By the way, there are solutions to the DRM problem. Each ebook can be digitally "water marked", making subtle changes to the text in random places, so that each user gets a different version. For example, they can use a long or short dash in places, for pauses, they could use "...", or ". ..", or randomly insert two spaces rather than one between words in a few chapters. If a particular version winds up on ThePirateBay.org, then the copyright holder could file a law-suit and get a court order to find out what account was used to purchased that copy. This wont stop a determined copyright violator, as there's no way to keep a user from using character recognition to suck up the contents of an ebook from a Kindle, or from a printed book. In reality, DRM is 100% useless at keeping copies from appearing on the Internet. However, most consumers are willing to fall in line and buy legal copies if there's a chance they'll get caught making illegal copies. I'm all for copyright protection. Keeping a database of which accounts bought which books is kind of icky, but every ebook store does this anyway, just so they can balance their books, and most users would want to be able to access their ebooks in the future from the store they bought them from. A person determined to hide their buying patterns could buy ebooks with digital cash without an account, so anonymity could still be protected.
The same goes for other digital media, like music, where we could introduce unperceptible changes, flipping he LSB of samples in noisy sections like a drum beat or vocal plosive. Images can similarly be watermarked. If copyright holders want to keep me honest, I don't mind buying watermarked copies. In fact, I do when I read ebooks from Bookshare.org, where I legally download ebooks almost for free. My copies are water marked, so when my kids ask if they could borrow my ebook, I have to wonder if that will lead to it getting posted on the Internet. So, I've bought both kids Nook Touches, and I've agreed to pay for any book they want to read. This water marking stuff really does work in so far as it helps keep honest people honest.
Here's what's going on. Steve Jobs wanted 100% of the saving of switching from print to ebooks to go to Apple, not users or publishers and authors. However, he didn't want to drive customers away with higher prices. So, how do you suck 30% of the revenue out of an industry as pure profit without adding value or inviting unwanted competition? This is pure Steve Jobs evil marketing genius, and one reason to be glad he's dead.
The answer is the "agency model" combined with "most favored nation status". The agency model eliminates the likes of Ebooks.com and Ebook Depot, where you could often go and find an ebook for $1 or $2 less than Amazon. By forcing the industry to go to the Agency model, an ebook costs the same no matter where you buy it, eliminating any priced based competition, and reducing the consumer's choice to a matter of convenience, where Steve could dominate with the iPad and iTunes. Just for good measure, he removed any apps that also sell e-books from the App Store, like Sony's e-book app.
However, the big publishers wanted all of the profits for publishing as ebooks and then some. They pretty much wanted to screw authors, users, and the ebook stores, and were hopping mad at Amazon for forcing them to sell at $10 while Amazon took a bigger share of the profits than was even close to reasonable (over 50% for small publishers). In dealing with Apple, they loved the agency model and immediately raised prices, and of course they wanted all of the revenue. Statements like "4% would be a reasonable fee for the digital distributor" were common. Rather than bicker with each publisher like Amazon did, Apple simply demanded the lowest price the publisher offered anyone, meaning Amazon's price. Thus, Steve gets just as good a deal as Amazon had for so long. And in this case, he gets tons of cash with no work, and no added value in the chain. On the positive side, he did lower Apple's cut for doing nothing to 30%, or roughly 100% of the savings for going digital. Amazon responded by requiring their publishers also give them the lowest price, and then even Google jumped on board. Thus over 90% of the distribution channel for ebooks agreed on one thing: Apple, Amazon, and Google get 30% for doing almost nothing. Screw users, authors, and publishers. Between them, they have become the new gate keepers, sucking money out of you and me and crushing independent stores and sales channels. It's about time the DoJ looked into this!
This anti-competitive price fixing pisses me off. In the age of digital media, authors should be closer than ever to their readers. Publishers are still needed for editing and marketing, as books rarely become best sellers by themselves. However, the lower cost of digital distribution should mostly go to us, the consumers. If a print book is $10, I want the ebook for $7.
I got so upset at how all these companies are screwing the consumers over, that I came up with a potential solution. I've got a stalling effort to create Ebooks.coop. Members of this coop would pay for ebooks through the coop at the same price as they would using iBooks or a Kindle, because of the agency model. The coop would hopefully get close to the price from publishers as Amazon and Apple. Thus, for doing pretty much nothing, Ebooks.coop would make an unreasonable amount of money on each sale. At the end of the year, members would be mailed a check for their share of the profits, which would be proportional to how much they spent at the coop. This should enable us readers to "earn" most of that 30% savings.
The main reason I've stalled on this effort is DRM. I have difficulty reading print or a computer screen, and use text-to-speech software to read ebooks. Fortunately, I can get many popular ebooks almost for free from Bookshare.org, because of a loop-hole in copyright law specifically designed to help the blind. However, most ebooks are not available there, so I am forced to break the DRM manually, which is a huge pain, and always a moving challenge as publisher
Yes, you are correct. One of my best friends is a conservative Mormon, and being Unitarian, I'd be ashamed to belittle others for their faith, though stupid political beliefs are fair game. I don't believe Mormons are higher or lower on the Holy Ladder, but I read the Book of Mormon (my friend gave me a copy), and I read that the innocent people who had not read the book are still possibly going to Heaven, but now that I've read it and did not convert (I'm still Unitarian), I am in fact quite clearly banned from the presence of God, according to the book. However, our local Baptists here in NC will waste no time explaining why Jews and Mormons are damned, so we can all enjoy damnation together.
He could be an Anonymous Coward and still have an interesting question. And I'd like to offer him a reply.
Open source is massively misunderstood by just about everyone who doesn't read slashdot. Corporate executives' knee-jerk reaction to open source is that it's a Communist plot designed to destroy Capitalism. Free Software advocates (open source is a dirty phrase) will state that your company must embrace the give-it-away-for-free philosophy or your soul will be damned (that line of reasoning works with chicks, too).
