Despite decades of complaints about ticket scalping, artists and/or venue don't change their pricing policies.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if both were making money on the back end -- and possibly avoiding taxes or other financial scrutiny -- by scalping tickets. Concert tickets represent an asset easily exchanged for cash and one for which artists or venues can give away, write off as expense, yet sell for untraceable cash.
Fixing collusion by venues and artists is probably really hard, since they can "sell" tickets at face value (and pay whatever taxes they have to pay) to shell entities and then those entities can resell them at higher prices and funnel the money back. I don't know how you fix this other than public audits of ticket sales -- "Hey, Beyonce/her management sold 3000 prime tickets to one person" so that their double-dipping can just be named and shamed.
But none of this changes the market economics that the price people are willing to pay exceeds what the face value of the ticket.
Tickets get scalped because the price doesn't meet demand? What fantasyland do you live in?
Tickets get scalped because someone got there first, bought all the tickets, and resells them.
Tickets get scalped because demand exceeds supply and the demand price (what people are willing to pay to see the event) exceeds the face price.
When was the last time you went to a concert for which there were expensive scalped tickets available but where the venue was half-empty? Probably never, because most scalped tickets get sold to people willing to pay the price to see the event. They may think they had to pay too much, but obviously they made a decision that they were willing to pay the price to see the event.
The marketplace (the universe of ticket buyers and sellers) have decided that the price to see an in-demand concert is higher (in many cases, much higher) than the price printed on the ticket.
Tickets get scalped because the price doesn't reflect demand. Instead of impossible to enforce regulations, why don't venues/artists instead change their pricing model?
Something like a reverse auction -- start the ticket process extremely high, like $10,000 per ticket and keep cutting the ticket price by small amounts based on sales volume. If volume remains fairly constant, then the price stays constant. The ticket price will then reflect what people are truly willing to pay, and ticket brokers won't be able to arbitrage the low face price versus the actual demand price.
Brokers can snap up all the $10,000 tickets they want on a day 1 of sales, but it will be both a huge capital outlay and they will not be able to sell many tickets for those prices plus their own profit premium.
You will still run the risk that as volume flags and the price falls, the tickets will hit a threshold where brokers believe they can still bulk purchase tickets, but I'd guess that the risk of being stuck with tickets they can't sell at a high price would be a negative incentive.
The bad thing would be -- well, tickets will be more expensive if you want to go, because you will be paying a higher price. But right now, the price is artificially low and acquiring tickets from the box office is more akin to a lottery than a marketplace.
I do a lot of boating on a large inland lake, and from what I've seen the Sea Ray Sundancers of ~30 ft (Sundancer 280s to 320s) seldom run at anywhere near full throttle. I'd guess something like 10-12 mph is pretty common, with about 30-something MPH being wide open on plane.
But on those boats, 30-something is really wide open engine-wise -- usually a pair of V8s (350 or better) running within 1000 rpm of the red line. As you say, the engines on these boats are ancient by auto standards -- Mercury still(?) buys GM iron blocks from a Mexico-based casting operation. But the brand new ones are slightly better, but it's still a shit-ton of power at full throttle -- Sea Ray claim 188 kW per engine for a 4.5L Bravo III. You might get about 15 minutes at full throttle out of a P90 battery. I'd guess if you were willing to tolerate about 15 mph as maximum speed, you might get a couple of hours cruise time.
What I think would be interesting would be a hybrid drive -- a single 100kw generator for charging and drive, coupled with a large battery pack and Chevy Volt-style automatic engine control. On inland waterways and short uses, you could probably stay on battery. It probably wouldn't be any savings over twin 4.5L engines, though. Those weight in around 800 pounds, and the P85 battery is 1200, so a battery + engine would end up weighing more, even if your generator engine was lighter than a 4.5L gas engine.
You'd also have to re-think the hull, the planing and semi-planing hulls would be kind of inefficient for an electric drive meant to operate at low speeds. And at that point, you're kind of back to a trawler-style boat, many of which do well with small single diesels and a top end of 8 knots.
