Microsoft would immediately turn it into an abusive monopoly and Google won't. What's the difference between the two?
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and serial abuser of said monopoly power with an operational philosophy/culture that encourages this. Google isn't.
For the most part, their 'product' is invisible.
Maybe to the average consumer. Not to those buying online advertising.
While Google has many competitors in that marketplace, none of them get a lot of press. Or any press at all, aside from trade journals.
It's because none of Google's competitors have managed to duplicate both sides of their business:
Google has good stuff on both sides of the equation. They sell ads on websites. They create websites that are premeire destinations on the web and sell ads on them. Nobody else really does both of them as well.
There are many competitors that do online advertising pretty well. And those are invisible to Joe Consumer, but not to those buying online advertising (hence the trade journals).
That I find that many GW skeptics do the former. That is to say they raise legitimate questions of the empirical data. They question the methods used, such as using computer models to "prove" things (a model doesn't prove anything), the data gathered, the understanding of the system and so on. They bring up extremely valid points. However the response always seems to be the same: They are shouted down.
That's fine as far as it goes. And especially when it coincides with erring on the side of caution, it can be useful.
The problem I have with even a lot of the people in this camp is that it often looks like they're not actively developing a more useful conceptual framework for understanding climate change. The purpose of their questions doesn't seem to be to provoke thought or produce illumination.
The purpose simple seems to be to call existing understanding into doubt, and to prevent action based on it.
And then it gets taken to the popular sphere, where it absolutely IS, no question, used by industry shills, political entertainers, and other manipulators of the public mindset.
If the people who are getting shouted down want to be taken seriously, they're going to have to work harder on both fronts: gather better data, produce clearly better models. And they're going to have make the implications of their work clear, so that they don't find themselves being used in the same breath as those who say "Hah! Global warming my navel! I woke up this morning and there was a foot of snow!"
It's a rough road, but it's the real road travelled by those who've been able to fight existing consensus and shift paradigms.
From what I've seen, the skeptics do their best to present very well reasoned criticisms and questions of the accepted knowledge. The defenders are the ones that act unscientific and just shout the other side down.
I'm sure there is simple shouting down going on, as surely as there absolutely people who are living examples of the "Global warming my navel" crowd I mentioned before, and real industry shills.
There are, by the same token, people who are happy to genuinely argue the scientific case. For example, the sun-driven theory of climate change has been around for a while, and its critics aren't simply ignoring it:
The state's actually not a bad place for startups and new ideas right now. It's got an educated populace with a good work ethic and historically low wages. I've worked for three different startups in the last 10 years, all of which have either turned into profitable, sustainable operations, or been sold, or both.
But ability to do keyword advertising has been crucial to the success of last one, and played a role in the success of the first two as it does with nearly any online enterprise. And even if keywords aren't just banned, but become some kind of IP, it seems like it would essentially entrench established players and make things much harder for startups. It's hard for me to see any other result than decreased competition.
If the law really works that way, I'd hope Google won't even wait to go to court, but simply pull the rug out from under businesses in the state. Nothing I can think of would send a message to Utah's tech business community about what their legislators are busy doing.
Then again, maybe it wouldn't. Maybe the bill is backed by people who've got money and who'd like to have a new IP fronteir on which to practice land-grabbing. And you'd think this would be a paradox, given that Utah's political culture is ostensibly economically liberal. But sadly, it wouldn't be the first time I'd have heard about local business interests influencing law to create or defend a personal gravy train.
...the head of an image processing and fx software company, I can tell you one thing with certainty: Online apps that transfer photos back and forth and process them online are the very last thing on our list of technologies to be concerned about.
It's not going to stay that way. Much (if not most) of the processing will be done on the client side. Using Javascript/Canvas, using flash, maybe even Java Applets. I know this because I'm working on an app that does a limited amount of image editing via the first means -- it's a huge pain because of cross-browser differences and because the Canvas is still essentially bleeding edge, but that'll change, and the other two technologies are more mature, and what people try to do with them is only going to increase. You might see the final image apply transformations in a batch manner on the server side, but that's one round trip, something people are probably going to be fine with.
This isn't to say that desktop software will go away -- I agree that for professionals, desktop software will likely always have features unavailable in online products. But for an awful lot of everyday simple stuff, I suspect that web apps will indeed become compelling.
What's more, you don't have to spend long in today's business culture before it becomes *obvious* that there's enough of a critical mass of actors who believe in getting ahead by amassing control over channels and perception (rather than producing/adding value) that the emergence of price-fixing behavior is practically inevitable.
The problem isn't necessarily trying to dot every i and cross every t, or even government in particular. How hard is it to picture a good number of PHBs in the private sector reading this article and thinking "paint will make our network secure!"? The difference is that rather than your tax dollars being wasted, investment/operations dollars will be. Cost subsidized by the consumer in less competetive or more collusive markets.