In reality, if you have software which cannot make you money directly, it's a very good candidate for making open-source, assuming that someone out there will bother to use your code. Most closed-source commercial code does not pass this test. Usually, they could mail DVD's with their proprietary source to every competitor and not one of them would bother reading any of it. If you think open source code is ugly, just wait until you see the closed-source crap powering our big businesses.
So, in the unlikely case that anyone would care to read the code your company is considering making open source, the next question is "could you sell it?" If that code has any value to anyone, chances are that the copyright holder will go for the bucks rather than make it open-source. In most cases like this, I would guess that the source is closed to worthless. It's the coders that count, not their current code base.
Assuming there are people out there who want to use your soure code, either to compete with you or because it's valuable in their business, and somehow you could charge for that source, well then no... keep it closed source, because your boss will get seriously pissed otherwise. In the end, regardless of the actual issues at hand, your boss will cover his behind and force you to keep it closed source just so he can point out his enormous value to the company, where without him, dangerous socialists like you would give away the Company Jewels. You freaking Obamacare lover... Thank God for your boss!
What's the "Most religious state?" What's the most Republican state? What state can't host the Olympics without embarrassing the USA with their corruption? What state lost $2.5M to stupid Nigerian "You have been selected to win $100M dollars!" scams? What state bans effective sex-ed? Banning D&D in public schools... polygamy... and these people are too innocent to know that the religious right GOP crowd they want to join knows for sure that every Mormon will burn in Hell.
And after yet another epic f--kup, I have to listen to posts like this... on an article about how Utah can't keep track of their Medicare records, and this somehow is an opportunity to blame Obamacare? Give me a break.
H2 gas has around 1/3 the energy density of methane, the largest component of natural gas. Rather than saying "Hydrogen sucks because I can't put it my car," we should be asking, "Can we replace natural gas with hydrogen?" I use natural gas for heating, cooking, and it's increasingly used in power generation. Do we need all new pipelines, or can we use some of the existing infrastructure? I've never heard anyone complain that natural gas is too expensive for the providers to store at various places along the pipelines. It's just expensive to ship. So, I'll assume they can store H2 without huge cost. The major problem with natural gas is it's typically needed far from where it's produced. Now, giving TFA a benefit of the doubt, let's assume they can split water at high efficiency with a cheap reactor - at least one problem solved. However, last I checked the mirror arrays needed to focus light on the tower are still rather expensive, though there.
Long winded prolog... Wasn't it originally DARPANET, and then they decided to let it grow without the stigma of Defense on the front? My memory of the 70's is cloudy now days. Anyway, there's been some good (oh, say the Internet) from DARPA funding. I have done a fair bit of work over my career for the Air Force and random defense related stuff. I was born on an Air Force base, and my dad flew F-102 Delta Dart's, the first super-sonic jet fighter commissioned in significant numbers by the Air Force. Frankly, I love working for the Air Force directly, or through AFRL even better. I worked a bit on the BFV (Bradly Fighting Vehicle - that B is not for Big, and the F is not for F----). What a waste of human talent, in the most corrupt government/industry mess ever... well at least in the top 10%.
My experience working on a DARPA project was the worst government/commercial screw up I've ever been part of. Now I refuse to bid on anything DARPA related. We just wanted to help the Air Force make cheaper rad-hard electronics, but as soon as we started succeeding in making something viable, the a-hole DARPA dude running it proclaimed it was illegal to have any commercial gain from a DARPA project! We were only allowed to do usless far-future research! Never again. I don't mind yanking my own chain, but these DARPA guys will wear it out.
It seems to me that SCIRO is extremely talented at sucking money out of other companies for barely patentable ideas. Of course, it's not their fault that the system is just begging for patent trolls. IBM has done about as much patent trolling as any company to date, even though they're better known for innovation.
I don't doubt that SCIRO had some inventions in the wifi space, but as I recall RadioLan was just about the first company to make anything of it, and even before that, the gigabit networking group at DEC had already written BSD drivers that allowed their geeks to roam about the complex while automatically switching to the nearest WAP. At QuickLogic, I got to meet some early innovators in wifi (including the RadioLan guys), because back then they needed our fast FPGAs, which were fast for the time. I can't recall a single mention of anything from Australia, but of course, we were all too busy turning wifi into something useful to notice the credits on the various inventions that were naturally being accidentally stepped on.
I'm letting them learn from their mistakes, and the cost is I wipe their hard drive every now and then. Actually, there's no way for me to know just how much if any malware is on my machine right now. I downloaded and installed Vuse, which wants to replace adds in my browser. I've got AVG installed, and it's trying to take over failed DNS lookups. I installed exe2Explorer.exe so I could access my Ubuntu files from Windows. I've installed Skype, TrueCrypt and other non-free (as in speech) software. There is simply no practical way for me to know just how compromised I've made my machine. I guess you haven't installed anything like that, so you can be confident of your Windows security.
Windows has some amazing security technology under the hood. The problem is they still encourage users like you and me to download various binary executables from the web and give them permission to do whatever they like to our hard drives. Android does it much better, IMO, running each app in a jail, and asking users for specific permissions. They have a common App repository and they can quickly pull apps that are found to be malicious, and even automatically wipe them from your machine. Windows just leaves users praying that the next exe they install wont be the one that screws them.
That's pretty cool. I'm hopefully having my "exome" sequenced soon, as part of a clinical trial. I don't think my data will make it into a public database, but I would be for it, so long as my name etc were removed.
Just some dumb thoughts on TFA: The 1000 Genome project is hosting 200TB of data?!? Haven't these guys ever heard of compression? It seems that an individual's entire genome can be compressed to about 4MB, so the ~2000 genomes produced by the 1000 genome project should easily fit on my microSD card. $20 worth of storage in 1/20th of a cubic centimeter. Also, how many downloads to they expect to get? Even one? Not at 200TB containing 8GB of useful data! Why does this require the government to pay Amazon loads of cash? And... how do I get in on this scam? I'm thinking I could host a database of all zip codes in only 500TB from my house using 500 external 1TB drives. The exact boundaries between zip codes, taking into account tectonic plate shifting in real time, can be a lot of data if I write a stupid program to generate stupid data. I'd be willing to do that for the government for only $10M.
