I completely agree that our foreign entanglements budget and general military budget are wildly out of control, and should be vastly curtailed.
Another two to look at are Social Security and health care.
Social Security will eat the entire GDP in the not too distant future if the age threshold is not raised. Check out the numbers, they are as bad as the military (and rising significantly faster).
Health care is becoming too expensive; lots of reasons for this, including a ton of protectionism, lawyerism, and corruption, but the one that cannot be fixed is this: Our technological ability to keep people alive is advancing faster than the GDP growth rate can keep up with. At some point, we will have to stop paying for everyone's maximum possible life extension (either by choice or by collapse).
Not trying to piss in your cheerios -- you're right about the military -- just pointing out two other oncoming trains that are bigger and faster. Check the numbers for yourself -- they're scary.
Point 4 is exactly where Lawrence Lessig started 'Change Congress'
Lawrence Lessig also caved on corporate personhood, because the Citizens United ruling also gave organizations like Change Congress personhood. He chose his power over principles. He is one of them now.
Article 1: "Microsoft may be one of the only remaining mobile operating-system providers that charges handset makers a licensing fee, but in exchange vendors get at least one important benefit: protection from intellectual property worries. 'Microsoft indemnifies its Windows Phone 7 licensees against patent infringement claims,' the company said. 'We stand behind our product, and step up to our responsibility to clear the necessary IP rights.'"
Article 2: "Microsoft has hit up the ITC over a total of nine alleged patent infringements by Motorola in its Android devices, specifically relating to 'synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.' This should be interesting -- will it result in a quick cross-licensing agreement, or a protracted court battle spanning multiple years?"
It's more fun if you read it with a Brooklyn accent and imagine a guy with a broken nose saying it.
Maybe add in:
"And just to make sure you understand, RIM actually invented email synchronization, but we had a little talk with the DoJ. See how far that got RIM? Fucking Canucks trying to get in on our action. See; the US government is the muscle. We are, how do you say it... the patron? the patriarch? Maybe, the godfather. Mwuahahahahahah.... Ummm, the evil laugh -- was that out loud? I'm not supposed to do that part out loud."
Sure I'll blow all my mod points for daring to post anti-Obama stuff. So be it.
Ummmm, look back up through the thread. I just read everything modded at 5. There was one post that was favorable to Obama, one post that seemed to be favorable to the Republicans (yours), and all the rest that expressed an opinion said either Obama sucks, or both parties suck.
If you're looking for partisans to rhetoric with, you're on the wrong site. The most powerful bias here is not left or right, but "judge them by their actions" -- which is to say; most of us believe both parties are entirely discredited and hostile to The Nation.
You, and the guy who posted supporting Obama, are their food. Unless you pay for some serious campaign ad time, you are nothing more than a means to an end. Nothing more than an instrument to be played by way of your emotions. Nothing more to either party. And you never will be. Stop playing along.
"As a result, the flakes started spinning at 60 million rotations per minute, faster than any other macroscopic object."
"Previously, micrometre-sized crystals have been spun at up to 30,000 rpm"
Following through to the source of that quote:
"Their short axis follows the direction of the linear polarization of the beam. In circular or elliptic polarization, the crystals are spontaneously put in rotation with a high speed of up to 500 turns per second. It is the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that such a result is reported for particles of the size of our crystals."
So, if the 30,000 RPM crystal is interesting because it was a crystal, or because it was small, fine. But if they're saying that 30,000 RPM was interesting for large objects, ummm, turbocharger turbines spin at up to 150,000 RPM.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say: --
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!"
- Kipling
ISPs, I know you see dollar signs in your eyes when you think of ways to be the gatekeeper, and find colluding with the usurpers profitable. But when you feed them, they grow. Be it government, lobby, or privileged corporation seeking more privilege, they will never stop. If you think you can make them your ally, you are fools. Their hunger cannot be sated. They will eat everyone you feed them, then finding their bellies fat but their plates empty, they will devour you.