To be pithy, the ultimate problem is "zeal without knowledge" -- or, to be a bit more verbose, quick institutionalization of specific rules and practices for their own sake, rather than the development of an institution with intelligence and introspection built-in and distributed throughout.
Markets only work when there are choices and there's no collusion between those you can choose between. The consortium reported on here is all about colluding to avoid market forces.
I think it's possible that new content providers and models will provide competition, and there's all kinds of completely different media now capturing attention share that television used to command, and so I suspect that if net neutrality isn't destroyed that there will be enough alternatives to keep markets working, if slowly while the dinosaurs struggle to change. But it's not going to be a sure thing, certainly nothing to get complacent about.
The problem with public officials is that they have the right to use excessive force in order to protect their position. The average citizen has no right to call out any public official on any illegal actions since the average citizen has no real power against non-elected public officials.
The problem is probably more closely related to the fact that, in part due to the libertarian ravings about "the gubmint" like your own, in part due to the dissolution of community, people have stopped seeing *themselves* as the source of civic power and have therefore chosen to be governed rather than govern themselves. Eliminating civic power is one choice, of course, but really, it simply makes the eventual private power structure that arises more opaque and even less accountable, should the citizenry choose to rouse itself at some point. The Sipples have recourse in courts and councils right now. Remove civic power, and they wouldn't have that alternative, or a speed limit to attempt to enforce, or a means via which to try to enforce it other than personal confrontation.
They'll have to spend some time and attention getting a matter of social conflict resolved. But the truth is that this problem wouldn't magically go away in a Liberatarian fantasy world, and they'd have fewer tools to work with.
There's certainly a difference worthy of at least semantic note between selection / breeding by phenotype, and direct manipulation of genotype. GM foods may turn out to pose no risks to consumers, but saying they're produced in the same way new breeds have been produced for thousands of years is deceptive.
State run monopolies always have two advantages over any private corporation. State run monopolies can easier push through legislation to make it harder to compete with them, and state run monopolies can always make up for inefficiency, poor planning, and higher operational costs with tax money.
And yet, there are in fact government or civic programs that die, or never grow large enough to persist. Markets have their mechanisms for obsolescence, but they're not the only mechanisms.
I am not against rules to help poke and prod competition forward, but setting up state run and tax subsidized networks is not the answer.
There's a developer's mantra -- "right tool for the right job" -- that really ought to see more use in discussion of politics and policy. "Privatization is always the right way to go" is about like saying "Java is always the right choice."
When a service that provides a huge amount of utility to society has trouble developing into a commodity, sometimes we do in fact set up state-run enterprises, and sometimes, it works rather well as a platform for further social and economic development. And the truth is, having left things in a private state of affairs for the last two decades doesn't seem to have produced any real competition when it comes to basic network services -- not to mention advancement of those services has been exceptionally limited. There was various legislation to encourage monopolies to open their networks to others who wanted to sell services. The privately owned networks reacted defensively and made it difficult. This is where the "open network" philosophy that's driving many of the municipal network initiatives comes from. The private approach hasn't worked. The private sector is far more interested in rent-seeking and clamping down access than innovation. The only apparent alternatives are public subsidization for companies building new infrastructure (which we also tried, giving millions to telcos to lay fiber and new networks) in hopes that having several different infrastructures might produce competition -- or public networks, on top of which private providers can truly compete.
It's not that different from the idea of having a public road system, over which many private operators can offer shipping or transportation services and compete absent of the kind of fear and complications that having a competitor own the roads would produce. Frankly, I'd like to see more of our utility networks move this way, but AFAIK, packet-switched natural gas isn't in the picture.
Only Libertarians truly stand for constitutionally protected freedom
Libertarians (at least, your traditional anarchocapitalist) also have their problems, often including a rather large blind spot towards the abuse of private power and some seriously inconsistent views regarding the trustworthiness thereof and the strength of the profit incentive.
Not that I don't think it might do us some good to turn the entire Democratic and Republican parties out of office for a term or two, and I agree with the libertarians that civic power presents the problem of misuse. But a vacuum leaves only private power to protect from other private power, and once collusion sets in, the problem becomes nearly intractable, and freedom is again lost. The alternative -- having a democratic republic where civic power is accountable to the citizenry -- also has flaws, mainly that it's only as good as the citizenry attempts to keep it, but it's more easily subject to change when the citizenry chooses.
2 out of four, actually, if I'm counting correctly: "the bill is sponsored by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Joseph Biden (D-DE), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC)." Split the blame 50-50.
I'm sure there are people out there who'd claim the Democrats are squeaky clean, but I suspect the majority of the critics of the recent Republican congress understood that a Democratic upset wouldn't fix all our problems. It's never been a secret, at least on Slashdot, that the Dems have ties to content cartels that match those among the R's, and yes, there's lots of new blood in the picture from the last election, but in all but a very few races, sensible intellectual property laws weren't even raised as an issue, so we've no idea what to expect even from the freshmen.