The attack on science has some common ground among religious conservatives, and fiscal conservatives. Exxon and Phillip Morris donate plenty to "conservative" think tanks like the Heartland Institute to push their specific financial agenda, which benefits from the anti-science movement of the religious right. Second hand smoke kills? Nonsense, and no scientific study is going to change the minds of the religious right. What the power brokers of the Republican Party have found is that with money, they can by belief systems, not just votes.
Some of my best friends are deeply religious, and very intelligent. However, most of them would not describe themselves as "conservatives", much less "true conservatives", and the likes of Santorum scares them as much as me. One trait I find common among them is they've rationalized the Bible and science, choosing to believe the Bible is imperfect, and not to be taken entirely literally.
As for "providing truth statements", it's going to depend on your definition of True. I prefer "True == not False", using Python syntax. If you have discovered personal truths through your faith, more power to you, but I doubt we can talk about those truths logically. However, most people will admit they feel there is something about experiencing life that so far defies scientific explanation. There's some greater meaning to all of this living that we just can't pin it down with logic. This is the area religions should stick to, IMO, and the various faiths should come to terms with the fact that the world around us does not agree in every detail with words written thousands of years ago. There is a real need for spiritual guidance, yet the religious right wastes that opportunity and flaunts their ignorance by attacking science in ditto-head fashion.
I'd say it was Regan who invited the social conservative Christians into the Repblican party, creating the rise of the "religious right". This group as a whole seems to demand that they be "right" and everyone else be wrong, so it's natural for them to seek consensus on what a "true conservative" means, and they're quite willing to morph their beliefs to gain consensus. It's not that they trust science less, it's just that these people, who blindly believe in Genesis rather than any science, now identify themselves as "conservative", not that they've warped the meaning to their liking.
The term "conservative" had a very different meaning in the '70s. Those conservatives would have cringed at the phrase "true conservative". Here's a decent definition of the term. They blindly believe not just in the common ground between social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and military hawks, but they believe in the super-set of all three, creating the strangest set of widely held blind beliefs I've ever heard of.
So, it's now Christian to promote war, fiscal conservatives abandon rational though when it comes to science, and the desperately poor rally to causes to help the rich. It's "I'll believe what you want me to believe if you believe what I want you to believe." Scary. Understanding science is simply one of those things they brokered away. I love how the definition above claims true conservatives don't believe in various science issues like Evolution, because "they do the research themselves."
Games... the last great reason to have Windows machines. My kids originally both had Ubuntu, but the whining about games was too much for me to withstand, and I installed Windows for both of them. Now I seem to install Windows fairly often, as they get freaking computer viruses like other children get the flu.
Well, personally it's never McDonalds I crave when trying to be kinder to animals by eating fewer of them. It's peperoni pizza and sushi that make me a carnivore. So, I give myself a break and instead of being "vegetarian", I'm "trying to be kinder to animals". I don't ask for a special meal at a party where the choices are hot dogs or hamburgers, and just eat them, and I'll still buy sushi or peperoni pizza, but I'd guess my consumption of turkey, pork, chicken, and products where I now know animals have been tortured to bring me cheap meat are now 1/10th as much of my spending as before. I figure that we can make a lot of progress without having to be perfect. If a Big Mac now and then is what you really feel you need, don't feel like it makes you not a vegetarian if now and then you indulge. Anyway, there's not all that much actual meat in a Big Mac, and cows seem to have better lives than the other animals we factory farm.
Well said. I'd say open source projects are successful when they give those contributing what they want. In my case, I volunteer for projects that help blind/VI people, projects like Vinux - Linux for the Vision Impaired, SpeechHub - free voices everywhere, NVDA - the free screen reader for the blind, and Orca - the Linux screen reader. I also contribute algorithms, such as libsonic - speeding up speech for speed listeners, and an enhanced FFT algorithm for speech recognition.
So, my win is helping the blind and otherwise disabled with computing technology. In Open Source Land, it's whatever floats your boat.
I'm just glad this suit went the right way. Cam-coders in every cell phone will have a major impact on both crime and enforcement in the future. People are getting filmed while robbing or committing other crimes right and left, which is a very good thing, and a major disincentive to commit major crimes. Note that no one is trying to make us to stop recording crimes in progress, unless it's policemen committing them. The impact this has on enforcement should be equally positive, creating a major disincentive for the police to act above the law. If this had gone the other way, it would have been a blow to freedom from government oppression.
I agree. Frankly I'm shocked about the low numbers reported. Surely the author of Python deserves more than $30K/year? I'm not a big fan of the coders behind the GTK+ code base. Could it be partly because the whole Gnome organization runs on about $500K/year? Maybe that doesn't buy very many good coders? Apache makes practically nothing. How is that a good thing? I had no idea that our collective generosity added up to so little. I mean, we seem to be able to put together a couple hundred million in small donations to elect president, so why can't we help out some of these organizations a bit more. I donated something like $50 last year to the FSF, and $100 to NVDA, the free screen reader for the blind. I figured that makes me a stingy SOB... gee a whole $150 in a year. And that was my most generous year of FOSS support ever. Still... don't we add up to a bit more than a few million?
The top earner, Mozilla Corp, is getting $300M/year from Google. So, combined, Mozilla is making something like $301M/year, assuming no other major cash sources exist. In short, Mozilla is rolling in cash, but they only have to report on the $1M. I would not be surprised to see several million in compensation per year to their top earner. How many other organizations on this list play similar tricks, having a private commercial side to make all the cash, while reporting as if they were poor starving do-gooders?
Actually, GNU/Linux is getting crusty and losing it's one time ability of fostering innovation and collaboration. Core pieces like GTK are outdated and a poor platform for building a desktop environment. If you try to contribute, you run into a buzz saw of red tape and gate keepers. If you want to write an app today and publish tomorrow, you need to be on Android or iOS. Debian is run like the Catholic Church, and only the priests have any say. We have no simple way for me to write a cool hack of a little game today, and share it with thousands of Linux enthusiasts tomorrow. That's total BS. LInux should be Linux, not GNU/Linux with all those managed Debian packages on top. We should then build a new distributed system for authoring packages, building them for various platforms, publishing and marketing them. As it is, Linux sucks.