I doubt the battery concept would work with open bow/sport/wakesurfing boats. Those still have big V8s to propel fat wakes or go fast,
I'm guessing it wouldn't go fast or far, but it might actually be useful enough for inland lake recreational purposes. Especially on a 30' cruiser which probably already has a pair of big block gasoline engines and a 5kw generator. The batteries vs. the engines would be a wash, and the gen set could provide some charging or limp-back drive power.
IMHO, the future doesn't look good. Less because security is hard and more because technology business has become so focused on data collection that it almost supersedes the product, even when the product is physical (and in Google's case it is the product).
With corporate business focus on data collection, you have a built-in incentive for the kinds of backdoors, lack of user control and monitoring that helps enable security problems, not prevent them. As long as the technology business is in a data-is-the-product paradigm, the software systems will have increased vulnerability.
I think it will take a substantial paradigm shift, probably brought on by some kind of catastrophe to change this, probably forced via legislation as substantial as something like the Pure Food and Drugs act.
It's almost like there's this human capacity to worry that can't be turned off.
I remember in college becoming worried about a class -- an upcoming test, a paper due, something like that -- and thinking, oh, if I could just get that taken care of, I'd have nothing to worry about.
As soon as I did, something else to worry about cropped up.
I guess my concern is that the variability of CPE starts to sound like regular commercial networks where provider specific technologies operate as barriers to switching providers and less as a source of network innovation, as well as raising the cost of the CPE by reducing economies of scale.
You might also argue that the majority of users/uses will be the same anyway, so variability in CPE is less meaningful. The number of potential users with novel equipment and use cases is small.
I do think that it would make sense to build-in CWDM to a muni system so it would support niche applications, but push the cost of using that capability off to explicit users of it so as to not undermine economies of scale for the majority of users.
I think you keep muni broadband technology-invested buy setting user fees at a level that meets operational costs and investment and only pay someone a management fee to perform maintenance. As long as the economics are setup right, the network should have the money to sanely follow performance improvements.
Of course to users this sounds superficially like a great idea. Dump the dozen bits of crap installed on a new PC and put it back to a clean OS install.
In reality, MS wants to eliminate the data harvesting competition. OEMs add crapware because they get paid to add it. Crapware installers pay for this because they want you to buy their crapware, but even if you don't it's worth the cost to gather data on you and your computer, sometimes for years when naive users don't ever uninstall it.
Microsoft's move is into the data harvesting business -- win 10 telemetry, azure, office365, and now linked in. Third party crapware doesn't just degrade the product (its always done that, and they never cared) but now it produces independent data sets that compete with Microsoft's data sets.
The "solution" they propose is kind of like a symbiotic parasite, guarantee our exclusive data harvesting and will make your PC have fewer problems.
I cannot believe I had to scroll down so far to see the first reasonable fucking statement.
Instead I had to view pages and pages of idiot arguments between libertarian nutjobs arguing about the immoral presumption of taxes and the social welfare advocates taking them up on the argument.
Jesus fucking christ on a stick. If these people are so wound up on their anti-tax stance, how in the hell do they get to the point where they see government involvement in substance consumption as something worth arguing for?
If you're going to argue the legitimacy of drug testing welfare recipients, you're well beyond the point at which you can cherry pick the idea that your tax deductions are somehow immune from government social involvement.
Drug testing welfare recipients is complete fucking waste of time, along with the entirety of our war on drugs. I'd rather the unemployable classes be dope addled anyway, they're less likely to be able to harness their ambition towards criminal intent. Those that aren't dope addled I'd rather not see harnessed with a burdensome and puritanical requirement.
It's hard to gauge with Hillary. She backs the authority structure and big money, so pharma, alcohol and law enforcement will likely pressure her into at least not furthering the legalization trend. Plus, she's from the I-inhaled-in-college-only generation and possibly even opposes it personally.
That being said, she'll face popular opinion -- and pressure from the minorities she's pandered to in the election to quit jailing them over pot use. Plus it's hard to see eliminating it in the states where it's already legal -- the money is too good, and the rightly paranoid have probably vacuum sealed ten lifetimes worth in case the whole deal goes down.
Trump could go either way, but something tells me the deal maker and businessman would see the value in increased tax revenue and lower policing costs in addition to the entrepreneurial nature of legalization.
