1 in 5 people live in developed countries. Everyone in a non-developed country uses pirates software. That means 4 out of 5 people at least have pirated software.
And from this, what follows? Answer: nothing.
None of those people were customers to begin with.
So the BSA can go F themselves if they think this statistic is a good reason for new and more draconic laws impinging on end user's rights.
I'm sure (well, actually not really) rumours are just FUD (by whom and for what purpose?) but that's the thing, you're through Alice's Looking Glass now... is it FUD disseminated by people who don't want use to use Truecrypt just because it is iuin fact unbreakable or is it someone who's hit on truly suspect facts about Truecrypt? How do you actually know?
This much is certain- we live in a world in which it's guaranteed that intelligence agencies have a keen, legitimate and abiding interest in being able to decrypt and otherwise ascertain the information in any given file since in point of fact Super Bad Guys determined to do Super Bad Things will avail themselves of the same technology to secure their Evil Plot as you will use to secure your discovery of the missing second step in the underwear gnome riddle:
So is TrueCrypt (or other) backdoored and is that a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Or is it totally impenetrable and therefore a Big PITA and Threat to us all in some way and who wants you to think it's one way and who wants you to think it's another?
Like I said, you're through the Looking Glass where you can't be sure of anything you "know". This is where us regular folk accidentally bump up against spooks and their ways....
OK let em get this straight. Conservatives (Forbes Magazine- very) are now worried about the deleterious effect on the free market if people know that Tesla was an radically under-appreciated genius who was repeatedly screwed over by the money-grubbing, politicking fame -hound Edison whose efforts to discredit, defame and disenfranchise Tesla set back progress by a good half century?
The image of Edison as the icon and living embodiment of genius-through-sweat and progress via patented, monetized innovation, must at all cost be protected now? So the culture wars now extend to every nook and cranny at all times in history present, future and past ?
Let it go. Edison was what he was and yes, he was "banging" Tesla more frequently and harder than a screen door in a tornado. That's the tail of the historical tape. It doesn't mean anything beyond what it was.
If it weren't true, then no one would do it. Look at Mexico. Look at Somolia. Now those are countries where everything has been cleared and businesses can operate with total freedom, and those are the cleanest, safest most technologically advanced countries with the two largest economies in the world.
If businesses want something, in this case software patents, then let them have it . Nothing is worse than non-business people trying to dictate what business should and shouldn't have.
Fraud extortion murder kidnapping nepotism bribery are all good for business.. Why can't people understand that's what good for business is good for society????
I't s not the business people driving this, it's the lawyers. The lawyers are acting as a parasitic business on computer programming, siphoning off time and resources which would have otherwise gone into advancing software and money which would have otherwise gone to developers startups and consumers.
If you go to any of these conferences or read op eds and especially blogs you'l see it's lawyers who are attempting to defend software patents, going to conferences and it's lawyers who are employed in the EU and elsewhere by M$ in an attempt to spread the disease.
Lawyers are the prime beneficiaries of these patents, not even inventors who mostly never reach their dreamed of trolling nirvana- a job which entails only cashing checks that come to your mailbox.
I love the way software patents advocates present dystopian hypotheticals as a form of argument when we already KNOW what the world looks like without software patents.
It's a world of Turing Machines (1936) and von Neumann architecture (1945), machine language and assembly language (1951), compilers (1952) and loops and switch and if / then statements and LISP (1958) and packet switching (1960s).
It's a world with operating systems and databases and word processors and spreadsheets and browsers and web pages.
It's a world with the ARPANET, TCP/IP, the internet and HTTP and FTP and DNS.
In other words a world where the most fundamental, most visionary, most complex, most resource intensive, most ambitious and most beneficial contributions to humankind are conceived, created, disseminated, taken up and used in creating incalculable social, scientific and economic benefit for all.
So just remember this next time you hear someone going on about what a bad place the world will become if we abolish software patents.
And please, give generously each year. Your continued ability to pay your bills depends on it.
-is a natural force for good in developed countries and it's never going to be "over" unless that developed country is "over" .
The leveraging for "Yearbook On The Web !!! " -type opportunities to make money off people naive enough to surrender their most intimate details to a group of total strangers whose sole aim is to monetize same, well, that may be over.
If you compare FB with Google, the differences tell the real story. FB could be replaced in functionality by any number of me-too--products because its peculiar success is not borne of any kind of technological breakthrough but only the fact that it, and not some other equally ordinary-technology product, was the victor in a product space with network effects strong enough to create a natural "winner take all" market.
Meanwhile, Bing is still trying to be 1/10th as good as Google is at doing what it does, despite billions of dollars at the M$'s disposal and some of the best minds in the world working for them.
When the story of the internet is told, it will go like this- DARPA, FTP, email, the web, HTML, Mosaic then Google. Those are the big events. Those are the technological breakthroughs that that literally changed the world. FB will be a footnote.