I just use our home wireless phones, but I keep my thumb on the mute button as I walk around. My visions not as good as it used to be, and I don't see the mute icon very easily. I accidentally got confused about the mute/unmute state in a meeting a few months ago, and my whole group of co-workers got to wonder why I didn't respond, and then they got to here me yelling at my daughter to be nice to her brother, and then nothing, and then me shouting some dumb dad stuff, and the more silence. The guys at work figured out I had my mute backwards and let me do this for quite a while before I figured out what all the laughing was about.
The advice about making sure the family knows work comes first during your work hours is good.
My son who was about 5 at the time got in yet another physical fight with her older sister, and so my wife and I had a sit-down talk with him. My wife asked, "What's the most important rule in our house?" The correct answer was never hit. My son said, "Never disturb Daddy while he's working." I think that's about when I started thinking about giving up my office in the house and moving into the living room.
I am the least wanted presence of any employee I know. When I sold most of my stock in the small company I founded to our new CEO and major share holder, the exiting CEO said things would work out better if I worked from home. Six years later, they keep an empty desk which is theoretically mine to honor my employment, but I've been working at home all this time. Now, I don't disagree with them, but it has been quite an adjustment. The first two years I would have agreed with the other posters about having an office and a door - I did. We've got a stupidly large house, a mistake I will not make again, which was motivated from years of too little space in Silicon Valley. Eventually, I missed the personal contact with people, and I love my family. I've given over the office to the kids, and we call it the "Children's Lounge". I put an Xbox 360, and hi-def TV, and a computer for each of them in there, and they love it. I work in a lazy-boy chair with my feet up (I got blood clots in my leg and lungs from working too long without moving). I now work in the family room, and life is much better than when I was closed off in my solitary office.
Part of the adjustment was training my family to understand that for 8-ish hours most days I'm going to sit in that damned chair and ignore whatever it is they want from me. There was about a year where I'd say my wife seemed to resent me "always being at my computer", though it was only about 8 hours a day. Now days, I like working from home. I know a lot more about my kid's lives just from casual listening while working.
Now, I take issue with the guy who thought headphones were a dumb idea. I was blessed with exactly Steve Job's shaped ears, so even though I hate Apple, I go through about two pairs of iPod headphones a year, which I power with my Linux/Windows dual boot laptop and my awesome Galaxy Nexus phone. I listen to audio books I create with TTS synthesizers, and it's just a huge improvement in my quality of life. They don't block my hearing like "in-ear" headphones, so I can keep them in a lot of the time.
Another major issue is training your co-workers to work with you remotely. For example, software I've been working on with a team remotely will be installed on some sales guys machines tomorrow for the first time. I've asked that before installing our software, that each machine have the latest Skype installed, and that voice and remote desktop sharing tested. I can do better support with Skype than standing in someone's office looking over their shoulder. Getting people to actually switch to on-line communication can be pretty hard. I've been commuting twice a week to a pretty remote office (3-4 hours driving a day) to build relationships with our excellent but naturally social phobic engineering team, partly so they wont feel so weird talking to me on Skype. Also, having your team mates just a click away all day is wonderful. It makes it almost feel like you're at the office. I have my family and my team mates. However, I don't get away very often for an after work beer or two.
It's a really interesting topic of discussion. During WWII, we broke all sorts of codes, primarily by building bigger and more expensive computers than any rational scientist from the other side believed we would be willing to build. The two secrets the NSA has to keep to be effective (assuming it is, but that's a different topic) is 1) just how big their computers are, and 2) knowledge of any codes they've broken. In WWII, we let good people die who we could have saved, simply to protect the secret that we had broken their codes. If every time the other side sent an encrypted message about where and when to attack, we just magically happened to be in the right place at the right time, they'd catch on. If the NSA can break AES, then they're in the same situation today. For example, they may be letting good people die who could be saved if the NSA simply informed the local police of an encrypted message from some bad guy.
So, today most of us rational computer geeks don't believe the NSA can break our codes. We have more public discussion now than was ever possible before, and the brain power on the internet world-wide thinking about code breaking probably dwarfs the NSA. Breaking AES by brute force would take a computer of nearly unthinkable size... sort of like in WWII. Breaking RSA with long keys like most of use use would probably take a quantum computer many years ahead of anything we know of...
Actually, I know a guy who knows one of the guys that RSA is named after, and he tells me that guy broke RSA in the '90s... The funny thing is my story is true! Of course, I can't verify the story the guy told me.
I've been told that many patents are rejected, but 4 out of 8 sounds pretty poor. I'm 22 of 22, even though some prior art I found made me try to retract one, but the patent officer found a narrow interpretation that let it stand in a limited form. All mine have been used defensively. It turns out that you either have to have no viable business, or a ton of cash you're just itching to burn to start patent wars. The rest of us live in fear of being sued by someone with either no money and a bunch of lawyers, or a huge war chest. Either way, we're screwed.
Most of my patents are software patents, which I continue to firmly believe should be illegal. We should not be able to patent mathematical algorithms or any stupid list of steps which can be executed by a computer. Yahoo, Google, Motorola, Apple, Samsung, HTC, and several other huge companies have decided to burn all their money in a pointless effort to hold back innovation. If ever their was a time to say "I told you so" over software patents, this is it.
I forgot to mention where the sonic speed-up library is included. So far, Astro Nova Player, Own Speed Player, eSpeak, a Russian TTS engine, possibly a Chinese TTS engine, Speech-Hub, and a Debian library. However, I want speech to be high quality a high speed everywhere, so there is no need for developers to tell me when they use it. I suspect it or something like it is used in the latest Audible.com app for Android (but not iOS, which still sucks). I'm hoping the technology will make it into Ivana. Frankly it doesn't do very well for eSpeak, but it works well with Voxin/Eloquence and human speech speed up.