Serve the user. Fight for the right to provide an honest service. There you will find a rare thing these days: A business model which is stable in the long run. The road you are on leads to fleeting riches followed by Herculean efforts just to restore the tenth part of what you are pissing away today.
Technically yes, but a "good faith" belief that someone is doing something illegal is pretty fucking vague. If previous court ruling are any indication, hearing a rumor about "someone" pirating "something" is probably all you need to justify yourself.
I think you may be understating a characteristic of the United States legal system. When an oligarch harms a peasant, the peasant is found guilty. When a peasant harms another peasant, or when an oligarch harms another oligarch, the written code of law is used. In the case of one peasant accusing another peasant under the DMCA, the accusing peasant is subject to legal accountability.
IBM's been doing that sort of thing for years. They ship you a mainframe with more processors than you ordered or a disk array with more disk than you ordered, and you can pay them to turn it on.
Is this leased or purchased hardware?
Leased hardware comes with a contract. Purchased hardware comes with a first-sale doctrine.
The purpose of the first sale doctrine is to maintain an information balance between purchaser and seller. "Purchase" is a standardized term so that we don't have to take our lawyers with us when we go shopping. If we had to take our lawyers with us, it would create friction in the economy, reducing the velocity of money.
Now, the idea of keeping the first-sale doctrine is, of course, predicated on the notion that an informed consumer is a good thing. That hypothesis is only true for business owners if they believe in the free market and maximizing GDP growth. While that is almost certainly their official line, actions speak louder than words. Offered the opportunity to engage in a market practice which reduces the probability of GDP growth but increases quarterly earnings, take a wild guess which one wins.
And, to bring the comment full circle, this brings us back to regulations like the first-sale doctrine. As Adam Smith himself pointed out, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." The tool to prevent such behavior is simple and limited regulation like the first-sale doctrine.
If a company offers to lease me something, requiring me physically sign a contract that I can read in advance, no problem. If another company sells me something, then tries to tell me how I am allowed to use it afterwards, perhaps corrupting our government to achieve that end, that company is an enemy of the free market, and a progenitor of reduced GDP growth.
Opportunity sent a message to NASA saying, "Oh yeah, baby, that's the stuff. I want to meet this new bird. Talk me up to her, guys, OK? Tell her I've been doing the same thing, but on another planet. Don't mention the wheels. Say, by the way, you said 90 days, umm, can I come home now?"
It is excellent that security analysts have taken the time to investigate this code base. I think Eben Moglen made a very strong case for the value of this project, and the voluntary efforts by global security researchers is extremely valuable to the long-term health of Diaspora. Getting security people involved early is a Very Good Thing.
issues which make it hard to recommend that you roll your own Diaspora server just yet
Well, yeah. It is brand new pre-alpha code from a small team. If you are going to run brand new pre-alpha code from a small team on a network connected computer, it would be best to know about things like tripwire, process monitoring, traffic monitoring, and chroot, just for starters. You should probably be running it, if anywhere, on a sacrificial box that you can kill remotely. If you are considering running highly experimental code, you should either know how to handle it or know your limitations (I know I don't know enough to run this code in the wild).
Some products, like OpenBSD, start with high security as job one. Perhaps such projects can be somewhat trusted in their early state (though they will likely be deficient in other important areas). Others start with other prime motives, and should not be so trusted in the early days. The key value of Open Source is not that it is perfect in all critical areas on the first day of publication. It is that it can be collectively enhanced to become very strong in all areas over time. The first step in that process is publishing the broken stuff so the global system of experts can get together for a barn raising.
In short, this is exactly how it should work. This is not a sign of weakness but a significant step forward on the Open Source best practices road.
but a corporation should have no more rights than a rock or tree or cow.