So to the extent that FB's value is an exercise in bubble economics and phantom value, maybe this is the end of SV's love affair with this kind of thing. That proposition is dubitable since people with too much money generally earned it by doing wholly useless things like co-locating their servers closer to NYSE's servers to give them a multi-billion dollar edge when doing flash trading -
so it's unlikely these same people are going to have the fine antenna necessary to distinguish innovations which create revenue opportunities by delivering real, ongoing value from those that have "Hindenberg " painted in man-sized letters on the side:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F54rqDh2mWA
Long live the free market and real innovation delivering real value to the lives of real people . Here's to you.
Got my vote but by today's insane standards yo're a regular old liberal.
What ever happened to the conservatives who were conservationists? The hunters and sportsmen? They've been replaced by toxic conservatives like Hannity and Limbaugh. What the fuck happened? Is conservatism like a progressive disease where each generation has to be "more" right wing than the last? In my view, ti's turned into an essentially reactionary "movement" where instead of espousing rational positions, they are outdoing each other to see who can redefine "conservative" further away from messy reality and deeper into "purity" how ever far from rationality it takes them.
I am only going to take the first of this denier meme because I am short on time. perhaps someone else has heard of Google and can contribute rebuttals to the other denialist talking points
"Bristlecones falsified" WRONG WRONG WRONG.
This is completely normal science where papers are properly subjected to post publishing criticism, and then that criticism is answered and back and forth like this. There was NO FALSIFICATION and if you want the details they're here
OK I experienced this as an undergrad at UCSD. Our prof (who shall remain nameless) "let it be known" that our undergrad experiments would be graded better if the results contradicted the null hypothesis (no effect). It's very subtle and informal, it's not like they stand in front of the class and say it, but someone gets told and by the time the papers are turned in, everyone knows and has complied.
Research universities are notoriously political and cutthroat; even not complying could send the inadvertent signal that you think you're morally better than your TA, who did the same thing as an undergrad and everyone knows you never want to offend your TA in any way shape form or size; they'll end your career, at least at UCSD.
There's a lot that's wrong with the university and the more competitive the university the truer that becomes. With a surfeit of very over-qualified candidates, careers are decided by who likes whom or more often who doesn't like whom. Everyone know this and the whole scene is despotic with the power to of life and death over careers being handed over to temperamental 23 year olds.
So now you're telling me this system is also corrupt? Oh my!
Well, don't despair, we can clean this sewer right up.
1) anonymous grading where the the grader doesn't know whose paper / test / etc they are grading.
2) Enough experiments randomly selected for rigorous anonymous, independent confirmation so as to make any cheater properly nervous with a three strikes and your out policy (or such like) by a body composed for just this task.
Rolling back of the excessive metricization of performance. They essentially "grade" you as a prof by how many times you're cited and how many grants you pull down for the university. In many cases, the university acts as your pimp, taking their cut or what you get. How do you pull down grants? By being a golden researcher- one who consistently makes new discoveries, and that has come to mean positive results even though a negative result can bear just as much new information as a positive one if the experiment is aimed in the right place.
Tenure and grant money are decided by who gets positive results, even though a negative result can bear just as much new information as a positive one if the experiment is aimed in the right place.
An institution's character can largely come to be dominated by how many sociopaths it let through its doors and into positions of power. The dishonesty of these personalities can have enormous influence over every aspect of everyone's else's life and survival strategy. Then that attitude becomes institutionalized, meaning people who came up through that system and won by playing it reanimate during their own careers. Right now, the university culture, at least where I went, is an open running sewer.
It' s almost not worth fixing since the university as we know it will be dead within 15 years thanks to super-inflationary tuition models, layers and layers of overpaid bureaucrats thrashing around looking for something to get busy with in order to seem indispensable, no bankruptcy stipulations on quarter million dollar student loans and the creation of low cost / no cost alternatives for the vast majority of majors.
It's really too bad since the collective efforts of research university system has essentially saved civilization a few times now and been the only source of truly independent knowledge free from mundane political pressures and as such effectively kept progress technological and civic progress going for a least a century now. Such a thing must continue to exist in some capacity and it must be funded through public measures (or it's not independent.) Either that or society is going to extinguish itself.
But I covered the case of taking a pee during commercials. What matters for the business model is not what you could do during commercials, or what you do do during commercials, it's what advertiser's BELIEVE MOST people do during commercials.
That's am interesting construct since it permits the business model to thrive if EVERYONE leaves during commercials, as long as the advertisers still BELIEVE their commercials are effective; maybe advertisers are wrong, maybe their commercials aren't effective because many more people leave during them than the suppose. Maybe advertisers know most people leave, but stay within earshot and commercials are designed as primarily "talkies" with the graphics thrown in gratuitously (and maybe that's why THEY"RE SO LOUD).
Whatever the case, advertisers under the current system have a "show funding belief " which will, presumably evaporate when there is no doubt whatsoever that their commercials are not being aired.