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By the way, there are solutions to the DRM problem. Each ebook can be digitally "water marked", making subtle changes to the text in random places, so that each user gets a different version. For example, they can use a long or short dash in places, for pauses, they could use "...", or ". . .", or randomly insert two spaces rather than one between words in a few chapters. If a particular version winds up on ThePirateBay.org, then the copyright holder could file a law-suit and get a court order to find out what account was used to purchased that copy. This wont stop a determined copyright violator, as there's no way to keep a user from using character recognition to suck up the contents of an ebook from a Kindle, or from a printed book. In reality, DRM is 100% useless at keeping copies from appearing on the Internet. However, most consumers are willing to fall in line and buy legal copies if there's a chance they'll get caught making illegal copies. I'm all for copyright protection. Keeping a database of which accounts bought which books is kind of icky, but every ebook store does this anyway, just so they can balance their books, and most users would want to be able to access their ebooks in the future from the store they bought them from. A person determined to hide their buying patterns could buy ebooks with digital cash without an account, so anonymity could still be protected.
The same goes for other digital media, like music, where we could introduce unperceptible changes, flipping he LSB of samples in noisy sections like a drum beat or vocal plosive. Images can similarly be watermarked. If copyright holders want to keep me honest, I don't mind buying watermarked copies. In fact, I do when I read ebooks from Bookshare.org, where I legally download ebooks almost for free. My copies are water marked, so when my kids ask if they could borrow my ebook, I have to wonder if that will lead to it getting posted on the Internet. So, I've bought both kids Nook Touches, and I've agreed to pay for any book they want to read. This water marking stuff really does work in so far as it helps keep honest people honest.
Here's what's going on. Steve Jobs wanted 100% of the saving of switching from print to ebooks to go to Apple, not users or publishers and authors. However, he didn't want to drive customers away with higher prices. So, how do you suck 30% of the revenue out of an industry as pure profit without adding value or inviting unwanted competition? This is pure Steve Jobs evil marketing genius, and one reason to be glad he's dead.
The answer is the "agency model" combined with "most favored nation status". The agency model eliminates the likes of Ebooks.com and Ebook Depot, where you could often go and find an ebook for $1 or $2 less than Amazon. By forcing the industry to go to the Agency model, an ebook costs the same no matter where you buy it, eliminating any priced based competition, and reducing the consumer's choice to a matter of convenience, where Steve could dominate with the iPad and iTunes. Just for good measure, he removed any apps that also sell e-books from the App Store, like Sony's e-book app.
However, the big publishers wanted all of the profits for publishing as ebooks and then some. They pretty much wanted to screw authors, users, and the ebook stores, and were hopping mad at Amazon for forcing them to sell at $10 while Amazon took a bigger share of the profits than was even close to reasonable (over 50% for small publishers). In dealing with Apple, they loved the agency model and immediately raised prices, and of course they wanted all of the revenue. Statements like "4% would be a reasonable fee for the digital distributor" were common. Rather than bicker with each publisher like Amazon did, Apple simply demanded the lowest price the publisher offered anyone, meaning Amazon's price. Thus, Steve gets just as good a deal as Amazon had for so long. And in this case, he gets tons of cash with no work, and no added value in the chain. On the positive side, he did lower Apple's cut for doing nothing to 30%, or roughly 100% of the savings for going digital. Amazon responded by requiring their publishers also give them the lowest price, and then even Google jumped on board. Thus over 90% of the distribution channel for ebooks agreed on one thing: Apple, Amazon, and Google get 30% for doing almost nothing. Screw users, authors, and publishers. Between them, they have become the new gate keepers, sucking money out of you and me and crushing independent stores and sales channels. It's about time the DoJ looked into this!
This anti-competitive price fixing pisses me off. In the age of digital media, authors should be closer than ever to their readers. Publishers are still needed for editing and marketing, as books rarely become best sellers by themselves. However, the lower cost of digital distribution should mostly go to us, the consumers. If a print book is $10, I want the ebook for $7.
I got so upset at how all these companies are screwing the consumers over, that I came up with a potential solution. I've got a stalling effort to create Ebooks.coop. Members of this coop would pay for ebooks through the coop at the same price as they would using iBooks or a Kindle, because of the agency model. The coop would hopefully get close to the price from publishers as Amazon and Apple. Thus, for doing pretty much nothing, Ebooks.coop would make an unreasonable amount of money on each sale. At the end of the year, members would be mailed a check for their share of the profits, which would be proportional to how much they spent at the coop. This should enable us readers to "earn" most of that 30% savings.
The main reason I've stalled on this effort is DRM. I have difficulty reading print or a computer screen, and use text-to-speech software to read ebooks. Fortunately, I can get many popular ebooks almost for free from Bookshare.org, because of a loop-hole in copyright law specifically designed to help the blind. However, most ebooks are not available there, so I am forced to break the DRM manually, which is a huge pain, and always a moving challenge as publisher
Yes, you are correct. One of my best friends is a conservative Mormon, and being Unitarian, I'd be ashamed to belittle others for their faith, though stupid political beliefs are fair game. I don't believe Mormons are higher or lower on the Holy Ladder, but I read the Book of Mormon (my friend gave me a copy), and I read that the innocent people who had not read the book are still possibly going to Heaven, but now that I've read it and did not convert (I'm still Unitarian), I am in fact quite clearly banned from the presence of God, according to the book. However, our local Baptists here in NC will waste no time explaining why Jews and Mormons are damned, so we can all enjoy damnation together.
He could be an Anonymous Coward and still have an interesting question. And I'd like to offer him a reply.
Open source is massively misunderstood by just about everyone who doesn't read slashdot. Corporate executives' knee-jerk reaction to open source is that it's a Communist plot designed to destroy Capitalism. Free Software advocates (open source is a dirty phrase) will state that your company must embrace the give-it-away-for-free philosophy or your soul will be damned (that line of reasoning works with chicks, too).