Mainly because it reflects the same model that cities have been in forever for the physical road network. They build the roads and everyone has equal access to them. The services provided over the road network depend on who you want to buy them from.
An open-access fiber network would be great because there's all kinds of creative uses for it, most of which stall as independent business ideas because they start or end with "Step N. Build municipal fiber network."
Such a network could get used for lots of things besides just generic internet access, including video delivery, private WANs, and so on. Most of these things are things that could be done over an IP network, but many of them are simpler to do over a network that at least looks to the ends like a dumb network.
And there's a dozen different ways to define what an ISP is or does, too, so even in that specific realm there's lots of ways to implement that same business -- and the cost would be small at small scale since there wouldn't be a huge infrastructure to maintain.
IP management? Technical support? Secondary services, like email, or storage/backup, web hosting, voice? There's an endless list of ancillary businesses ISPs can be in besides IP dialtone.
Yes, you could buy that stuff elsewhere, but people have demonstrated a tendency to like bundles and some services (like backup or storage) may just work better when they are basically on the same wire.
The IP address part is increasingly important with static IPs becoming scarcer -- a budget ISP could be the dynamic non-routable ISP with no email or services, while a premium one may specialize in IPv6 or static IPs.
At a certain point, it feels like the data is being obsessively collected to be used by marketing people with absolutely no math or statistics backgrounds to merely bolster whatever bullshit arguments, gut instincts or dart-throwing decisions they make.
Scientists schooled in the scientific method with math/stats backgrounds making a conscious effort to not fall into correlation/causation or selective bias errors often fail at producing good data.
A room full of marketing people, jockeying for corporate positions and status? That's a recipe for data errors.
It also makes you wonder how often the people responsible for the data alter it, simply to see what happens if they tweak the data so that suddenly it seems entirely sensible to sell polka-dot hats to 20-somethings or hoverboards to old people.
Destabilize the grid enough and the demand for self-sufficiency grows, most importantly increasing the demand for home energy storage systems, both dropping their prices and and improving them. This would probably also drive an improvement in home energy efficiency and related technologies, like smart panel boards that can do intelligent load prioritization and shedding.
If the facts and narrative of the files are legitimate, then they are bound to be bad for Trump. It may not matter if they're used strategically for so-called maximum impact -- releasing them at once may be like bomb, wounding Trump badly enough he can't regain momentum. And unlike carefully timed releases, the whole "stolen files" publicity may give the information the kind of self-perpetuating dynamic that keeps it in the public's eye longer than it would have on Meet the Press.
On the other hand, what if it's a plant? Just slander we already knew, served up on a different plate, by shadowy forces of "hackers" or "Russians" or some other ill-defined entity wanting to "ruin it for Hillary", with the DNC squealing all the way to November in righteous indignation? That kind of thing is just the sort of political theater you might expect and it can't help Trump, either, if he seems to be using it to his advantage.
I think generally speaking it's helpful to Trump if the leak is legitimate and represents their actual strategy. But none of it means they can't tweak their strategy, and if the information is damaging, well, it's still damaging.
Overall, I'd say very slight Trump advantage but with low-margin risks of serious blowback.
I can see them being actively enforced for people working directly on technologies with a specific competitive value, but it seems like they're used so often for people whose main risk from leaving for the competition isn't threatening privileged information but the hassle to management of losing an employee and having to hire another one, often at a higher wage.
Does anyone really spend any money on these rank and file "blanket NDA" employees?
That's a very weak justification for the spending of billions in public funds.
And what exactly do you think it cost to send a half-dozen legions off to expand Rome's borders and who do you think actually benefited from it? Rome was a spoils system, where the aristocrat who was at the top got the state to fund their army and then kept the spoils for themselves. It was the very definition of using state funds for personal enrichment. It makes Lockheed Martin look like a charity.
We don't need to go to Mars for that. We can simply research and develop those technologies right here on Earth.
Except we won't, because there will be no profit-driven motive to develop many of them. The space program largely been driven to solve problems related to space travel but whose solutions turn out to have significant applications on Earth.
Any business model that relies on court enforcement of restrictive labor contracts is weak. If you can't provide an incentive good enough to keep your employees at your firm and need to coerce them, you're doing it wrong.