OK so what I hear you saying is they're charging an unfair price. My attitude towards new CDs. The value isn't there for me, and you won't let me pay less legally.
I boil this down to a fairness thing. Your price is a ripoff and represents obscene profits for millionaires.
I feel that way about cable and HBO. My solution is to stay a season or two behind the shows I like to watch and wait until they come out on Netflix. It's not as much fun if other people are watching it. I don't , quite amusingly, have anyone to to talk about how exciting 24 is since it's a freaking decade old, but hey, I never watched it soc it's new to me. Obviously not many people are going to go this route for a variety of sociological reasons.. new stuff - especially music I am thinking of- is the modern campfire around which we gather and socialize and form our cliques and even identities.
OK, so, too expensive and smells like exploitation one reason.
BTW I am not an insider and I have no idea if those shows could be made just by charging advertisers money.. if that model works.
I don't have a smart phone (shocking) because It's a moral thing with me... much the same reason I don't have cable or buy Georgia Pacific lumber or Brawny paper towels. I am not giving my sworn enemy money with which he'll do even more harm to my life.
OK I am just going to play devil's advocate to keep things interesting.
Boradcasters have a business model that permits them to make stuff for you. By by passing ads, you're killing that business model. If you want to create stuff without ads, the way PBS does with their model then that's cool and a cool way to put broadcasters out of business or make them at least respond to your better model .
But that's not what this is, this is. This is more like breaking the contract broadcasters have with you to watch their stupid ads in exchange for stuff.
All i am saying is by watching TV there's an implicit - not saying legal- agreement that at least the ads will be presented on that station, whether you get up to pee or channel surf or whatever during their broadcast.
I dunno, you have a lot of leeway to skip ads as it is but enough people sit there and watch them just because they're there to keep the business model able to make stuff. If you strip out the ads, then the business model is screwed and unless another one is created, like paid product placement (they're already doing that of course) then there will be no more stuff, until someone thinks of something better.
I am making something kewl (just totally kewl!) - software - right now. I find it's easy to be revolutionary in a domain if you don't care about economics. The REALLY hard part , the part I've really struggled with is making it so everyone involved on all sides of an n-part exchange can still eat and beyond that remains motivated to continue to make great stuff. I did at least as much reading on what the idea of "value" is, what markets are and how they actually operate in various domains and even what money is than I ever thought I would because just like seeing what has to happen to get your software to work, you start naturally to think about all these things when you think about asking people for money or making it worth their while to pay and for creators to create.
So TV has a business model that it's refined over generations. If it was a matter of buggy whips, then we'd be seeing people say "I don't want' to watch TV anymore". But that's not the dynamic here. It'snot that buggy whips aren't needed, it's that the economic model that supports their production can be gotten around.
If you like what's on TV- and I do like shows like Damages and Breaking Bad and Downton Abbey and Dexter and MadMen.. it's almost like we're in a golden age of TV or something.... I like those shows and those people gotta eat. We all gotta eat. I am not so motivated to get stuff for free if the price is paying only 10 bucks a month for Netflix or not circumventing some dumb ads for the obvious reasons- I want those shows to carry on.
OTOH I buy used CDs instead of new b/c I think the list on new is crazy and the artist gets screwed in that exchange, so there you go. Just thinking aloud now but I guess everyone has some price at which it's ust oo much, then they look to acquire the thing through some other way.
I am the only person I know who pays one legal way or another for virtually everything I have that is the subject of controversy with respect to mass unauthorized downloading. I suppose I have some screenshots of pictures which may be copyrighted in theory but then no one was selling those in the first place and I can view them online at any time.
I am not saying I am better, I am literally just thinking aloud. I think people take things when they want them and feel they need them but can't afford them. There's no point in getting your panties in a bunch over that, it's human nature and not provably a bad thing since they were never going to pay anyways.
I dunno. It's what I said. Why undermine the business model of the creators when it's really no skin off your nose? It's not evena case of whether you were ever going to buy product X, it's that advertiser X believes rightly or wrongly that the ads are worth paying for and that's how stuff get made.
OK don't go all holy warrior on me, this is an attempt to just turn over these ideas with a bunch of strangers who I just know disagree with me. It's an attempt to be academic as in "collegial" and not "moot"
This is tied to the whole idea that EVERYTHING is some form of property and the more we enforce property rights, the better off we are. The problem with nations, this line of thinking goes, is that they have failed to establish property rights in some area of economic activity, either through excessive state ownership of industry or a lack of judicial integrity such that litigants can't cont on a fair result at trial, or even that the laws will be enforced at all.
It seems obvious that property rights are, in fact, crucial to economic activity and a fair and unbiased judiciary ready and able to enforce those rights is also essential, but it is equally obvious that, just like every other concept it only makes sense within domains whose dynamics it actually describes accurately.