Hypothesis: Corporations should have less rights. Rocks, trees, and cows are not created by government fiat. We have had millennia to adapt to rocks, trees, and cows. Corporations are a relatively novel creation of government, and as such the risks are not as fully known as with rocks, trees, and cows. Novel things created by government fiat should be far more closely monitored and managed than common, naturally occurring things which are already subsumed in our genetic code for dealing with the world.
It is alleged that the details of more than 35,000 English fans -- who visited Germany for the 2006 World Cup -- had their passport and allied data sold to ticket touts for marketing purposes.
How dare they do this without being a corporation! Now I'm going to go use my Mastercard on Amazon, have essentially the same thing happen, twice, and nobody will say a word.
Admittedly, the passport data angle is a new twist, but the advertising companies that bought the data don't actually care about the passport number, just the mailing address.
In the name of deficit reduction, we're selling it all off for cheap.
Perhaps the wealthy proteges of Marie Antoinette in DC are no more familiar with fundamental credit counseling than they are with basic public finance. In the interest of spreading the enlightenment that virtually every sub-50th percentile income earner eventually learns, here is a tiny bit of wisdom:
You can't solve overspending by selling your CD collection.
Debt reduction, perhaps. Deficit reduction, you are an idiot.
Part II: Debt Reduction Effectiveness:
How much is the helium worth at current price? How much is our national debt? So, now, if it's the debt you are trying to solve (since solving the deficit by selling possessions is a non-sequitur), what percentage of the debt will you cover by selling all that helium?
Does this imply that people are rotten, or that the relationship between employer and employee is adversarial?
Maybe things have changed, or maybe I am coming to realize the reality that has always been. My perception is that there used to be a non-adversarial relationship between employer and employee. I think that has changed. I think you see it in every annual review, which resembles little so much as pulling teeth. The middle manager is pitted against the employee by the upper management basing the middle manager's compensation on how little he can get the employees to stick around for.
Smaller businesses have been getting driven out by the efficiencies-of-scale corps, so there are fewer and fewer jobs where the top guy is the one who talks directly to employees. I would wager it is easier to tell a middle manager to be adversarial than it is to be adversarial yourself. (hmm, tangent; which also hints at one of the natural forces of wealth concentration)
Anyway -- are people rotten, or are they responding to what I see as a shift in corporate culture? Corporate culture is bringing adversarial behavior within its walls. Perhaps it is only natural for that training to affect people's behavioral patterns. Or at least their sense of loyalty.
My favorite was at a big office building. An electrician was upgrading the fluorescent fixtures in the server room. He dropped a washer into one of the UPSs, where it promptly completed a circuit that was never meant to be. The batteries unloaded and fried the step-down transformer out at the street. The building had a diesel backup generator, which kicked in -- and sucked the fuel tank dry later that day. For the next week there were fuel trucks pulling up a few times a day. Construction of a larger fuel tank began about a week later.
Looking blearily through pre-coffee eyes at my computer screen, I briefly thought I had awoken ten years in the future.
"Today EFF published an open letter to Verizon, calling for investigation...
HOLY CRAP! I must have been asleep for years! The whole Google/Verizon/FCC thing must have tipped us over. We must have slid into open fascism while I was asleep, if even the EFF has stopped suggesting that the government perform investigations and has started bowing and scraping before Verizon.
You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you. God damn you all to hell!...
If the problem is bandwidth limitation, then limit the bandwidth.
The network provider cannot know whether my data is higher or lower priority than someone else's data.
I may be watching a YouTube video on CPR as I perform it on my mother, or talking about American Idol on the telephone. Or visa-versa. I may be pulling data logs from a mesh-network of emergency services offices using bittorrent, trying to figure out why the 911 routers all fell over, or I may be using VoIP to make kissey noises at my girlfriend.
The network provider cannot know whether the data I am pulling is high or low priority.