I think you overstate the practical value of past expansions and completely understate the moral weight of such expansions in light of the fact that the places all but the most primitive stone age migrations entered were already occupied by someone else.
Most of Rome's territorial expansions were purely conquest for the benefit of its ruling class -- the subjugation of foreign peoples, expropriating their wealth and enslaving their populations.
The Vikings were even worse in this regard. While the Romans were often inclined to merely extract tribute and extend political dominance, the Vikings for the most part were motivated solely for plunder and often just killed everyone they found and took what treasure they could carry, with little practical benefit for their home countries and without any long-term settlement. To the extent that the Vikings expanded their territory to "new" lands, it mostly Greenland and Iceland, and the Greenland expansion ultimately failed. In the British Isles, by the time they got around to doing anything like "settling" they had largely been assimilated into the existing Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultures they invaded.
Travel to Mars is less about its immediate practical value and much more about its secondary value in learning what it takes to get there and explore. The secondary value of the technologies and know-how of making this work will produce profound benefits for things like sustainable energy and medicine here on Earth, and without any of the moral implications of military conquest.
You're assuming there *is* a warm and cozy inside filled with hot cocoa or even the fuel to make it hot. One of the challenges of Iceland and moreso Greenland was a lack of trees for building materials and fuel.
Falling into freezing water can kill you in two minutes, and even if it doesn't immediately kill you, you might drown because you can't move your muscles adequately to swim.
Obviously the lack of atmosphere on Mars is a serious problem, but because it's severe doesn't make the cold and barren new landscape faced by explorers in the 9th century not dangerous, especially when they only had what they brought with them in small boats over hundreds of miles of open ocean. "Oops, this sucks, let's go back now" wasn't really an option for them, either.
Dedupe is more valuable than compression because you can usually find duplication even among unrelated compressed data. I have dedupe enabled on a volume with DVD ISOs and see ~20% compression.
We had a laugh at work believing that the dedupe was due to plot overlap in the movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite decades of complaints about ticket scalping, artists and/or venue don't change their pricing policies.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if both were making money on the back end -- and possibly avoiding taxes or other financial scrutiny -- by scalping tickets. Concert tickets represent an asset easily exchanged for cash and one for which artists or venues can give away, write off as expense, yet sell for untraceable cash.
Fixing collusion by venues and artists is probably really hard, since they can "sell" tickets at face value (and pay whatever taxes they have to pay) to shell entities and then those entities can resell them at higher prices and funnel the money back. I don't know how you fix this other than public audits of ticket sales -- "Hey, Beyonce/her management sold 3000 prime tickets to one person" so that their double-dipping can just be named and shamed.
But none of this changes the market economics that the price people are willing to pay exceeds what the face value of the ticket.
Tickets get scalped because the price doesn't meet demand? What fantasyland do you live in?
Tickets get scalped because someone got there first, bought all the tickets, and resells them.
Tickets get scalped because demand exceeds supply and the demand price (what people are willing to pay to see the event) exceeds the face price.
When was the last time you went to a concert for which there were expensive scalped tickets available but where the venue was half-empty? Probably never, because most scalped tickets get sold to people willing to pay the price to see the event. They may think they had to pay too much, but obviously they made a decision that they were willing to pay the price to see the event.
The marketplace (the universe of ticket buyers and sellers) have decided that the price to see an in-demand concert is higher (in many cases, much higher) than the price printed on the ticket.
Tickets get scalped because the price doesn't reflect demand. Instead of impossible to enforce regulations, why don't venues/artists instead change their pricing model?
Something like a reverse auction -- start the ticket process extremely high, like $10,000 per ticket and keep cutting the ticket price by small amounts based on sales volume. If volume remains fairly constant, then the price stays constant. The ticket price will then reflect what people are truly willing to pay, and ticket brokers won't be able to arbitrage the low face price versus the actual demand price.
Brokers can snap up all the $10,000 tickets they want on a day 1 of sales, but it will be both a huge capital outlay and they will not be able to sell many tickets for those prices plus their own profit premium.
You will still run the risk that as volume flags and the price falls, the tickets will hit a threshold where brokers believe they can still bulk purchase tickets, but I'd guess that the risk of being stuck with tickets they can't sell at a high price would be a negative incentive.