There's also the concept of "the commons" , which is equally as important as private property to the economic health of a nation and the growth of businesses . The problem this entire generation of people who are now retiring or dying (they tend to hang on forever) like Milton Friedman and this judge and Alan Greenspan all came up at a time when a certain set of beliefs was dominant. Beliefs like, "the more ways we can figure out how to attach property rights property to more things, the more economic activity we'll generate, and that relationship is strictly linear."
It's just another case of fanatics with an idee fixe and seeing everywhere problems their magic silver bullet can solve. These guys were not subtle thinkers. There are no gray areas where their theory's power did not obtain, or effects far removed in time space and obviousness from their causes or non-linear relationships between variables. Greenspan may be a doddering fool who oversaw the melting down of our economy to most people today, but he actually lived the life of the Wizard of Oz, making grand pronouncements in inscrutable language which CNBC and the WSJ ate up and spat out as if it came from the mouth of God. Friedman helped overthrow the democratically elected Salador Allende in Chile which resulted in thousands being tortured and "disappeared" . His rationalization for helping in the overthrow of a democratically elected and popular leader of a sovereign nation and installing a brutal dictator in his stead was that the Chile didn't have economic freedom- as Friedman defined it- and without such economic freedom there could be no "real" political freedom.
Seriously.
This is really just another case of doctrinaire (and as such, necessarily anti-rational) ideologically driven personalities attempting to create grand unifying theory of all economics and then forcing it onto the world by the point of a gun or in this guy's case, his warped adjudications.
the government is some type of separate entity from the people it governs is simply not correct
Actually if you read the exchange I am making that point to you so let's see if we can sort this out.
When you're talking about money and taxes, then you're talking about an accounting perspective and from that perspective the government's money is not your and your money is not the governments. You can't say to an IRA agent "I am the government !" by way of explaining why you didn't pay taxes. So this is the sense in which the government and youa re clearly separate entities.
Now when it comes to the actions of the government, the government and the people are in the realtionship of represented and representer. However, they're not representing any one individual, they're representing and acting for the aggregate Amerrican population. Even this representation is not direct. We don't have a direct democracy and further, the oath various office holders take is to an even more abstract thing, the welfare of the nation itself. This isn't some theoretical handwaving, this is built into the Constittution itself and deliberately designed into the way our government works. There's more than a little something of the leaders of the nation being thought fo as more far sighted and temperate than the people. You can read the papers of the Framers where they argue about this kind of thing.
One of the concerns is the tyranny of the majority which is what majoritarianism would yield to.
We ARE the government, but the government is not a puppet of individual citizens. If someone doens't like X, say , a war or a policy, then they can try to change it but that's not the same as saying that the government policy is illegitimate.
Most people who objected to Solyndra also object to government involving itself in R and D and social programs and really anything. They want the government to just do defense and not involve itself with social issues.
Most Americans disagree with that strongly as Ron Paul's barely double digit showing at the Republican primary showed. He could have swept the primaries; Democrats dont' like him less than the other candidates which held leads in that process including Rick Santorum who is a lunatic IMO and Herbert Cain who is a narcissist and Newt Gingrich, who is a sociopath.
So it is simply not a view most Americans hold. I hold that view in utter contempt and if it looks like it's gaining ground to me, i do what I can to smack it down, un paid, unbidden and unthanked because I love my country and I consider Ron Paul to be a real fool and his theories and philosophy to be little more than just-so fairy tales on subjects he knows exactly nothing about, say for instance his stance on Civil Rights or his understanding of the environment and his take on gay marriage.
Paul has also said that at the federal level he opposes âoeefforts to redefine marriage as something other than a union between one man and one woman.â He believes that recognizing or legislating marriages should be left to the states and local communities, and not subjected to "judicial activism."[143] He has said that for these reasons he would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, had he been in Congress in 1996. The act allows a state to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states or countries, although a state will usually recognize marriages performed outside of its own jurisdiction. The act also prohibits the U.S. Government from recognizing same-sex marriages, even if a state recognizes the marriage.
Especially with the environment, he has no point of tangency with reality. Property rights is the WRONG framework to try to graft onto the problems pollution and global warming bring.
He believes that environmental legislation, such as emissions standards, should be handled between the states or regions concerned. "The people of Texas do not need feder
No problem with that.. I as the lone voice of frugality in a startup I was in and I would say that our burn rate made the dot-com flu everyone caught near-fatal for us, along with a bunch of other things of course.
See my later post for what we stood to get out of it.
Sure, Roosevelt put money directly in the hands of workers but in this political climate it's not possible to create a government solar company and employ people. The closest thing to that is funding researchers directly, which we do do.
Slashdot Mirror
And from this, what follows? Answer: nothing.
None of those people were customers to begin with.