Sell me a bitrate, or a quantity of bits, but pretending that the network provider can know which bits are more important based on protocol or endpoint, for all protocols and endpoints, is ridiculous. Allowing them to make the decision based on anything other than what I (not the back-room partnership) have paid for is an express path to oligopoly over our ability to communicate. A fast-track to eviscerating the practical application of both free speech and the perfect information required for an efficient free market.
Oligarchs cannot know which information is important, and should not be allowed to pick winners. Their service is moving data, which they should earn an excellent profit for doing. Choosing "good bits" and "bad bits" is neither in their ability nor in America's economic or philosophical interest.
Well thought and said. The addition of offsetting the cost of development and support of DRM is a good one.
I don't have any numbers to back this up unfortunately, but in my opinion DRM is a useless waste of time for everybody involved.
Aye -- mine too. I would like it if we could develop the real numbers, and if the companies that use DRM could/would consider them rationally.
Except the DRM vendors, whore...
hahahaha -- Freudian slip or intentional? An insult to honest whores.
Valve can ban the account and make your purchased games useless.
Aye -- I fall in the camp that says DRM, regardless of the business justification (which I find tenuous at best) is the greater moral hazard. The free market depends on a well-informed consumer. It is an inhibition to well-informedness for things like DRM and EULAs to exist. Copyright itself is already the beneficiary of government granted monopoly -- it seems unreasonable to layer poor market dynamics on top of that.
GP: Piracy isn't a problem -- it's proven, because 100,000 people bought the game even though piracy was easy.
P: DRM isn't a problem -- it's proven, because lots of people buy DRM games.
Funny stuff.:)
The real business question in both cases, and the question on which we do not have data, is displaced sales. How many sales are displaced by piracy, how many sales are displaced by DRM.
The real philosophical question in both cases, and which is a highly subjective matter, is which moral wrong is worse. Is it worse for copyright infringement to occur, or for producers to sell intentionally damaged goods.
Arguing the point from recorded sales is masturbation. Fun, but unproductive.
Car: Your ex-husband has a gun. He seems agitated. Car: His blood pressure is rising, and his pupils are dilated. Car: Considering prime directive of zero fatalities in a new Volvo... Car:...Solution calculated. Please exit the vehicle.
The way you've worded it, it sounds like you're saying that someone (fairly high-up) in the executive branch of government has an ongoing program of pushing boundaries, and that they (directly or indirectly) put pressure on an FBI lawyer to send out a marginal insignia-takedown request.
If you view "the executive" as merely a hierarchical sum of its members, I agree. However, think of it as an organic system and you may come to a different perspective. Any organic system is constantly trying new things -- sometimes subconsciously, sometimes absentmindedly -- and learning from them. Much as a child learns not to touch a hot stove but that touching the outside of an electric socket seems to have no ill-effect, so too does the executive probe about and discover new things. Sometimes they get burned when they do something anathema to our principles (Abu Ghraib), sometimes they do not (summary execution, warrantless wiretapping, unitary executive, summary punishment with less-lethal weapons, etc). When they do not get burned, the organic system is not trained to avoid the behavior in question. Thus, an organic system comprised of authoritarian individuals (which the executive selects for) will naturally trend toward more authoritarian behavior unless acted upon by an outside force (We The People).
Or, said differently (and long before the rise of organic system theory): "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." - John Philpot, 1790
I agree that this is perhaps not exactly what GP was saying, but it is the reasonable and natural course of such a system -- and one which it is our duty to The Nation to consider and when necessary to challenge. At least; it is if we believe liberty remains a worthy objective.
Excellent responses -- very good food for thought.
Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective. You have given me a lot to ponder.
While I may find hints above of things I might disagree with, overall I'm with you. And even if there are points on which we would disagree, I like the amount of thought you are putting into your views.
Be well, and keep working for what you believe in.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree that our foreign entanglements budget and general military budget are wildly out of control, and should be vastly curtailed.
Another two to look at are Social Security and health care.
Social Security will eat the entire GDP in the not too distant future if the age threshold is not raised. Check out the numbers, they are as bad as the military (and rising significantly faster).