The bad thing would be -- well, tickets will be more expensive if you want to go, because you will be paying a higher price. But right now, the price is artificially low and acquiring tickets from the box office is more akin to a lottery than a marketplace.
I do a lot of boating on a large inland lake, and from what I've seen the Sea Ray Sundancers of ~30 ft (Sundancer 280s to 320s) seldom run at anywhere near full throttle. I'd guess something like 10-12 mph is pretty common, with about 30-something MPH being wide open on plane.
But on those boats, 30-something is really wide open engine-wise -- usually a pair of V8s (350 or better) running within 1000 rpm of the red line. As you say, the engines on these boats are ancient by auto standards -- Mercury still(?) buys GM iron blocks from a Mexico-based casting operation. But the brand new ones are slightly better, but it's still a shit-ton of power at full throttle -- Sea Ray claim 188 kW per engine for a 4.5L Bravo III. You might get about 15 minutes at full throttle out of a P90 battery. I'd guess if you were willing to tolerate about 15 mph as maximum speed, you might get a couple of hours cruise time.
What I think would be interesting would be a hybrid drive -- a single 100kw generator for charging and drive, coupled with a large battery pack and Chevy Volt-style automatic engine control. On inland waterways and short uses, you could probably stay on battery. It probably wouldn't be any savings over twin 4.5L engines, though. Those weight in around 800 pounds, and the P85 battery is 1200, so a battery + engine would end up weighing more, even if your generator engine was lighter than a 4.5L gas engine.
You'd also have to re-think the hull, the planing and semi-planing hulls would be kind of inefficient for an electric drive meant to operate at low speeds. And at that point, you're kind of back to a trawler-style boat, many of which do well with small single diesels and a top end of 8 knots.
I doubt the battery concept would work with open bow/sport/wakesurfing boats. Those still have big V8s to propel fat wakes or go fast,
I'm guessing it wouldn't go fast or far, but it might actually be useful enough for inland lake recreational purposes. Especially on a 30' cruiser which probably already has a pair of big block gasoline engines and a 5kw generator. The batteries vs. the engines would be a wash, and the gen set could provide some charging or limp-back drive power.
It's the Windows 8 start menu of gear shifters.
IMHO, the future doesn't look good. Less because security is hard and more because technology business has become so focused on data collection that it almost supersedes the product, even when the product is physical (and in Google's case it is the product).
With corporate business focus on data collection, you have a built-in incentive for the kinds of backdoors, lack of user control and monitoring that helps enable security problems, not prevent them. As long as the technology business is in a data-is-the-product paradigm, the software systems will have increased vulnerability.
I think it will take a substantial paradigm shift, probably brought on by some kind of catastrophe to change this, probably forced via legislation as substantial as something like the Pure Food and Drugs act.
It's almost like there's this human capacity to worry that can't be turned off.
I remember in college becoming worried about a class -- an upcoming test, a paper due, something like that -- and thinking, oh, if I could just get that taken care of, I'd have nothing to worry about.
As soon as I did, something else to worry about cropped up.
I guess my concern is that the variability of CPE starts to sound like regular commercial networks where provider specific technologies operate as barriers to switching providers and less as a source of network innovation, as well as raising the cost of the CPE by reducing economies of scale.
You might also argue that the majority of users/uses will be the same anyway, so variability in CPE is less meaningful. The number of potential users with novel equipment and use cases is small.
I do think that it would make sense to build-in CWDM to a muni system so it would support niche applications, but push the cost of using that capability off to explicit users of it so as to not undermine economies of scale for the majority of users.
I think you keep muni broadband technology-invested buy setting user fees at a level that meets operational costs and investment and only pay someone a management fee to perform maintenance. As long as the economics are setup right, the network should have the money to sanely follow performance improvements.
Of course to users this sounds superficially like a great idea. Dump the dozen bits of crap installed on a new PC and put it back to a clean OS install.
In reality, MS wants to eliminate the data harvesting competition. OEMs add crapware because they get paid to add it. Crapware installers pay for this because they want you to buy their crapware, but even if you don't it's worth the cost to gather data on you and your computer, sometimes for years when naive users don't ever uninstall it.