What we *have* known is that the Republican majority government has been anything but good, and that the ostensible Democratic philosophy at least pays lip service to concepts like the public good. It's no hypocrisy to examine the status quo, condemn its authors and potentates, and suggest the opposition might do better.
Ultimately, though, I think the problem here is that intellectual property isn't a campaign issue -- and worse, I think somehow, rent-extracting royalty-free living is probably seen by the average citizen as one way of finding the American Dream. Invent a widget, patent it, live comfortably for the rest of your life of license fees. Never mind it's rarely that simple, the perception matters. Voters won't elect someone based on their insight into IP Law any more than they'll elect someone on their insight into technical matters -- unless they themselves posses a similar level of insight. So it's not surprising that neither party seems to produce a preponderance of candidates with interests in balancing property-like economic incentives for creativity with important freedoms.
What to do, then? I'm not sure, but I think it might include these steps:
(1) Tech companies must lobby and increase the power of their lobby. They share some of our interests. (2) We need to support organizations like the EFF who work on these issues. Monetarily. (3) Individual geeks must lobby as constituents. Not just letter writing. Go to their damn office. Make an appointment with the staffers who cover the related issues. Discuss issues with them. Listen as well as make your case -- because you're going to have to learn the other sides of the case in order to respond to their concerns as well as express yours.
Things that won't help: ignoring the problem that this issue cuts across party lines, or using announcements like this one as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at a party you dislike.
There is however no reason why this should be such an expensive (as in have to sell all your assets and go live under a bridge) proposition.
There are reasons. The main one has to do with demand, and with how the legal system and profession feeds its own demand. Complexity of the system is part of the problem, though it may not be possible to eliminate legal complexity any more than it's possible to eliminate complexity in software development. And the other half is the arms-race nature of representation which is almost inherent in an adversarial system where one must hire professionals.
If you want to quibble, you could ask where he got the EvilAlienOS programmer's reference manual or the EvilAlienCPU's architecture description or how he managed to find an exploitable vulnerability in EvilAlienOS so quickly.
EvilAlienOS is actually Windows95, which they, like everybody else in the universe, were forced to install on their hardware by Microsfot.
This is actually the reason they invaded in the first place.
Fortunately, once Jeff Goldblum figured this out, finding an exploitable vulnerability wasn't a problem.
So, yeah, I searched Yahoo's site, and pretty much think the article is wrong. Yahoo Music is not selling this track as an MP3 (alternatively, their peanut butter may be spread so thin they're simply unable to actually execute the policy of selling it, even though they've decided they're selling it).
But this "amplified.com" site is in fact selling it. However, I've never heard of them before, and like a lot of other online retailers who I've never purchased from, I'm reluctant to hand over my credit card number. So I decided to use a feature my credit card offers called "ShopSafe", which lets you generate temporary numbers with a given limit and expiration date.
I decided to use a temporary number I created two weeks ago that had one dollar left on the account. The purchase came back "declined due to insufficient funds". Odd, given that the track was supposed to be $.99, and there's a dollar left on the limit.
OK, I decided to create a new number, just in case the old one was the problem. Limit $1, expires 2/07.
Declined due to insufficient funds.
Well, maybe like many companies, they actually ding you for just a bit more for some reason. OK. I bumped the limit on the temp number up to $5.
Declined due to insufficient funds.
Suffice it to say that if this was just about purchasing the song, I would have given up by this point for certain. But I don't want some brain-damanged analyst who is unable to fathom the very idea of *ease of experience* to attribute the failure of this promo to piracy (or worse "people like DRM"), so in principle I want to support it.
$10 limit: declined due to insufficient funds.
I'm sorry? $10 in an account is not enough to purchase a $1 song? This must be the kind of Math that the analytically challenged record labels use to determine their loss figures.
I was finally able to buy when giving the card a limit of $25. For a $1 song. Not to mention 20 minutes of work.
It is an MP3, and it's not bad. For the song itself, it wouldn't be worth the hassle.
Today, new CD releases are south of $15 and selection of online music is plentiful at $0.99 and below. Yet this price is still not "fair." For many people, it never will be.
Maybe for some people. But for "many" people, $5 seems to be a good target.
I've made/sold compilation CDs with a bunch of local musicians, almost all of us (with one or two exceptions) with only small followings. The idea was to cross-pollinate our audiences, really, but we were going to do our best to sell as many CDs to whoever would buy them at the summer festival where we were all performing and promoting the discs.
$15? Even the fans of some of the artists on the CD were slow to buy. $10? Fans were likely to buy, but the average passerby would pretty $5? They *sold*. Almost all of 'em. Many to people who'd never heard a single artist on the compilation before.
We repeated this experience over a few years. $5 is the magic number. We've been able to sell some discs for more as we acquired a rep, but strangers buy at $5.
I seem to recall an NYC street musician doing a similar experiment and coming up with the same number. Wish I could come up with a link.
