *could* terminate the contract... but then we have to put out another RFP, go through another round of presentations and proposals in windowless secured rooms, and have to hire the company that looks best on paper. There's no guarantee that we will be able to reuse anything that's been done so far, and the contractor pretty much gets off scot-free... all their costs have been paid for, and they have no further liability.
Partly this is because this particular contract isn't written too well, but it's partly just because the huge potential for fraud and corruption in multimillion dollar government contracts leaves personal judgement completely out of the picture.
If you don't think this works this way, just look at the only private "road" in California. The '91 express lanes'. This is an example of the government, and thus the people, being abused by a private road company that want's to guarantee their profits.
Where to begin?
1) The 91 Freeway HOT lanes are NOT the only private road in California. There are several toll roads in Orange County that were built by public-private partnerships and are operated under a similar model to the 91 lanes. The 91, however, is one of only two examples of congestion pricing in California, and is also one of only two where the same route has both pay and free lanes (the other toll roads are strictly that-- you can only use that route if you pay the toll, like the 73 which circumvents the El Toro Y). The HOT lanes in San Diego County may be publicly owned (I don't know offhand) but operate in a similar way to the 91 lanes.
2) What in heck are you talking about? Government, people, abused? The 91 lanes have been a huge success by pretty much every measure I've seen. For one thing, they never would have been built without private funding, so the public wouldn't have had those lanes available anyway. For another, your incentive comment is out of whack... the whole *point* behind congestion pricing is that you can sell mobility, and charge a premium for better mobility. Before the project opened many people referred to them as "Lexus lanes" because it was assumed only rich people would pay the toll to move faster. What they find, though, is that a large proportion of the users of the 91 express lanes are occasional users from lower income brackets. Why? Because paying $5.00 to get in the express lane is cheaper than paying a $10.00 fee for picking up your kid late from childcare. Because that $3.75 toll means you'll get in one more garden job before sundown, which is $40 extra in your pocket. The assumption normally is that low-income people will almost always spend time instead of money, but this project has shown that when they have a choice, they can save money by literally buying time.
I'd love to know where you got this totally distorted perception of how the 91 express lanes operate. I'm actually going on a field trip there tomorrow with a class... we'll see if I have any more useful info to give you.
Take 20% of the money currently spent on pharmacuticals and pump it into university research projects that are not patented and you get 100% of the current rate of discoveries.
Well, dunno about the universities where you're from, but UCLA is pretty rigorous about patenting their discoveries and protecting their patents. They're just not as likely to gouge the consumer to buy the results.
The bottom line is that the current "montra" of "private enterprise is always more efficient" is literally killing thousands of people.
Perhaps more dramatic than necessary, but generally speaking, yes. Economic efficiency is only *one* of many possible ways to evaluate systems. If one takes the concept of economic efficiency to its logical conclusions, there should be no prisons... there should be work camps for the useful and death for the rest. People who are too old to work should be euthanized, not venerated. It goes on. Human beings are social and emotional creatures, and economic efficiency contradicts a whole lot of our nature. It is therefore a relatively poor method for a number of cases, and rarely emerges as the single most important criterion for judging the merits of a system.
Actually, no. Government control of public transport has simply allowed hiding the true cost behind a tax structure - it's great for those that make use of it to not have to bear the full costs - but rather unfair to all those who have no choice in the matter to foot the bill regardless. Contrarily, a privately funded system has to pay its own way, and be paid by the actual users - which is why so few such efforts are started and even fewer work.
The essential problem with privately owned/operated transit is that it's simply not profitable to provide in most circumstances. In every large city, you can probably find a handful of bus routes that collect more in fares than it costs to run them, but those routes alone do not create a usable transit network. If you dropped all the "unprofitable" lines, you would likely have trouble making ends meet, since the people who *were* riding your profitable lines were using unprofitable ones to get there.
In Los Angeles, MTA collects about 29% of its operating budget from farebox revenues, which is pitiful... other similar-sized transit agencies are closer to 50%. But on the other hand, California's 2000 budget paid three times as much for street and highway maintenance as it collected in gas taxes, license fees, and truck fees... so most large transit agencies are proportionally *less* subsidized for operations than our road system. When you take into account that the road system is used far more heavily than transit, that 2/3rds we're paying out of general revenues really adds up fast.
There have been many situations where gov't regulation has helped us, but when has the gov't taken over a previously private role and done a better job?
Well, hm. A couple years ago, we had an "energy shortage" or "power crisis" or somesuch in California. At least, that's what I heard. I never personally experienced it. Why? Because I lived in the City of Los Angeles, where the municipal DWP provided our power. While the private companies were selling off their generation facilities during the energy glut, DWP was modernizing their generation and providing more clean power. While the private companies were saving money by not upgrading their grid, DWP was increasing the reliability of their power supply. During the "energy shortage," LADWP was one of those companies *selling* power to Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric at exorbitant market rates (BTW, it wasn't possible or legal to sell for less, under the current regulatory framework).
Now I live in SCE territory, and had to get a UPS because our power goes out for at least a few seconds every few weeks through the summer. No, it's not a rolling blackout; they just can't handle the load on their outdated equipment, and they're bankrupted by the sudden change in the market, so they can't replace it. Of course, if they could just raise the rates, you see, everything would be fine... except that electricity is something that we, as a society, have decided people shouldn't really have to do without because they can't afford it, so the rates are regulated. This isn't a problem for DWP, who provides better service at lower rates than SCE in neighboring territories.