Microsoft's move is into the data harvesting business -- win 10 telemetry, azure, office365, and now linked in. Third party crapware doesn't just degrade the product (its always done that, and they never cared) but now it produces independent data sets that compete with Microsoft's data sets.
The "solution" they propose is kind of like a symbiotic parasite, guarantee our exclusive data harvesting and will make your PC have fewer problems.
I cannot believe I had to scroll down so far to see the first reasonable fucking statement.
Instead I had to view pages and pages of idiot arguments between libertarian nutjobs arguing about the immoral presumption of taxes and the social welfare advocates taking them up on the argument.
Jesus fucking christ on a stick. If these people are so wound up on their anti-tax stance, how in the hell do they get to the point where they see government involvement in substance consumption as something worth arguing for?
If you're going to argue the legitimacy of drug testing welfare recipients, you're well beyond the point at which you can cherry pick the idea that your tax deductions are somehow immune from government social involvement.
Drug testing welfare recipients is complete fucking waste of time, along with the entirety of our war on drugs. I'd rather the unemployable classes be dope addled anyway, they're less likely to be able to harness their ambition towards criminal intent. Those that aren't dope addled I'd rather not see harnessed with a burdensome and puritanical requirement.
What's the value of varying CPE?
I would think you would benefit from some standardization on CPE.
It's hard to gauge with Hillary. She backs the authority structure and big money, so pharma, alcohol and law enforcement will likely pressure her into at least not furthering the legalization trend. Plus, she's from the I-inhaled-in-college-only generation and possibly even opposes it personally.
That being said, she'll face popular opinion -- and pressure from the minorities she's pandered to in the election to quit jailing them over pot use. Plus it's hard to see eliminating it in the states where it's already legal -- the money is too good, and the rightly paranoid have probably vacuum sealed ten lifetimes worth in case the whole deal goes down.
Trump could go either way, but something tells me the deal maker and businessman would see the value in increased tax revenue and lower policing costs in addition to the entrepreneurial nature of legalization.
Mainly because it reflects the same model that cities have been in forever for the physical road network. They build the roads and everyone has equal access to them. The services provided over the road network depend on who you want to buy them from.
An open-access fiber network would be great because there's all kinds of creative uses for it, most of which stall as independent business ideas because they start or end with "Step N. Build municipal fiber network."
Such a network could get used for lots of things besides just generic internet access, including video delivery, private WANs, and so on. Most of these things are things that could be done over an IP network, but many of them are simpler to do over a network that at least looks to the ends like a dumb network.
And there's a dozen different ways to define what an ISP is or does, too, so even in that specific realm there's lots of ways to implement that same business -- and the cost would be small at small scale since there wouldn't be a huge infrastructure to maintain.
IP management? Technical support? Secondary services, like email, or storage/backup, web hosting, voice? There's an endless list of ancillary businesses ISPs can be in besides IP dialtone.
Yes, you could buy that stuff elsewhere, but people have demonstrated a tendency to like bundles and some services (like backup or storage) may just work better when they are basically on the same wire.
The IP address part is increasingly important with static IPs becoming scarcer -- a budget ISP could be the dynamic non-routable ISP with no email or services, while a premium one may specialize in IPv6 or static IPs.
At a certain point, it feels like the data is being obsessively collected to be used by marketing people with absolutely no math or statistics backgrounds to merely bolster whatever bullshit arguments, gut instincts or dart-throwing decisions they make.
Scientists schooled in the scientific method with math/stats backgrounds making a conscious effort to not fall into correlation/causation or selective bias errors often fail at producing good data.
A room full of marketing people, jockeying for corporate positions and status? That's a recipe for data errors.
It also makes you wonder how often the people responsible for the data alter it, simply to see what happens if they tweak the data so that suddenly it seems entirely sensible to sell polka-dot hats to 20-somethings or hoverboards to old people.
Maybe disrupting the grid is a good idea.
Destabilize the grid enough and the demand for self-sufficiency grows, most importantly increasing the demand for home energy storage systems, both dropping their prices and and improving them. This would probably also drive an improvement in home energy efficiency and related technologies, like smart panel boards that can do intelligent load prioritization and shedding.