As for individual tracks online, I don't have similar experience trying to sell, but as a buyer, I can tell you that at the prices AllOfMP3.com sells at (about $.10-$.15 per track the way I encode), I've found that I don't even think about the cost. If I want to listen to something I don't already have handy, I'll buy it. In some cases, I have even just bought songs I *already own* but don't want to bother looking for the CD. The cost of downloading is practically negligible and it's a very low-hassle experience. I'd probably continue to think that way up to a quarter per track.
This isn't to say I *won't* buy music online at higher prices. I've shopped the iTunes store regularly and have bought a good chunk of music there. I'd probably never buy stuff on a whim there that I've bought at AllOfMP3.com (say, the "Flash Gordon" soundtrack by Queen), but I'm willing to buy some material I really like there, even with the DRM encumbrance, which is a hassle when it comes time to switch systems or share with friends.
Okay, I had my deductible/HSA contributions off, it's $2200, not $2400. I also have the HMO plan, not the PPO, which means jumping through hoops for referrals for specialists, but also means 100% coverage. I checked my benefits, and my max-out-of-pocket is my deductible of $2200. After that is met, I have $0 copays on everything (except non-routine equipment, which has another $2000 deductible).
That's interesting. If their covered costs are good, and if I could get it in a group situation for portability's sake, it's something I'd look into. Most of the high-deductible/HSA plans I looked into two years ago still had 20-30% coinsurance after the deductible, which made me very wary.
In fact, I propose that this insurance is BETTER for managing costs. A traditional medical plan cares 80% coverage, meaning if I have something bad happen to me and end up with a $40,000 medical bill, I'm on the hook for $8000. With my high deductible plan, I'm on the hook for $2,400.
You're suggesting you're insured 100% after your deductible is met -- that your deductible is also your out-of-pocket limit. This is not the case with any of the plans I'm familiar with, but I'm interested in the details if you can provide them. It might change my perspective.
If I roll snake-eyes, I just lose my $2400 that is socked into the HSA, but in other years, I keep most/all of it. Ten years from now, I'll have a stockpile of medical related cash in the HSA, that I can use to cover all these medical related expenses.
Unless you're correct about being 100% insured post-deductible, I think you're underestimating how expensive non-routine care can be. Five years ago I believed that anything short of cancer or a heart attack or some other serious chronic illness or traumatic injury couldn't eat into five figures of expenses. Now I know differently. There's also the fact that you rarely know how cooperative and insurance company is going to be about upholding the agreement as you've perceived it... 100% doesn't always mean 100% what you've been billed by the provider.
I understand the principle involved in the HSA/High-deductible plan. I agree that routine care may not be the best place for insurance for most people -- I'm certainly fine paying cash to the general practioner a few times a year if I go and buying typical drugs. For anything that's going to require significant testing ambulatory care, especially if they're not quick to apprehend what the actual problem is, though, it's a different world.
For me, I never go to the doctor because I'm healthy,
Nothing personal, but that says to me you may well be missing some perspective here. I insured the way you did for years -- high deductible (or no insurance!), savings account/out-of-pocket for small things.
But I got sick. Things got expensive fast -- I was (and still am) amazed at how much even blood tests can cost, or even to just see a specialist. And eventually, having insurance with good first-dollar coverage and decent out-of-pocket limitations became important.
If deductibles were also out-of-pocket limits, I still might be interested in trying to insure that way. But I haven't found a plan like that yet.
And more importantly, an issue that seemed simple and common sense when I was a healthy 20-something (whose biggest threat to health was probably that I'd injure myself while being active) seems very different from my mid-30s. Once you get into having to really deal with our medical and insurance system because you *need care*, it's definitely a different perspective.
Why not? They'll negotiate with you. In fact if you can pay them promptly, they'll cut you a better deal than they'll cut any insurance company.
I've had enough trouble negotiating with them when they bill me incorrectly -- seriously, a recent merry-go-round took me six months of active efforts to resolve. I've asked for discounts for paying *before* service. No dice. I'm glad other people have better luck, and I certainly think there's no point in trying to mandate negotiation away, but there's no reason to assume that all or even most hospitals are reasonable when negotiating with individual customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft would immediately turn it into an abusive monopoly and Google won't. What's the difference between the two?
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and serial abuser of said monopoly power with an operational philosophy/culture that encourages this. Google isn't.
For the most part, their 'product' is invisible.
Maybe to the average consumer. Not to those buying online advertising.
While Google has many competitors in that marketplace, none of them get a lot of press. Or any press at all, aside from trade journals.
It's because none of Google's competitors have managed to duplicate both sides of their business:
(a) online advertising
(b) interesting, useful, highly usable information technology services
Google has good stuff on both sides of the equation. They sell ads on websites. They create websites that are premeire destinations on the web and sell ads on them. Nobody else really does both of them as well.
There are many competitors that do online advertising pretty well. And those are invisible to Joe Consumer, but not to those buying online advertising (hence the trade journals).