So the BSA can go F themselves if they think this statistic is a good reason for new and more draconic laws impinging on end user's rights.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/05/21/1915247/mega-uploads-the-clouds-unspoken-hurdle
Except it's a sort of explainer to that story.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah I think that is the way to go... for the extra paranoid, how do you know you can trust Truecrypt?
http://superuser.com/questions/164162/is-truecrypt-truly-safe
I'm sure (well, actually not really) rumours are just FUD (by whom and for what purpose?) but that's the thing, you're through Alice's Looking Glass now... is it FUD disseminated by people who don't want use to use Truecrypt just because it is iuin fact unbreakable or is it someone who's hit on truly suspect facts about Truecrypt? How do you actually know?
This much is certain- we live in a world in which it's guaranteed that intelligence agencies have a keen, legitimate and abiding interest in being able to decrypt and otherwise ascertain the information in any given file since in point of fact Super Bad Guys determined to do Super Bad Things will avail themselves of the same technology to secure their Evil Plot as you will use to secure your discovery of the missing second step in the underwear gnome riddle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)
So is TrueCrypt (or other) backdoored and is that a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Or is it totally impenetrable and therefore a Big PITA and Threat to us all in some way and who wants you to think it's one way and who wants you to think it's another?
Like I said, you're through the Looking Glass where you can't be sure of anything you "know". This is where us regular folk accidentally bump up against spooks and their ways....
These two things are only related if said tiny town in Cali is subsidizing said connection. Did I miss that this is the case?
A special case of my number two perhaps.
I like your sig.
Second biggest challenge: trusting any of these places have the motivation to keep your data more secure than credit card companies do.
OK let em get this straight. Conservatives (Forbes Magazine- very) are now worried about the deleterious effect on the free market if people know that Tesla was an radically under-appreciated genius who was repeatedly screwed over by the money-grubbing, politicking fame -hound Edison whose efforts to discredit, defame and disenfranchise Tesla set back progress by a good half century?
http://www.electroherbalism.com/bioelectronics/tesla/teslaversusedison.htm
The image of Edison as the icon and living embodiment of genius-through-sweat and progress via patented, monetized innovation, must at all cost be protected now? So the culture wars now extend to every nook and cranny at all times in history present, future and past ?
Let it go. Edison was what he was and yes, he was "banging" Tesla more frequently and harder than a screen door in a tornado. That's the tail of the historical tape. It doesn't mean anything beyond what it was.
If it weren't true, then no one would do it. Look at Mexico. Look at Somolia. Now those are countries where everything has been cleared and businesses can operate with total freedom, and those are the cleanest, safest most technologically advanced countries with the two largest economies in the world.
If businesses want something, in this case software patents, then let them have it . Nothing is worse than non-business people trying to dictate what business should and shouldn't have.
Fraud extortion murder kidnapping nepotism bribery are all good for business.. Why can't people understand that's what good for business is good for society????
If you go to any of these conferences or read op eds and especially blogs you'l see it's lawyers who are attempting to defend software patents, going to conferences and it's lawyers who are employed in the EU and elsewhere by M$ in an attempt to spread the disease.
Lawyers are the prime beneficiaries of these patents, not even inventors who mostly never reach their dreamed of trolling nirvana- a job which entails only cashing checks that come to your mailbox.
Defensive patents are about retaining the ability to sue an aggressor (drop your own nuke) which you lose if you don't patent.
I love the way software patents advocates present dystopian hypotheticals as a form of argument when we already KNOW what the world looks like without software patents.
It's a world of Turing Machines (1936) and von Neumann architecture (1945), machine language and assembly language (1951), compilers (1952) and loops and switch and if / then statements and LISP (1958) and packet switching (1960s).
It's a world with operating systems and databases and word processors and spreadsheets and browsers and web pages.
It's a world with the ARPANET, TCP/IP, the internet and HTTP and FTP and DNS.
In other words a world where the most fundamental, most visionary, most complex, most resource intensive, most ambitious and most beneficial contributions to humankind are conceived, created, disseminated, taken up and used in creating incalculable social, scientific and economic benefit for all.
So just remember this next time you hear someone going on about what a bad place the world will become if we abolish software patents.
And please, give generously each year. Your continued ability to pay your bills depends on it.
http://www.ffii.org/Donations
https://www.eff.org/
Impartial, disinterested, university funded R and D - which is what everything from music synths to Google started out as:
http://facts.stanford.edu/research.html
-is a natural force for good in developed countries and it's never going to be "over" unless that developed country is "over" .
The leveraging for "Yearbook On The Web !!! " -type opportunities to make money off people naive enough to surrender their most intimate details to a group of total strangers whose sole aim is to monetize same, well, that may be over.
If you compare FB with Google, the differences tell the real story. FB could be replaced in functionality by any number of me-too--products because its peculiar success is not borne of any kind of technological breakthrough but only the fact that it, and not some other equally ordinary-technology product, was the victor in a product space with network effects strong enough to create a natural "winner take all" market.
Meanwhile, Bing is still trying to be 1/10th as good as Google is at doing what it does, despite billions of dollars at the M$'s disposal and some of the best minds in the world working for them.