In reality, if you have software which cannot make you money directly, it's a very good candidate for making open-source, assuming that someone out there will bother to use your code. Most closed-source commercial code does not pass this test. Usually, they could mail DVD's with their proprietary source to every competitor and not one of them would bother reading any of it. If you think open source code is ugly, just wait until you see the closed-source crap powering our big businesses.
So, in the unlikely case that anyone would care to read the code your company is considering making open source, the next question is "could you sell it?" If that code has any value to anyone, chances are that the copyright holder will go for the bucks rather than make it open-source. In most cases like this, I would guess that the source is closed to worthless. It's the coders that count, not their current code base.
Assuming there are people out there who want to use your soure code, either to compete with you or because it's valuable in their business, and somehow you could charge for that source, well then no... keep it closed source, because your boss will get seriously pissed otherwise. In the end, regardless of the actual issues at hand, your boss will cover his behind and force you to keep it closed source just so he can point out his enormous value to the company, where without him, dangerous socialists like you would give away the Company Jewels. You freaking Obamacare lover... Thank God for your boss!
What's the "Most religious state?" What's the most Republican state? What state can't host the Olympics without embarrassing the USA with their corruption? What state lost $2.5M to stupid Nigerian "You have been selected to win $100M dollars!" scams? What state bans effective sex-ed? Banning D&D in public schools... polygamy... and these people are too innocent to know that the religious right GOP crowd they want to join knows for sure that every Mormon will burn in Hell.
And after yet another epic f--kup, I have to listen to posts like this... on an article about how Utah can't keep track of their Medicare records, and this somehow is an opportunity to blame Obamacare? Give me a break.
H2 gas has around 1/3 the energy density of methane, the largest component of natural gas. Rather than saying "Hydrogen sucks because I can't put it my car," we should be asking, "Can we replace natural gas with hydrogen?" I use natural gas for heating, cooking, and it's increasingly used in power generation. Do we need all new pipelines, or can we use some of the existing infrastructure? I've never heard anyone complain that natural gas is too expensive for the providers to store at various places along the pipelines. It's just expensive to ship. So, I'll assume they can store H2 without huge cost. The major problem with natural gas is it's typically needed far from where it's produced. Now, giving TFA a benefit of the doubt, let's assume they can split water at high efficiency with a cheap reactor - at least one problem solved. However, last I checked the mirror arrays needed to focus light on the tower are still rather expensive, though there.
Long winded prolog... Wasn't it originally DARPANET, and then they decided to let it grow without the stigma of Defense on the front? My memory of the 70's is cloudy now days. Anyway, there's been some good (oh, say the Internet) from DARPA funding. I have done a fair bit of work over my career for the Air Force and random defense related stuff. I was born on an Air Force base, and my dad flew F-102 Delta Dart's, the first super-sonic jet fighter commissioned in significant numbers by the Air Force. Frankly, I love working for the Air Force directly, or through AFRL even better. I worked a bit on the BFV (Bradly Fighting Vehicle - that B is not for Big, and the F is not for F----). What a waste of human talent, in the most corrupt government/industry mess ever... well at least in the top 10%.
My experience working on a DARPA project was the worst government/commercial screw up I've ever been part of. Now I refuse to bid on anything DARPA related. We just wanted to help the Air Force make cheaper rad-hard electronics, but as soon as we started succeeding in making something viable, the a-hole DARPA dude running it proclaimed it was illegal to have any commercial gain from a DARPA project! We were only allowed to do usless far-future research! Never again. I don't mind yanking my own chain, but these DARPA guys will wear it out.
It seems to me that SCIRO is extremely talented at sucking money out of other companies for barely patentable ideas. Of course, it's not their fault that the system is just begging for patent trolls. IBM has done about as much patent trolling as any company to date, even though they're better known for innovation.
I don't doubt that SCIRO had some inventions in the wifi space, but as I recall RadioLan was just about the first company to make anything of it, and even before that, the gigabit networking group at DEC had already written BSD drivers that allowed their geeks to roam about the complex while automatically switching to the nearest WAP. At QuickLogic, I got to meet some early innovators in wifi (including the RadioLan guys), because back then they needed our fast FPGAs, which were fast for the time. I can't recall a single mention of anything from Australia, but of course, we were all too busy turning wifi into something useful to notice the credits on the various inventions that were naturally being accidentally stepped on.
I'm letting them learn from their mistakes, and the cost is I wipe their hard drive every now and then. Actually, there's no way for me to know just how much if any malware is on my machine right now. I downloaded and installed Vuse, which wants to replace adds in my browser. I've got AVG installed, and it's trying to take over failed DNS lookups. I installed exe2Explorer.exe so I could access my Ubuntu files from Windows. I've installed Skype, TrueCrypt and other non-free (as in speech) software. There is simply no practical way for me to know just how compromised I've made my machine. I guess you haven't installed anything like that, so you can be confident of your Windows security.
Windows has some amazing security technology under the hood. The problem is they still encourage users like you and me to download various binary executables from the web and give them permission to do whatever they like to our hard drives. Android does it much better, IMO, running each app in a jail, and asking users for specific permissions. They have a common App repository and they can quickly pull apps that are found to be malicious, and even automatically wipe them from your machine. Windows just leaves users praying that the next exe they install wont be the one that screws them.
That's pretty cool. I'm hopefully having my "exome" sequenced soon, as part of a clinical trial. I don't think my data will make it into a public database, but I would be for it, so long as my name etc were removed.
Just some dumb thoughts on TFA: The 1000 Genome project is hosting 200TB of data?!? Haven't these guys ever heard of compression? It seems that an individual's entire genome can be compressed to about 4MB, so the ~2000 genomes produced by the 1000 genome project should easily fit on my microSD card. $20 worth of storage in 1/20th of a cubic centimeter. Also, how many downloads to they expect to get? Even one? Not at 200TB containing 8GB of useful data! Why does this require the government to pay Amazon loads of cash? And... how do I get in on this scam? I'm thinking I could host a database of all zip codes in only 500TB from my house using 500 external 1TB drives. The exact boundaries between zip codes, taking into account tectonic plate shifting in real time, can be a lot of data if I write a stupid program to generate stupid data. I'd be willing to do that for the government for only $10M.