That I find that many GW skeptics do the former. That is to say they raise legitimate questions of the empirical data. They question the methods used, such as using computer models to "prove" things (a model doesn't prove anything), the data gathered, the understanding of the system and so on. They bring up extremely valid points. However the response always seems to be the same: They are shouted down.
That's fine as far as it goes. And especially when it coincides with erring on the side of caution, it can be useful.
The problem I have with even a lot of the people in this camp is that it often looks like they're not actively developing a more useful conceptual framework for understanding climate change. The purpose of their questions doesn't seem to be to provoke thought or produce illumination.
The purpose simple seems to be to call existing understanding into doubt, and to prevent action based on it.
And then it gets taken to the popular sphere, where it absolutely IS, no question, used by industry shills, political entertainers, and other manipulators of the public mindset.
If the people who are getting shouted down want to be taken seriously, they're going to have to work harder on both fronts: gather better data, produce clearly better models. And they're going to have make the implications of their work clear, so that they don't find themselves being used in the same breath as those who say "Hah! Global warming my navel! I woke up this morning and there was a foot of snow!"
It's a rough road, but it's the real road travelled by those who've been able to fight existing consensus and shift paradigms.
From what I've seen, the skeptics do their best to present very well reasoned criticisms and questions of the accepted knowledge. The defenders are the ones that act unscientific and just shout the other side down.
I'm sure there is simple shouting down going on, as surely as there absolutely people who are living examples of the "Global warming my navel" crowd I mentioned before, and real industry shills.
There are, by the same token, people who are happy to genuinely argue the scientific case. For example, the sun-driven theory of climate change has been around for a while, and its critics aren't simply ignoring it:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=180
When the science of the skeptics can be called into question, as it often can be, the shoe should be worn on the other foot.
The state's actually not a bad place for startups and new ideas right now. It's got an educated populace with a good work ethic and historically low wages. I've worked for three different startups in the last 10 years, all of which have either turned into profitable, sustainable operations, or been sold, or both.
But ability to do keyword advertising has been crucial to the success of last one, and played a role in the success of the first two as it does with nearly any online enterprise. And even if keywords aren't just banned, but become some kind of IP, it seems like it would essentially entrench established players and make things much harder for startups. It's hard for me to see any other result than decreased competition.
If the law really works that way, I'd hope Google won't even wait to go to court, but simply pull the rug out from under businesses in the state. Nothing I can think of would send a message to Utah's tech business community about what their legislators are busy doing.
Then again, maybe it wouldn't. Maybe the bill is backed by people who've got money and who'd like to have a new IP fronteir on which to practice land-grabbing. And you'd think this would be a paradox, given that Utah's political culture is ostensibly economically liberal. But sadly, it wouldn't be the first time I'd have heard about local business interests influencing law to create or defend a personal gravy train.
...the head of an image processing and fx software company, I can tell you one thing with certainty: Online apps that transfer photos back and forth and process them online are the very last thing on our list of technologies to be concerned about.
It's not going to stay that way. Much (if not most) of the processing will be done on the client side. Using Javascript/Canvas, using flash, maybe even Java Applets. I know this because I'm working on an app that does a limited amount of image editing via the first means -- it's a huge pain because of cross-browser differences and because the Canvas is still essentially bleeding edge, but that'll change, and the other two technologies are more mature, and what people try to do with them is only going to increase. You might see the final image apply transformations in a batch manner on the server side, but that's one round trip, something people are probably going to be fine with.
This isn't to say that desktop software will go away -- I agree that for professionals, desktop software will likely always have features unavailable in online products. But for an awful lot of everyday simple stuff, I suspect that web apps will indeed become compelling.
Stop imagining conspiracies of collusion between cutthroat competitors.
0 -cd-settlement_x.htmm ed-in-video-tape-price-fixing-scheme/r +price+fixing/2100-1004_3-5894862.htmli ce-fixing.htmlh ronicle/archive/2002/05/10/MN24643.DTL8 -Wed-2002/business/18699104.htmlc t&isbn=0767903277
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2002-09-3
http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/21/sony-others-na
http://news.com.com/Samsung+to+pay+300+million+fo
http://illinoisissuesblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/pr
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2002/May-0
http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=28734&cgi=produ
What's more, you don't have to spend long in today's business culture before it becomes *obvious* that there's enough of a critical mass of actors who believe in getting ahead by amassing control over channels and perception (rather than producing/adding value) that the emergence of price-fixing behavior is practically inevitable.
The problem isn't necessarily trying to dot every i and cross every t, or even government in particular. How hard is it to picture a good number of PHBs in the private sector reading this article and thinking "paint will make our network secure!"? The difference is that rather than your tax dollars being wasted, investment/operations dollars will be. Cost subsidized by the consumer in less competetive or more collusive markets.
To be pithy, the ultimate problem is "zeal without knowledge" -- or, to be a bit more verbose, quick institutionalization of specific rules and practices for their own sake, rather than the development of an institution with intelligence and introspection built-in and distributed throughout.