When the story of the internet is told, it will go like this- DARPA, FTP, email, the web, HTML, Mosaic then Google. Those are the big events. Those are the technological breakthroughs that that literally changed the world. FB will be a footnote.
So to the extent that FB's value is an exercise in bubble economics and phantom value, maybe this is the end of SV's love affair with this kind of thing. That proposition is dubitable since people with too much money generally earned it by doing wholly useless things like co-locating their servers closer to NYSE's servers to give them a multi-billion dollar edge when doing flash trading -
http://theweek.com/article/index/204396/wall-streets-secret-advantage-high-speed-trading
and having custom FPGA made for them in order to grind out nanosecond advantages over their competitors in high frequency trading -
http://www.impulseaccelerated.com/app_financial.htm
so it's unlikely these same people are going to have the fine antenna necessary to distinguish innovations which create revenue opportunities by delivering real, ongoing value from those that have "Hindenberg " painted in man-sized letters on the side: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F54rqDh2mWA
Long live the free market and real innovation delivering real value to the lives of real people . Here's to you.
Got my vote but by today's insane standards yo're a regular old liberal.
What ever happened to the conservatives who were conservationists? The hunters and sportsmen? They've been replaced by toxic conservatives like Hannity and Limbaugh. What the fuck happened? Is conservatism like a progressive disease where each generation has to be "more" right wing than the last? In my view, ti's turned into an essentially reactionary "movement" where instead of espousing rational positions, they are outdoing each other to see who can redefine "conservative" further away from messy reality and deeper into "purity" how ever far from rationality it takes them.
Sorry that's number 3 at the bottom... number 3
"Bristlecones falsified" WRONG WRONG WRONG.
This is completely normal science where papers are properly subjected to post publishing criticism, and then that criticism is answered and back and forth like this. There was NO FALSIFICATION and if you want the details they're here
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-ii/
Number 5 at the bottom.
OK I experienced this as an undergrad at UCSD. Our prof (who shall remain nameless) "let it be known" that our undergrad experiments would be graded better if the results contradicted the null hypothesis (no effect). It's very subtle and informal, it's not like they stand in front of the class and say it, but someone gets told and by the time the papers are turned in, everyone knows and has complied.
Research universities are notoriously political and cutthroat; even not complying could send the inadvertent signal that you think you're morally better than your TA, who did the same thing as an undergrad and everyone knows you never want to offend your TA in any way shape form or size; they'll end your career, at least at UCSD.
There's a lot that's wrong with the university and the more competitive the university the truer that becomes. With a surfeit of very over-qualified candidates, careers are decided by who likes whom or more often who doesn't like whom. Everyone know this and the whole scene is despotic with the power to of life and death over careers being handed over to temperamental 23 year olds.
So now you're telling me this system is also corrupt? Oh my!
Well, don't despair, we can clean this sewer right up.
1) anonymous grading where the the grader doesn't know whose paper / test / etc they are grading.
2) Enough experiments randomly selected for rigorous anonymous, independent confirmation so as to make any cheater properly nervous with a three strikes and your out policy (or such like) by a body composed for just this task.
Rolling back of the excessive metricization of performance. They essentially "grade" you as a prof by how many times you're cited and how many grants you pull down for the university. In many cases, the university acts as your pimp, taking their cut or what you get. How do you pull down grants? By being a golden researcher- one who consistently makes new discoveries, and that has come to mean positive results even though a negative result can bear just as much new information as a positive one if the experiment is aimed in the right place.
Tenure and grant money are decided by who gets positive results, even though a negative result can bear just as much new information as a positive one if the experiment is aimed in the right place.
An institution's character can largely come to be dominated by how many sociopaths it let through its doors and into positions of power. The dishonesty of these personalities can have enormous influence over every aspect of everyone's else's life and survival strategy. Then that attitude becomes institutionalized, meaning people who came up through that system and won by playing it reanimate during their own careers. Right now, the university culture, at least where I went, is an open running sewer.
It' s almost not worth fixing since the university as we know it will be dead within 15 years thanks to super-inflationary tuition models, layers and layers of overpaid bureaucrats thrashing around looking for something to get busy with in order to seem indispensable, no bankruptcy stipulations on quarter million dollar student loans and the creation of low cost / no cost alternatives for the vast majority of majors.
It's really too bad since the collective efforts of research university system has essentially saved civilization a few times now and been the only source of truly independent knowledge free from mundane political pressures and as such effectively kept progress technological and civic progress going for a least a century now. Such a thing must continue to exist in some capacity and it must be funded through public measures (or it's not independent.) Either that or society is going to extinguish itself.
That's am interesting construct since it permits the business model to thrive if EVERYONE leaves during commercials, as long as the advertisers still BELIEVE their commercials are effective; maybe advertisers are wrong, maybe their commercials aren't effective because many more people leave during them than the suppose. Maybe advertisers know most people leave, but stay within earshot and commercials are designed as primarily "talkies" with the graphics thrown in gratuitously (and maybe that's why THEY"RE SO LOUD).