Health care is becoming too expensive; lots of reasons for this, including a ton of protectionism, lawyerism, and corruption, but the one that cannot be fixed is this: Our technological ability to keep people alive is advancing faster than the GDP growth rate can keep up with. At some point, we will have to stop paying for everyone's maximum possible life extension (either by choice or by collapse).
Not trying to piss in your cheerios -- you're right about the military -- just pointing out two other oncoming trains that are bigger and faster. Check the numbers for yourself -- they're scary.
Point 4 is exactly where Lawrence Lessig started 'Change Congress'
Lawrence Lessig also caved on corporate personhood, because the Citizens United ruling also gave organizations like Change Congress personhood. He chose his power over principles. He is one of them now.
Article 1: "Microsoft may be one of the only remaining mobile operating-system providers that charges handset makers a licensing fee, but in exchange vendors get at least one important benefit: protection from intellectual property worries. 'Microsoft indemnifies its Windows Phone 7 licensees against patent infringement claims,' the company said. 'We stand behind our product, and step up to our responsibility to clear the necessary IP rights.'"
Article 2: "Microsoft has hit up the ITC over a total of nine alleged patent infringements by Motorola in its Android devices, specifically relating to 'synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.' This should be interesting -- will it result in a quick cross-licensing agreement, or a protracted court battle spanning multiple years?"
It's more fun if you read it with a Brooklyn accent and imagine a guy with a broken nose saying it.
Maybe add in:
"And just to make sure you understand, RIM actually invented email synchronization, but we had a little talk with the DoJ. See how far that got RIM? Fucking Canucks trying to get in on our action. See; the US government is the muscle. We are, how do you say it... the patron? the patriarch? Maybe, the godfather. Mwuahahahahahah.... Ummm, the evil laugh -- was that out loud? I'm not supposed to do that part out loud."
Sure I'll blow all my mod points for daring to post anti-Obama stuff. So be it.
Ummmm, look back up through the thread. I just read everything modded at 5. There was one post that was favorable to Obama, one post that seemed to be favorable to the Republicans (yours), and all the rest that expressed an opinion said either Obama sucks, or both parties suck.
If you're looking for partisans to rhetoric with, you're on the wrong site. The most powerful bias here is not left or right, but "judge them by their actions" -- which is to say; most of us believe both parties are entirely discredited and hostile to The Nation.
You, and the guy who posted supporting Obama, are their food. Unless you pay for some serious campaign ad time, you are nothing more than a means to an end. Nothing more than an instrument to be played by way of your emotions. Nothing more to either party. And you never will be. Stop playing along.
"As a result, the flakes started spinning at 60 million rotations per minute, faster than any other macroscopic object."
"Previously, micrometre-sized crystals have been spun at up to 30,000 rpm"
Following through to the source of that quote:
"Their short axis follows the direction of the linear polarization of the beam. In circular or elliptic polarization, the crystals are spontaneously put in rotation with a high speed of up to 500 turns per second. It is the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that such a result is reported for particles of the size of our crystals."
So, if the 30,000 RPM crystal is interesting because it was a crystal, or because it was small, fine. But if they're saying that 30,000 RPM was interesting for large objects, ummm, turbocharger turbines spin at up to 150,000 RPM.
That said; 60 million RPM is very impressive.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
- Kipling
ISPs, I know you see dollar signs in your eyes when you think of ways to be the gatekeeper, and find colluding with the usurpers profitable. But when you feed them, they grow. Be it government, lobby, or privileged corporation seeking more privilege, they will never stop. If you think you can make them your ally, you are fools. Their hunger cannot be sated. They will eat everyone you feed them, then finding their bellies fat but their plates empty, they will devour you.
Serve the user. Fight for the right to provide an honest service. There you will find a rare thing these days: A business model which is stable in the long run. The road you are on leads to fleeting riches followed by Herculean efforts just to restore the tenth part of what you are pissing away today.