Markets only work when there are choices and there's no collusion between those you can choose between. The consortium reported on here is all about colluding to avoid market forces.
I think it's possible that new content providers and models will provide competition, and there's all kinds of completely different media now capturing attention share that television used to command, and so I suspect that if net neutrality isn't destroyed that there will be enough alternatives to keep markets working, if slowly while the dinosaurs struggle to change. But it's not going to be a sure thing, certainly nothing to get complacent about.
The problem with public officials is that they have the right to use excessive force in order to protect their position. The average citizen has no right to call out any public official on any illegal actions since the average citizen has no real power against non-elected public officials.
The problem is probably more closely related to the fact that, in part due to the libertarian ravings about "the gubmint" like your own, in part due to the dissolution of community, people have stopped seeing *themselves* as the source of civic power and have therefore chosen to be governed rather than govern themselves. Eliminating civic power is one choice, of course, but really, it simply makes the eventual private power structure that arises more opaque and even less accountable, should the citizenry choose to rouse itself at some point. The Sipples have recourse in courts and councils right now. Remove civic power, and they wouldn't have that alternative, or a speed limit to attempt to enforce, or a means via which to try to enforce it other than personal confrontation.
They'll have to spend some time and attention getting a matter of social conflict resolved. But the truth is that this problem wouldn't magically go away in a Liberatarian fantasy world, and they'd have fewer tools to work with.
Most of the "Old School" foods are ALSO GM.
There's certainly a difference worthy of at least semantic note between selection / breeding by phenotype, and direct manipulation of genotype. GM foods may turn out to pose no risks to consumers, but saying they're produced in the same way new breeds have been produced for thousands of years is deceptive.
State run monopolies always have two advantages over any private corporation. State run monopolies can easier push through legislation to make it harder to compete with them, and state run monopolies can always make up for inefficiency, poor planning, and higher operational costs with tax money.
And yet, there are in fact government or civic programs that die, or never grow large enough to persist. Markets have their mechanisms for obsolescence, but they're not the only mechanisms.
I am not against rules to help poke and prod competition forward, but setting up state run and tax subsidized networks is not the answer.
There's a developer's mantra -- "right tool for the right job" -- that really ought to see more use in discussion of politics and policy. "Privatization is always the right way to go" is about like saying "Java is always the right choice."
When a service that provides a huge amount of utility to society has trouble developing into a commodity, sometimes we do in fact set up state-run enterprises, and sometimes, it works rather well as a platform for further social and economic development. And the truth is, having left things in a private state of affairs for the last two decades doesn't seem to have produced any real competition when it comes to basic network services -- not to mention advancement of those services has been exceptionally limited. There was various legislation to encourage monopolies to open their networks to others who wanted to sell services. The privately owned networks reacted defensively and made it difficult. This is where the "open network" philosophy that's driving many of the municipal network initiatives comes from. The private approach hasn't worked. The private sector is far more interested in rent-seeking and clamping down access than innovation. The only apparent alternatives are public subsidization for companies building new infrastructure (which we also tried, giving millions to telcos to lay fiber and new networks) in hopes that having several different infrastructures might produce competition -- or public networks, on top of which private providers can truly compete.
It's not that different from the idea of having a public road system, over which many private operators can offer shipping or transportation services and compete absent of the kind of fear and complications that having a competitor own the roads would produce. Frankly, I'd like to see more of our utility networks move this way, but AFAIK, packet-switched natural gas isn't in the picture.
Only Libertarians truly stand for constitutionally protected freedom
Libertarians (at least, your traditional anarchocapitalist) also have their problems, often including a rather large blind spot towards the abuse of private power and some seriously inconsistent views regarding the trustworthiness thereof and the strength of the profit incentive.
Not that I don't think it might do us some good to turn the entire Democratic and Republican parties out of office for a term or two, and I agree with the libertarians that civic power presents the problem of misuse. But a vacuum leaves only private power to protect from other private power, and once collusion sets in, the problem becomes nearly intractable, and freedom is again lost. The alternative -- having a democratic republic where civic power is accountable to the citizenry -- also has flaws, mainly that it's only as good as the citizenry attempts to keep it, but it's more easily subject to change when the citizenry chooses.
2 out of four, actually, if I'm counting correctly: "the bill is sponsored by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Joseph Biden (D-DE), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC)." Split the blame 50-50.
I'm sure there are people out there who'd claim the Democrats are squeaky clean, but I suspect the majority of the critics of the recent Republican congress understood that a Democratic upset wouldn't fix all our problems. It's never been a secret, at least on Slashdot, that the Dems have ties to content cartels that match those among the R's, and yes, there's lots of new blood in the picture from the last election, but in all but a very few races, sensible intellectual property laws weren't even raised as an issue, so we've no idea what to expect even from the freshmen.