The internet holds a place much more similar to a public resource than private property, like a river compared to an office-park fountain. Dump whatever you like in your fountain; you have to clean it up... but if you pollute the river, the folks downstream are going to have to deal with it.
Currently, large corporations with lots of money are able to yank domain names they like out from under folks, shut down websites with a single lawyer-crafted letter, and so forth... all in the name of protecting their right to profit. If internet governance were handled in a more regulatory fashion, it would be easier to hold the folks in charge accountable for their decisions.
Which isn't to say we'd necessarily use that power... Americans are getting better and better at forgetting that *we* get to choose our government, so *we* are responsible for what they do. People seem perfectly happy to vote however the money tells them to and then whine because it works better for the money when that happens, without understanding their own role in the saga.
I only fear that Congress will assign someone even worse and more corrupt if that happened.
I hear Jeffrey Skilling is available (once that whole indictment thing blows over...)
There is a way, it's called a "trade secret", just don't tell anyone else how you did it.
This is often impossible. There are some methods you can keep secret, but for a large proportion of inventions, all someone needs is a fully-assembled product and they can find out how you did it. How would you keep, say, a lightbulb a trade secret? What about an engine? A new spill-proof mug that attacks people when they try to clean it*?
For a lot of items, the only way to keep it secret is to not ever market it, or even let anyone see it. This sort of defeats the purpose.
*The "UCLA Library Mug," which is allegedly spill-proof and therefore allowed to be used in the library, has a top consisting of two plastic parts that snap apart with difficulty for cleaning. After I sliced open my thumb one time getting them apart, I threw away the top part of it. The thing has not one, but TWO patents on it.
You are incorrect, I am not a sir. ;-)
You *are* correct about the ambiguity of the phrase. It seems, however, that it is liable to be interpreted as opposing whatever stance a particular person holds (but maybe that's just me).
Still, it seems that the logical palindromic feel is somewhat diminished by the logical fallacy of setting up "marriage" as equivalent to "funeral," when in fact it is the parallel of "death" (and "wedding" is the parallel of "funeral").
M$ is driven by the almighty dollar, while Linux is driven by people who want to do what's right.
Which comes to an interesting issue: Open Source Software operates much as a public good, and in a similar way, is liable to be underproduced. Proprietary software operates more traditionally within the market economy, and so is more likely to find an equilibrium price at which the amount suppliers are willing to produce matches the demand of consumers.
Which isn't to say that it's unworkable; many items are public goods because when they're privately held they're non-functional. The journal entries I linked above go into more detail about how digital data and OSS might work in spite of the normal economy. Still, it's an important point to understand, especially if you want to see OSS go mainstream.
Where do you think unions came from? How do you think they gained power? Why do you think they were allowed to persist? Violence and the threat of violence.
Uh, no, actually.
Where unions came from was the exploitation of individual workers by companies. They *lost* a good deal of power by violence... check out labor legislation around the Molly Maguire era, and you'll find that there were NO rights at all, and that many elements of union activity currently protected by labor law were forbidden.
Where their power came from was the *economic* threat of labor unrest and strikes. The Wagner Act was passed not because unions were violent and hurting people, but because strikes threatened the stability of the economy and production. Then the pendulum swung the other way, with the post-WWII strike wave which brought us the Taft-Hartley Act, and limited the powers of unions... again to ward off economic instability.
They are allowed to persist in part because the law protects them, and in part because they are losing power in an increasingly global economy, so they cause less of a threat to the well-being of businesses.
In the 20 weeks of the supermarket strike here in SoCal, there's been one violent incident... some guys jumped some picketers. In the MTA strike that lasted five weeks through October and November, there was lots of name-calling, but no violence at all.
If you consider withholding factors of production (i.e. labor) in order to cause economic damage to be violence, I guess your statement was correct, but your definition of violence seems a little more broad than is strictly speaking practical.
Marriage is a ritual. So are funerals. If you don't have a funeral, you're still dead, right?
Marriage is an "institution." Weddings are rituals. You can be married without a wedding, as you can be dead without a funeral. However, until you have a death certificate issued by the local authority, your beneficiaries cannot collect death benefits, your creditors won't stop hounding you, and your spouse can't remarry... so *legally*, you're not dead, no matter how stiff and cold you are.
Until you get a marriage certificate, *legally* you're not married, no matter how you feel about each other. You cannot collect any of the benefits of marriage (joint tax filing, automatic inheritance without probate, spousal SSI and pension benefits, etc.)
Anyone even slightly familiar with the story and even vaguely patriotic probably hates Jane Fonda.
Of course, we could come up with all sorts of examples, and you would be able to say "no, slightly *more* familiar than that" or "no, slightly *less* vaguely patriotic." Nice wiggle-room you've left yourself.
I'm wishing my dad was alive to weigh in. Not only was he a professional historian his entire career, he was also awarded a Purple Heart in Korea, where he served in the Marines. He didn't talk a lot about war or politics, but from the little he did say it was clear he didn't support what our country did.