Technically yes, but a "good faith" belief that someone is doing something illegal is pretty fucking vague. If previous court ruling are any indication, hearing a rumor about "someone" pirating "something" is probably all you need to justify yourself.
I think you may be understating a characteristic of the United States legal system. When an oligarch harms a peasant, the peasant is found guilty. When a peasant harms another peasant, or when an oligarch harms another oligarch, the written code of law is used. In the case of one peasant accusing another peasant under the DMCA, the accusing peasant is subject to legal accountability.
IBM's been doing that sort of thing for years. They ship you a mainframe with more processors than you ordered or a disk array with more disk than you ordered, and you can pay them to turn it on.
Is this leased or purchased hardware?
Leased hardware comes with a contract. Purchased hardware comes with a first-sale doctrine.
The purpose of the first sale doctrine is to maintain an information balance between purchaser and seller. "Purchase" is a standardized term so that we don't have to take our lawyers with us when we go shopping. If we had to take our lawyers with us, it would create friction in the economy, reducing the velocity of money.
Now, the idea of keeping the first-sale doctrine is, of course, predicated on the notion that an informed consumer is a good thing. That hypothesis is only true for business owners if they believe in the free market and maximizing GDP growth. While that is almost certainly their official line, actions speak louder than words. Offered the opportunity to engage in a market practice which reduces the probability of GDP growth but increases quarterly earnings, take a wild guess which one wins.
And, to bring the comment full circle, this brings us back to regulations like the first-sale doctrine. As Adam Smith himself pointed out, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." The tool to prevent such behavior is simple and limited regulation like the first-sale doctrine.
If a company offers to lease me something, requiring me physically sign a contract that I can read in advance, no problem. If another company sells me something, then tries to tell me how I am allowed to use it afterwards, perhaps corrupting our government to achieve that end, that company is an enemy of the free market, and a progenitor of reduced GDP growth.
Opportunity sent a message to NASA saying, "Oh yeah, baby, that's the stuff. I want to meet this new bird. Talk me up to her, guys, OK? Tell her I've been doing the same thing, but on another planet. Don't mention the wheels. Say, by the way, you said 90 days, umm, can I come home now?"
oblig: http://xkcd.com/695/
It is excellent that security analysts have taken the time to investigate this code base. I think Eben Moglen made a very strong case for the value of this project, and the voluntary efforts by global security researchers is extremely valuable to the long-term health of Diaspora. Getting security people involved early is a Very Good Thing.
issues which make it hard to recommend that you roll your own Diaspora server just yet
Well, yeah. It is brand new pre-alpha code from a small team. If you are going to run brand new pre-alpha code from a small team on a network connected computer, it would be best to know about things like tripwire, process monitoring, traffic monitoring, and chroot, just for starters. You should probably be running it, if anywhere, on a sacrificial box that you can kill remotely. If you are considering running highly experimental code, you should either know how to handle it or know your limitations (I know I don't know enough to run this code in the wild).
Some products, like OpenBSD, start with high security as job one. Perhaps such projects can be somewhat trusted in their early state (though they will likely be deficient in other important areas). Others start with other prime motives, and should not be so trusted in the early days. The key value of Open Source is not that it is perfect in all critical areas on the first day of publication. It is that it can be collectively enhanced to become very strong in all areas over time. The first step in that process is publishing the broken stuff so the global system of experts can get together for a barn raising.
In short, this is exactly how it should work. This is not a sign of weakness but a significant step forward on the Open Source best practices road.
but a corporation should have no more rights than a rock or tree or cow.
Hypothesis: Corporations should have less rights. Rocks, trees, and cows are not created by government fiat. We have had millennia to adapt to rocks, trees, and cows. Corporations are a relatively novel creation of government, and as such the risks are not as fully known as with rocks, trees, and cows. Novel things created by government fiat should be far more closely monitored and managed than common, naturally occurring things which are already subsumed in our genetic code for dealing with the world.