What we *have* known is that the Republican majority government has been anything but good, and that the ostensible Democratic philosophy at least pays lip service to concepts like the public good. It's no hypocrisy to examine the status quo, condemn its authors and potentates, and suggest the opposition might do better.
Ultimately, though, I think the problem here is that intellectual property isn't a campaign issue -- and worse, I think somehow, rent-extracting royalty-free living is probably seen by the average citizen as one way of finding the American Dream. Invent a widget, patent it, live comfortably for the rest of your life of license fees. Never mind it's rarely that simple, the perception matters. Voters won't elect someone based on their insight into IP Law any more than they'll elect someone on their insight into technical matters -- unless they themselves posses a similar level of insight. So it's not surprising that neither party seems to produce a preponderance of candidates with interests in balancing property-like economic incentives for creativity with important freedoms.
What to do, then? I'm not sure, but I think it might include these steps:
(1) Tech companies must lobby and increase the power of their lobby. They share some of our interests.
(2) We need to support organizations like the EFF who work on these issues. Monetarily.
(3) Individual geeks must lobby as constituents. Not just letter writing. Go to their damn office. Make an appointment with the staffers who cover the related issues. Discuss issues with them. Listen as well as make your case -- because you're going to have to learn the other sides of the case in order to respond to their concerns as well as express yours.
Things that won't help: ignoring the problem that this issue cuts across party lines, or using announcements like this one as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at a party you dislike.
2) Mac OS X is portable. It already runs on x86, x86-64, ppc, and ppc64.
And its base (NeXTStep) ran on Motorola 68xxx to start with, and IIRC, SPARC and whatever HP had inside its old HP-UX workstations.
OS X appears to be quite demonstrably portable... not much short of NetBSD appears to be more portable.
They're conspicuously absent, which makes some sense for a phone... but less for a palmtop computing device, which this clearly is.
There is however no reason why this should be such an expensive (as in have to sell all your assets and go live under a bridge) proposition.
There are reasons. The main one has to do with demand, and with how the legal system and profession feeds its own demand. Complexity of the system is part of the problem, though it may not be possible to eliminate legal complexity any more than it's possible to eliminate complexity in software development. And the other half is the arms-race nature of representation which is almost inherent in an adversarial system where one must hire professionals.
If you want to quibble, you could ask where he got the EvilAlienOS programmer's reference manual or the EvilAlienCPU's architecture description or how he managed to find an exploitable vulnerability in EvilAlienOS so quickly.
EvilAlienOS is actually Windows95, which they, like everybody else in the universe, were forced to install on their hardware by Microsfot.
This is actually the reason they invaded in the first place.
Fortunately, once Jeff Goldblum figured this out, finding an exploitable vulnerability wasn't a problem.
The pending amount appears to be $20.99.
Sometimes pending charges are replaced with final charges; I'll be watching closely to see what they do.
Conspiracy Theory: EMCA created/used for the purposes of the appearance of endorsement by ECMA without the burden.
More likely theory: editorial dyslexia.
So, yeah, I searched Yahoo's site, and pretty much think the article is wrong. Yahoo Music is not selling this track as an MP3 (alternatively, their peanut butter may be spread so thin they're simply unable to actually execute the policy of selling it, even though they've decided they're selling it).
But this "amplified.com" site is in fact selling it. However, I've never heard of them before, and like a lot of other online retailers who I've never purchased from, I'm reluctant to hand over my credit card number. So I decided to use a feature my credit card offers called "ShopSafe", which lets you generate temporary numbers with a given limit and expiration date.
I decided to use a temporary number I created two weeks ago that had one dollar left on the account. The purchase came back "declined due to insufficient funds". Odd, given that the track was supposed to be $.99, and there's a dollar left on the limit.
OK, I decided to create a new number, just in case the old one was the problem. Limit $1, expires 2/07.
Declined due to insufficient funds.
Well, maybe like many companies, they actually ding you for just a bit more for some reason. OK. I bumped the limit on the temp number up to $5.
Declined due to insufficient funds.
Suffice it to say that if this was just about purchasing the song, I would have given up by this point for certain. But I don't want some brain-damanged analyst who is unable to fathom the very idea of *ease of experience* to attribute the failure of this promo to piracy (or worse "people like DRM"), so in principle I want to support it.
$10 limit: declined due to insufficient funds.
I'm sorry? $10 in an account is not enough to purchase a $1 song? This must be the kind of Math that the analytically challenged record labels use to determine their loss figures.
I was finally able to buy when giving the card a limit of $25. For a $1 song. Not to mention 20 minutes of work.
It is an MP3, and it's not bad. For the song itself, it wouldn't be worth the hassle.
Today, new CD releases are south of $15 and selection of online music is plentiful at $0.99 and below. Yet this price is still not "fair." For many people, it never will be.
Maybe for some people. But for "many" people, $5 seems to be a good target.