Or is it?
If the facts and narrative of the files are legitimate, then they are bound to be bad for Trump. It may not matter if they're used strategically for so-called maximum impact -- releasing them at once may be like bomb, wounding Trump badly enough he can't regain momentum. And unlike carefully timed releases, the whole "stolen files" publicity may give the information the kind of self-perpetuating dynamic that keeps it in the public's eye longer than it would have on Meet the Press.
On the other hand, what if it's a plant? Just slander we already knew, served up on a different plate, by shadowy forces of "hackers" or "Russians" or some other ill-defined entity wanting to "ruin it for Hillary", with the DNC squealing all the way to November in righteous indignation? That kind of thing is just the sort of political theater you might expect and it can't help Trump, either, if he seems to be using it to his advantage.
I think generally speaking it's helpful to Trump if the leak is legitimate and represents their actual strategy. But none of it means they can't tweak their strategy, and if the information is damaging, well, it's still damaging.
Overall, I'd say very slight Trump advantage but with low-margin risks of serious blowback.
I can see them being actively enforced for people working directly on technologies with a specific competitive value, but it seems like they're used so often for people whose main risk from leaving for the competition isn't threatening privileged information but the hassle to management of losing an employee and having to hire another one, often at a higher wage.
Does anyone really spend any money on these rank and file "blanket NDA" employees?
That's a very weak justification for the spending of billions in public funds.
And what exactly do you think it cost to send a half-dozen legions off to expand Rome's borders and who do you think actually benefited from it? Rome was a spoils system, where the aristocrat who was at the top got the state to fund their army and then kept the spoils for themselves. It was the very definition of using state funds for personal enrichment. It makes Lockheed Martin look like a charity.
We don't need to go to Mars for that. We can simply research and develop those technologies right here on Earth.
Except we won't, because there will be no profit-driven motive to develop many of them. The space program largely been driven to solve problems related to space travel but whose solutions turn out to have significant applications on Earth.
My response is tough shit for them.
Any business model that relies on court enforcement of restrictive labor contracts is weak. If you can't provide an incentive good enough to keep your employees at your firm and need to coerce them, you're doing it wrong.
Has anyone else read the Expanse series and thought of the protomolecule when they read this?
I think you overstate the practical value of past expansions and completely understate the moral weight of such expansions in light of the fact that the places all but the most primitive stone age migrations entered were already occupied by someone else.
Most of Rome's territorial expansions were purely conquest for the benefit of its ruling class -- the subjugation of foreign peoples, expropriating their wealth and enslaving their populations.
The Vikings were even worse in this regard. While the Romans were often inclined to merely extract tribute and extend political dominance, the Vikings for the most part were motivated solely for plunder and often just killed everyone they found and took what treasure they could carry, with little practical benefit for their home countries and without any long-term settlement. To the extent that the Vikings expanded their territory to "new" lands, it mostly Greenland and Iceland, and the Greenland expansion ultimately failed. In the British Isles, by the time they got around to doing anything like "settling" they had largely been assimilated into the existing Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultures they invaded.
Travel to Mars is less about its immediate practical value and much more about its secondary value in learning what it takes to get there and explore. The secondary value of the technologies and know-how of making this work will produce profound benefits for things like sustainable energy and medicine here on Earth, and without any of the moral implications of military conquest.
You're assuming there *is* a warm and cozy inside filled with hot cocoa or even the fuel to make it hot. One of the challenges of Iceland and moreso Greenland was a lack of trees for building materials and fuel.
Falling into freezing water can kill you in two minutes, and even if it doesn't immediately kill you, you might drown because you can't move your muscles adequately to swim.
Obviously the lack of atmosphere on Mars is a serious problem, but because it's severe doesn't make the cold and barren new landscape faced by explorers in the 9th century not dangerous, especially when they only had what they brought with them in small boats over hundreds of miles of open ocean. "Oops, this sucks, let's go back now" wasn't really an option for them, either.
Dedupe is more valuable than compression because you can usually find duplication even among unrelated compressed data. I have dedupe enabled on a volume with DVD ISOs and see ~20% compression.
We had a laugh at work believing that the dedupe was due to plot overlap in the movies.