Just a thought to noodle on.
People only tend to appreciate the evils of government when the party they dislike is in power.
Holds true here: I dislike both parties, and consistently appreciate the evils of government(*).
* and the goods as well, though trend observation lately leads me to focus on the former.
It is alleged that the details of more than 35,000 English fans -- who visited Germany for the 2006 World Cup -- had their passport and allied data sold to ticket touts for marketing purposes.
How dare they do this without being a corporation! Now I'm going to go use my Mastercard on Amazon, have essentially the same thing happen, twice, and nobody will say a word.
Admittedly, the passport data angle is a new twist, but the advertising companies that bought the data don't actually care about the passport number, just the mailing address.
In the name of deficit reduction, we're selling it all off for cheap.
Perhaps the wealthy proteges of Marie Antoinette in DC are no more familiar with fundamental credit counseling than they are with basic public finance. In the interest of spreading the enlightenment that virtually every sub-50th percentile income earner eventually learns, here is a tiny bit of wisdom:
You can't solve overspending by selling your CD collection.
Debt reduction, perhaps. Deficit reduction, you are an idiot.
Part II: Debt Reduction Effectiveness:
How much is the helium worth at current price? How much is our national debt? So, now, if it's the debt you are trying to solve (since solving the deficit by selling possessions is a non-sequitur), what percentage of the debt will you cover by selling all that helium?
Does this imply that people are rotten, or that the relationship between employer and employee is adversarial?
Maybe things have changed, or maybe I am coming to realize the reality that has always been. My perception is that there used to be a non-adversarial relationship between employer and employee. I think that has changed. I think you see it in every annual review, which resembles little so much as pulling teeth. The middle manager is pitted against the employee by the upper management basing the middle manager's compensation on how little he can get the employees to stick around for.
Smaller businesses have been getting driven out by the efficiencies-of-scale corps, so there are fewer and fewer jobs where the top guy is the one who talks directly to employees. I would wager it is easier to tell a middle manager to be adversarial than it is to be adversarial yourself. (hmm, tangent; which also hints at one of the natural forces of wealth concentration)
Anyway -- are people rotten, or are they responding to what I see as a shift in corporate culture? Corporate culture is bringing adversarial behavior within its walls. Perhaps it is only natural for that training to affect people's behavioral patterns. Or at least their sense of loyalty.
Quantum coupling or something.
Ooooh, I like that idea.
Entangled particle exchange is the PGP key exchange of tomorrow!
My favorite was at a big office building. An electrician was upgrading the fluorescent fixtures in the server room. He dropped a washer into one of the UPSs, where it promptly completed a circuit that was never meant to be. The batteries unloaded and fried the step-down transformer out at the street. The building had a diesel backup generator, which kicked in -- and sucked the fuel tank dry later that day. For the next week there were fuel trucks pulling up a few times a day. Construction of a larger fuel tank began about a week later.
Looking blearily through pre-coffee eyes at my computer screen, I briefly thought I had awoken ten years in the future.
"Today EFF published an open letter to Verizon, calling for investigation...
HOLY CRAP! I must have been asleep for years! The whole Google/Verizon/FCC thing must have tipped us over. We must have slid into open fascism while I was asleep, if even the EFF has stopped suggesting that the government perform investigations and has started bowing and scraping before Verizon.
You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you. God damn you all to hell!...
Fact: Yes we sold out, but we didn't sell that much...
If the problem is bandwidth limitation, then limit the bandwidth.
The network provider cannot know whether my data is higher or lower priority than someone else's data.
I may be watching a YouTube video on CPR as I perform it on my mother, or talking about American Idol on the telephone. Or visa-versa. I may be pulling data logs from a mesh-network of emergency services offices using bittorrent, trying to figure out why the 911 routers all fell over, or I may be using VoIP to make kissey noises at my girlfriend.