The attack on science has some common ground among religious conservatives, and fiscal conservatives. Exxon and Phillip Morris donate plenty to "conservative" think tanks like the Heartland Institute to push their specific financial agenda, which benefits from the anti-science movement of the religious right. Second hand smoke kills? Nonsense, and no scientific study is going to change the minds of the religious right. What the power brokers of the Republican Party have found is that with money, they can by belief systems, not just votes.
Some of my best friends are deeply religious, and very intelligent. However, most of them would not describe themselves as "conservatives", much less "true conservatives", and the likes of Santorum scares them as much as me. One trait I find common among them is they've rationalized the Bible and science, choosing to believe the Bible is imperfect, and not to be taken entirely literally.
As for "providing truth statements", it's going to depend on your definition of True. I prefer "True == not False", using Python syntax. If you have discovered personal truths through your faith, more power to you, but I doubt we can talk about those truths logically. However, most people will admit they feel there is something about experiencing life that so far defies scientific explanation. There's some greater meaning to all of this living that we just can't pin it down with logic. This is the area religions should stick to, IMO, and the various faiths should come to terms with the fact that the world around us does not agree in every detail with words written thousands of years ago. There is a real need for spiritual guidance, yet the religious right wastes that opportunity and flaunts their ignorance by attacking science in ditto-head fashion.
I'd say it was Regan who invited the social conservative Christians into the Repblican party, creating the rise of the "religious right". This group as a whole seems to demand that they be "right" and everyone else be wrong, so it's natural for them to seek consensus on what a "true conservative" means, and they're quite willing to morph their beliefs to gain consensus. It's not that they trust science less, it's just that these people, who blindly believe in Genesis rather than any science, now identify themselves as "conservative", not that they've warped the meaning to their liking.
The term "conservative" had a very different meaning in the '70s. Those conservatives would have cringed at the phrase "true conservative". Here's a decent definition of the term. They blindly believe not just in the common ground between social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and military hawks, but they believe in the super-set of all three, creating the strangest set of widely held blind beliefs I've ever heard of.
So, it's now Christian to promote war, fiscal conservatives abandon rational though when it comes to science, and the desperately poor rally to causes to help the rich. It's "I'll believe what you want me to believe if you believe what I want you to believe." Scary. Understanding science is simply one of those things they brokered away. I love how the definition above claims true conservatives don't believe in various science issues like Evolution, because "they do the research themselves."
Games... the last great reason to have Windows machines. My kids originally both had Ubuntu, but the whining about games was too much for me to withstand, and I installed Windows for both of them. Now I seem to install Windows fairly often, as they get freaking computer viruses like other children get the flu.
Well, personally it's never McDonalds I crave when trying to be kinder to animals by eating fewer of them. It's peperoni pizza and sushi that make me a carnivore. So, I give myself a break and instead of being "vegetarian", I'm "trying to be kinder to animals". I don't ask for a special meal at a party where the choices are hot dogs or hamburgers, and just eat them, and I'll still buy sushi or peperoni pizza, but I'd guess my consumption of turkey, pork, chicken, and products where I now know animals have been tortured to bring me cheap meat are now 1/10th as much of my spending as before. I figure that we can make a lot of progress without having to be perfect. If a Big Mac now and then is what you really feel you need, don't feel like it makes you not a vegetarian if now and then you indulge. Anyway, there's not all that much actual meat in a Big Mac, and cows seem to have better lives than the other animals we factory farm.
Well said. I'd say open source projects are successful when they give those contributing what they want. In my case, I volunteer for projects that help blind/VI people, projects like Vinux - Linux for the Vision Impaired, SpeechHub - free voices everywhere, NVDA - the free screen reader for the blind, and Orca - the Linux screen reader. I also contribute algorithms, such as libsonic - speeding up speech for speed listeners, and an enhanced FFT algorithm for speech recognition.
So, my win is helping the blind and otherwise disabled with computing technology. In Open Source Land, it's whatever floats your boat.
I'm just glad this suit went the right way. Cam-coders in every cell phone will have a major impact on both crime and enforcement in the future. People are getting filmed while robbing or committing other crimes right and left, which is a very good thing, and a major disincentive to commit major crimes. Note that no one is trying to make us to stop recording crimes in progress, unless it's policemen committing them. The impact this has on enforcement should be equally positive, creating a major disincentive for the police to act above the law. If this had gone the other way, it would have been a blow to freedom from government oppression.
I agree. Frankly I'm shocked about the low numbers reported. Surely the author of Python deserves more than $30K/year? I'm not a big fan of the coders behind the GTK+ code base. Could it be partly because the whole Gnome organization runs on about $500K/year? Maybe that doesn't buy very many good coders? Apache makes practically nothing. How is that a good thing? I had no idea that our collective generosity added up to so little. I mean, we seem to be able to put together a couple hundred million in small donations to elect president, so why can't we help out some of these organizations a bit more. I donated something like $50 last year to the FSF, and $100 to NVDA, the free screen reader for the blind. I figured that makes me a stingy SOB... gee a whole $150 in a year. And that was my most generous year of FOSS support ever. Still... don't we add up to a bit more than a few million?
The top earner, Mozilla Corp, is getting $300M/year from Google. So, combined, Mozilla is making something like $301M/year, assuming no other major cash sources exist. In short, Mozilla is rolling in cash, but they only have to report on the $1M. I would not be surprised to see several million in compensation per year to their top earner. How many other organizations on this list play similar tricks, having a private commercial side to make all the cash, while reporting as if they were poor starving do-gooders?
Now there's some good marketing.
Actually, GNU/Linux is getting crusty and losing it's one time ability of fostering innovation and collaboration. Core pieces like GTK are outdated and a poor platform for building a desktop environment. If you try to contribute, you run into a buzz saw of red tape and gate keepers. If you want to write an app today and publish tomorrow, you need to be on Android or iOS. Debian is run like the Catholic Church, and only the priests have any say. We have no simple way for me to write a cool hack of a little game today, and share it with thousands of Linux enthusiasts tomorrow. That's total BS. LInux should be Linux, not GNU/Linux with all those managed Debian packages on top. We should then build a new distributed system for authoring packages, building them for various platforms, publishing and marketing them. As it is, Linux sucks.