I've made/sold compilation CDs with a bunch of local musicians, almost all of us (with one or two exceptions) with only small followings. The idea was to cross-pollinate our audiences, really, but we were going to do our best to sell as many CDs to whoever would buy them at the summer festival where we were all performing and promoting the discs.
$15? Even the fans of some of the artists on the CD were slow to buy.
$10? Fans were likely to buy, but the average passerby would pretty
$5? They *sold*. Almost all of 'em. Many to people who'd never heard a single artist on the compilation before.
We repeated this experience over a few years. $5 is the magic number. We've been able to sell some discs for more as we acquired a rep, but strangers buy at $5.
I seem to recall an NYC street musician doing a similar experiment and coming up with the same number. Wish I could come up with a link.
As for individual tracks online, I don't have similar experience trying to sell, but as a buyer, I can tell you that at the prices AllOfMP3.com sells at (about $.10-$.15 per track the way I encode), I've found that I don't even think about the cost. If I want to listen to something I don't already have handy, I'll buy it. In some cases, I have even just bought songs I *already own* but don't want to bother looking for the CD. The cost of downloading is practically negligible and it's a very low-hassle experience. I'd probably continue to think that way up to a quarter per track.
This isn't to say I *won't* buy music online at higher prices. I've shopped the iTunes store regularly and have bought a good chunk of music there. I'd probably never buy stuff on a whim there that I've bought at AllOfMP3.com (say, the "Flash Gordon" soundtrack by Queen), but I'm willing to buy some material I really like there, even with the DRM encumbrance, which is a hassle when it comes time to switch systems or share with friends.
You simply don't define infinity and -infinity as numbers.
_ line
Well, not Reals, at any rate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_real_number
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_projective_line
Okay, I had my deductible/HSA contributions off, it's $2200, not $2400. I also have the HMO plan, not the PPO, which means jumping through hoops for referrals for specialists, but also means 100% coverage. I checked my benefits, and my max-out-of-pocket is my deductible of $2200. After that is met, I have $0 copays on everything (except non-routine equipment, which has another $2000 deductible).
That's interesting. If their covered costs are good, and if I could get it in a group situation for portability's sake, it's something I'd look into. Most of the high-deductible/HSA plans I looked into two years ago still had 20-30% coinsurance after the deductible, which made me very wary.
In fact, I propose that this insurance is BETTER for managing costs. A traditional medical plan cares 80% coverage, meaning if I have something bad happen to me and end up with a $40,000 medical bill, I'm on the hook for $8000. With my high deductible plan, I'm on the hook for $2,400.
You're suggesting you're insured 100% after your deductible is met -- that your deductible is also your out-of-pocket limit. This is not the case with any of the plans I'm familiar with, but I'm interested in the details if you can provide them. It might change my perspective.
If I roll snake-eyes, I just lose my $2400 that is socked into the HSA, but in other years, I keep most/all of it. Ten years from now, I'll have a stockpile of medical related cash in the HSA, that I can use to cover all these medical related expenses.
Unless you're correct about being 100% insured post-deductible, I think you're underestimating how expensive non-routine care can be. Five years ago I believed that anything short of cancer or a heart attack or some other serious chronic illness or traumatic injury couldn't eat into five figures of expenses. Now I know differently. There's also the fact that you rarely know how cooperative and insurance company is going to be about upholding the agreement as you've perceived it... 100% doesn't always mean 100% what you've been billed by the provider.
I understand the principle involved in the HSA/High-deductible plan. I agree that routine care may not be the best place for insurance for most people -- I'm certainly fine paying cash to the general practioner a few times a year if I go and buying typical drugs. For anything that's going to require significant testing ambulatory care, especially if they're not quick to apprehend what the actual problem is, though, it's a different world.
For me, I never go to the doctor because I'm healthy,
Nothing personal, but that says to me you may well be missing some perspective here. I insured the way you did for years -- high deductible (or no insurance!), savings account/out-of-pocket for small things.
But I got sick. Things got expensive fast -- I was (and still am) amazed at how much even blood tests can cost, or even to just see a specialist. And eventually, having insurance with good first-dollar coverage and decent out-of-pocket limitations became important.
If deductibles were also out-of-pocket limits, I still might be interested in trying to insure that way. But I haven't found a plan like that yet.
And more importantly, an issue that seemed simple and common sense when I was a healthy 20-something (whose biggest threat to health was probably that I'd injure myself while being active) seems very different from my mid-30s. Once you get into having to really deal with our medical and insurance system because you *need care*, it's definitely a different perspective.
Why not? They'll negotiate with you. In fact if you can pay them promptly, they'll cut you a better deal than they'll cut any insurance company.
I've had enough trouble negotiating with them when they bill me incorrectly -- seriously, a recent merry-go-round took me six months of active efforts to resolve. I've asked for discounts for paying *before* service. No dice. I'm glad other people have better luck, and I certainly think there's no point in trying to mandate negotiation away, but there's no reason to assume that all or even most hospitals are reasonable when negotiating with individual customers.