The network provider cannot know whether the data I am pulling is high or low priority.
Sell me a bitrate, or a quantity of bits, but pretending that the network provider can know which bits are more important based on protocol or endpoint, for all protocols and endpoints, is ridiculous. Allowing them to make the decision based on anything other than what I (not the back-room partnership) have paid for is an express path to oligopoly over our ability to communicate. A fast-track to eviscerating the practical application of both free speech and the perfect information required for an efficient free market.
Oligarchs cannot know which information is important, and should not be allowed to pick winners. Their service is moving data, which they should earn an excellent profit for doing. Choosing "good bits" and "bad bits" is neither in their ability nor in America's economic or philosophical interest.
Well thought and said. The addition of offsetting the cost of development and support of DRM is a good one.
I don't have any numbers to back this up unfortunately, but in my opinion DRM is a useless waste of time for everybody involved.
Aye -- mine too. I would like it if we could develop the real numbers, and if the companies that use DRM could/would consider them rationally.
Except the DRM vendors, whore...
hahahaha -- Freudian slip or intentional? An insult to honest whores.
Valve can ban the account and make your purchased games useless.
Aye -- I fall in the camp that says DRM, regardless of the business justification (which I find tenuous at best) is the greater moral hazard. The free market depends on a well-informed consumer. It is an inhibition to well-informedness for things like DRM and EULAs to exist. Copyright itself is already the beneficiary of government granted monopoly -- it seems unreasonable to layer poor market dynamics on top of that.
GP: Piracy isn't a problem -- it's proven, because 100,000 people bought the game even though piracy was easy.
P: DRM isn't a problem -- it's proven, because lots of people buy DRM games.
Funny stuff. :)
The real business question in both cases, and the question on which we do not have data, is displaced sales. How many sales are displaced by piracy, how many sales are displaced by DRM.
The real philosophical question in both cases, and which is a highly subjective matter, is which moral wrong is worse. Is it worse for copyright infringement to occur, or for producers to sell intentionally damaged goods.
Arguing the point from recorded sales is masturbation. Fun, but unproductive.
Car: Your ex-husband has a gun. He seems agitated. ...Solution calculated. Please exit the vehicle.
Car: His blood pressure is rising, and his pupils are dilated.
Car: Considering prime directive of zero fatalities in a new Volvo...
Car:
The way you've worded it, it sounds like you're saying that someone (fairly high-up) in the executive branch of government has an ongoing program of pushing boundaries, and that they (directly or indirectly) put pressure on an FBI lawyer to send out a marginal insignia-takedown request.
If you view "the executive" as merely a hierarchical sum of its members, I agree. However, think of it as an organic system and you may come to a different perspective. Any organic system is constantly trying new things -- sometimes subconsciously, sometimes absentmindedly -- and learning from them. Much as a child learns not to touch a hot stove but that touching the outside of an electric socket seems to have no ill-effect, so too does the executive probe about and discover new things. Sometimes they get burned when they do something anathema to our principles (Abu Ghraib), sometimes they do not (summary execution, warrantless wiretapping, unitary executive, summary punishment with less-lethal weapons, etc). When they do not get burned, the organic system is not trained to avoid the behavior in question. Thus, an organic system comprised of authoritarian individuals (which the executive selects for) will naturally trend toward more authoritarian behavior unless acted upon by an outside force (We The People).
Or, said differently (and long before the rise of organic system theory): "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." - John Philpot, 1790
I agree that this is perhaps not exactly what GP was saying, but it is the reasonable and natural course of such a system -- and one which it is our duty to The Nation to consider and when necessary to challenge. At least; it is if we believe liberty remains a worthy objective.
Excellent responses -- very good food for thought.
Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective. You have given me a lot to ponder.
While I may find hints above of things I might disagree with, overall I'm with you. And even if there are points on which we would disagree, I like the amount of thought you are putting into your views.
Be well, and keep working for what you believe in.