I just use our home wireless phones, but I keep my thumb on the mute button as I walk around. My visions not as good as it used to be, and I don't see the mute icon very easily. I accidentally got confused about the mute/unmute state in a meeting a few months ago, and my whole group of co-workers got to wonder why I didn't respond, and then they got to here me yelling at my daughter to be nice to her brother, and then nothing, and then me shouting some dumb dad stuff, and the more silence. The guys at work figured out I had my mute backwards and let me do this for quite a while before I figured out what all the laughing was about.
My son who was about 5 at the time got in yet another physical fight with her older sister, and so my wife and I had a sit-down talk with him. My wife asked, "What's the most important rule in our house?" The correct answer was never hit. My son said, "Never disturb Daddy while he's working." I think that's about when I started thinking about giving up my office in the house and moving into the living room.
I am the least wanted presence of any employee I know. When I sold most of my stock in the small company I founded to our new CEO and major share holder, the exiting CEO said things would work out better if I worked from home. Six years later, they keep an empty desk which is theoretically mine to honor my employment, but I've been working at home all this time. Now, I don't disagree with them, but it has been quite an adjustment. The first two years I would have agreed with the other posters about having an office and a door - I did. We've got a stupidly large house, a mistake I will not make again, which was motivated from years of too little space in Silicon Valley. Eventually, I missed the personal contact with people, and I love my family. I've given over the office to the kids, and we call it the "Children's Lounge". I put an Xbox 360, and hi-def TV, and a computer for each of them in there, and they love it. I work in a lazy-boy chair with my feet up (I got blood clots in my leg and lungs from working too long without moving). I now work in the family room, and life is much better than when I was closed off in my solitary office.
Part of the adjustment was training my family to understand that for 8-ish hours most days I'm going to sit in that damned chair and ignore whatever it is they want from me. There was about a year where I'd say my wife seemed to resent me "always being at my computer", though it was only about 8 hours a day. Now days, I like working from home. I know a lot more about my kid's lives just from casual listening while working.
Now, I take issue with the guy who thought headphones were a dumb idea. I was blessed with exactly Steve Job's shaped ears, so even though I hate Apple, I go through about two pairs of iPod headphones a year, which I power with my Linux/Windows dual boot laptop and my awesome Galaxy Nexus phone. I listen to audio books I create with TTS synthesizers, and it's just a huge improvement in my quality of life. They don't block my hearing like "in-ear" headphones, so I can keep them in a lot of the time.
Another major issue is training your co-workers to work with you remotely. For example, software I've been working on with a team remotely will be installed on some sales guys machines tomorrow for the first time. I've asked that before installing our software, that each machine have the latest Skype installed, and that voice and remote desktop sharing tested. I can do better support with Skype than standing in someone's office looking over their shoulder. Getting people to actually switch to on-line communication can be pretty hard. I've been commuting twice a week to a pretty remote office (3-4 hours driving a day) to build relationships with our excellent but naturally social phobic engineering team, partly so they wont feel so weird talking to me on Skype. Also, having your team mates just a click away all day is wonderful. It makes it almost feel like you're at the office. I have my family and my team mates. However, I don't get away very often for an after work beer or two.
It's a really interesting topic of discussion. During WWII, we broke all sorts of codes, primarily by building bigger and more expensive computers than any rational scientist from the other side believed we would be willing to build. The two secrets the NSA has to keep to be effective (assuming it is, but that's a different topic) is 1) just how big their computers are, and 2) knowledge of any codes they've broken. In WWII, we let good people die who we could have saved, simply to protect the secret that we had broken their codes. If every time the other side sent an encrypted message about where and when to attack, we just magically happened to be in the right place at the right time, they'd catch on. If the NSA can break AES, then they're in the same situation today. For example, they may be letting good people die who could be saved if the NSA simply informed the local police of an encrypted message from some bad guy.
So, today most of us rational computer geeks don't believe the NSA can break our codes. We have more public discussion now than was ever possible before, and the brain power on the internet world-wide thinking about code breaking probably dwarfs the NSA. Breaking AES by brute force would take a computer of nearly unthinkable size... sort of like in WWII. Breaking RSA with long keys like most of use use would probably take a quantum computer many years ahead of anything we know of...
Actually, I know a guy who knows one of the guys that RSA is named after, and he tells me that guy broke RSA in the '90s... The funny thing is my story is true! Of course, I can't verify the story the guy told me.
I've been told that many patents are rejected, but 4 out of 8 sounds pretty poor. I'm 22 of 22, even though some prior art I found made me try to retract one, but the patent officer found a narrow interpretation that let it stand in a limited form. All mine have been used defensively. It turns out that you either have to have no viable business, or a ton of cash you're just itching to burn to start patent wars. The rest of us live in fear of being sued by someone with either no money and a bunch of lawyers, or a huge war chest. Either way, we're screwed.
Most of my patents are software patents, which I continue to firmly believe should be illegal. We should not be able to patent mathematical algorithms or any stupid list of steps which can be executed by a computer. Yahoo, Google, Motorola, Apple, Samsung, HTC, and several other huge companies have decided to burn all their money in a pointless effort to hold back innovation. If ever their was a time to say "I told you so" over software patents, this is it.
I forgot to mention where the sonic speed-up library is included. So far, Astro Nova Player, Own Speed Player, eSpeak, a Russian TTS engine, possibly a Chinese TTS engine, Speech-Hub, and a Debian library. However, I want speech to be high quality a high speed everywhere, so there is no need for developers to tell me when they use it. I suspect it or something like it is used in the latest Audible.com app for Android (but not iOS, which still sucks). I'm hoping the technology will make it into Ivana. Frankly it doesn't do very well for eSpeak, but it works well with Voxin/Eloquence and human speech speed up.