Whatever the case, advertisers under the current system have a "show funding belief " which will, presumably evaporate when there is no doubt whatsoever that their commercials are not being aired.
Yeah, you're right. I agree.
OK so what I hear you saying is they're charging an unfair price. My attitude towards new CDs. The value isn't there for me, and you won't let me pay less legally.
I boil this down to a fairness thing. Your price is a ripoff and represents obscene profits for millionaires.
I feel that way about cable and HBO. My solution is to stay a season or two behind the shows I like to watch and wait until they come out on Netflix. It's not as much fun if other people are watching it. I don't , quite amusingly, have anyone to to talk about how exciting 24 is since it's a freaking decade old, but hey, I never watched it soc it's new to me. Obviously not many people are going to go this route for a variety of sociological reasons.. new stuff - especially music I am thinking of- is the modern campfire around which we gather and socialize and form our cliques and even identities.
OK, so, too expensive and smells like exploitation one reason.
BTW I am not an insider and I have no idea if those shows could be made just by charging advertisers money.. if that model works.
I don't have a smart phone (shocking) because It's a moral thing with me... much the same reason I don't have cable or buy Georgia Pacific lumber or Brawny paper towels. I am not giving my sworn enemy money with which he'll do even more harm to my life.
OK I am just going to play devil's advocate to keep things interesting.
Boradcasters have a business model that permits them to make stuff for you. By by passing ads, you're killing that business model. If you want to create stuff without ads, the way PBS does with their model then that's cool and a cool way to put broadcasters out of business or make them at least respond to your better model .
But that's not what this is, this is. This is more like breaking the contract broadcasters have with you to watch their stupid ads in exchange for stuff.
All i am saying is by watching TV there's an implicit - not saying legal- agreement that at least the ads will be presented on that station, whether you get up to pee or channel surf or whatever during their broadcast.
I dunno, you have a lot of leeway to skip ads as it is but enough people sit there and watch them just because they're there to keep the business model able to make stuff. If you strip out the ads, then the business model is screwed and unless another one is created, like paid product placement (they're already doing that of course) then there will be no more stuff, until someone thinks of something better.
I am making something kewl (just totally kewl!) - software - right now. I find it's easy to be revolutionary in a domain if you don't care about economics. The REALLY hard part , the part I've really struggled with is making it so everyone involved on all sides of an n-part exchange can still eat and beyond that remains motivated to continue to make great stuff. I did at least as much reading on what the idea of "value" is, what markets are and how they actually operate in various domains and even what money is than I ever thought I would because just like seeing what has to happen to get your software to work, you start naturally to think about all these things when you think about asking people for money or making it worth their while to pay and for creators to create.
So TV has a business model that it's refined over generations. If it was a matter of buggy whips, then we'd be seeing people say "I don't want' to watch TV anymore". But that's not the dynamic here. It'snot that buggy whips aren't needed, it's that the economic model that supports their production can be gotten around.
If you like what's on TV- and I do like shows like Damages and Breaking Bad and Downton Abbey and Dexter and MadMen .. it's almost like we're in a golden age of TV or something.... I like those shows and those people gotta eat. We all gotta eat. I am not so motivated to get stuff for free if the price is paying only 10 bucks a month for Netflix or not circumventing some dumb ads for the obvious reasons- I want those shows to carry on.
OTOH I buy used CDs instead of new b/c I think the list on new is crazy and the artist gets screwed in that exchange, so there you go. Just thinking aloud now but I guess everyone has some price at which it's ust oo much, then they look to acquire the thing through some other way.
I am the only person I know who pays one legal way or another for virtually everything I have that is the subject of controversy with respect to mass unauthorized downloading. I suppose I have some screenshots of pictures which may be copyrighted in theory but then no one was selling those in the first place and I can view them online at any time.
I am not saying I am better, I am literally just thinking aloud. I think people take things when they want them and feel they need them but can't afford them. There's no point in getting your panties in a bunch over that, it's human nature and not provably a bad thing since they were never going to pay anyways.
I dunno. It's what I said. Why undermine the business model of the creators when it's really no skin off your nose? It's not evena case of whether you were ever going to buy product X, it's that advertiser X believes rightly or wrongly that the ads are worth paying for and that's how stuff get made.
OK don't go all holy warrior on me, this is an attempt to just turn over these ideas with a bunch of strangers who I just know disagree with me. It's an attempt to be academic as in "collegial" and not "moot"
This is tied to the whole idea that EVERYTHING is some form of property and the more we enforce property rights, the better off we are. The problem with nations, this line of thinking goes, is that they have failed to establish property rights in some area of economic activity, either through excessive state ownership of industry or a lack of judicial integrity such that litigants can't cont on a fair result at trial, or even that the laws will be enforced at all.
It seems obvious that property rights are, in fact, crucial to economic activity and a fair and unbiased judiciary ready and able to enforce those rights is also essential, but it is equally obvious that, just like every other concept it only makes sense within domains whose dynamics it actually describes accurately.
There's also the concept of "the commons" , which is equally as important as private property to the economic health of a nation and the growth of businesses . The problem this entire generation of people who are now retiring or dying (they tend to hang on forever) like Milton Friedman and this judge and Alan Greenspan all came up at a time when a certain set of beliefs was dominant. Beliefs like, "the more ways we can figure out how to attach property rights property to more things, the more economic activity we'll generate, and that relationship is strictly linear."
It's just another case of fanatics with an idee fixe and seeing everywhere problems their magic silver bullet can solve. These guys were not subtle thinkers. There are no gray areas where their theory's power did not obtain, or effects far removed in time space and obviousness from their causes or non-linear relationships between variables. Greenspan may be a doddering fool who oversaw the melting down of our economy to most people today, but he actually lived the life of the Wizard of Oz, making grand pronouncements in inscrutable language which CNBC and the WSJ ate up and spat out as if it came from the mouth of God. Friedman helped overthrow the democratically elected Salador Allende in Chile which resulted in thousands being tortured and "disappeared" . His rationalization for helping in the overthrow of a democratically elected and popular leader of a sovereign nation and installing a brutal dictator in his stead was that the Chile didn't have economic freedom- as Friedman defined it- and without such economic freedom there could be no "real" political freedom.
Seriously.
This is really just another case of doctrinaire (and as such, necessarily anti-rational) ideologically driven personalities attempting to create grand unifying theory of all economics and then forcing it onto the world by the point of a gun or in this guy's case, his warped adjudications.
the government is some type of separate entity from the people it governs is simply not correct
Actually if you read the exchange I am making that point to you so let's see if we can sort this out.
When you're talking about money and taxes, then you're talking about an accounting perspective and from that perspective the government's money is not your and your money is not the governments. You can't say to an IRA agent "I am the government !" by way of explaining why you didn't pay taxes. So this is the sense in which the government and youa re clearly separate entities.
Now when it comes to the actions of the government, the government and the people are in the realtionship of represented and representer. However, they're not representing any one individual, they're representing and acting for the aggregate Amerrican population. Even this representation is not direct. We don't have a direct democracy and further, the oath various office holders take is to an even more abstract thing, the welfare of the nation itself. This isn't some theoretical handwaving, this is built into the Constittution itself and deliberately designed into the way our government works. There's more than a little something of the leaders of the nation being thought fo as more far sighted and temperate than the people. You can read the papers of the Framers where they argue about this kind of thing.
One of the concerns is the tyranny of the majority which is what majoritarianism would yield to.
We ARE the government, but the government is not a puppet of individual citizens. If someone doens't like X, say , a war or a policy, then they can try to change it but that's not the same as saying that the government policy is illegitimate.
Most people who objected to Solyndra also object to government involving itself in R and D and social programs and really anything. They want the government to just do defense and not involve itself with social issues.
Most Americans disagree with that strongly as Ron Paul's barely double digit showing at the Republican primary showed. He could have swept the primaries; Democrats dont' like him less than the other candidates which held leads in that process including Rick Santorum who is a lunatic IMO and Herbert Cain who is a narcissist and Newt Gingrich, who is a sociopath.
So it is simply not a view most Americans hold. I hold that view in utter contempt and if it looks like it's gaining ground to me, i do what I can to smack it down, un paid, unbidden and unthanked because I love my country and I consider Ron Paul to be a real fool and his theories and philosophy to be little more than just-so fairy tales on subjects he knows exactly nothing about, say for instance his stance on Civil Rights or his understanding of the environment and his take on gay marriage.
Paul has also said that at the federal level he opposes âoeefforts to redefine marriage as something other than a union between one man and one woman.â He believes that recognizing or legislating marriages should be left to the states and local communities, and not subjected to "judicial activism."[143] He has said that for these reasons he would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, had he been in Congress in 1996. The act allows a state to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states or countries, although a state will usually recognize marriages performed outside of its own jurisdiction. The act also prohibits the U.S. Government from recognizing same-sex marriages, even if a state recognizes the marriage.
Especially with the environment, he has no point of tangency with reality. Property rights is the WRONG framework to try to graft onto the problems pollution and global warming bring.
He believes that environmental legislation, such as emissions standards, should be handled between the states or regions concerned. "The people of Texas do not need feder
No problem with that .. I as the lone voice of frugality in a startup I was in and I would say that our burn rate made the dot-com flu everyone caught near-fatal for us, along with a bunch of other things of course.
Sure, Roosevelt put money directly in the hands of workers but in this political climate it's not possible to create a government solar company and employ people. The closest thing to that is funding researchers directly, which we do do.