> Yes and how many have put petrol into desiel engines? Can you imagine the KABOOM when you do this with CHEMICAL ELECTRICITY BATTERIES?
Why not just use different shaped plugs for different standards? (We could do that with fuel too, if it weren't such a de minimis problem with such an infrastructure already in place.)
Why is so much in the cloud? I've heard it touted in lots of marketing speak, but I've never worked with it.
As someone who has never worked with the cloud (shocking, I know), what are the advantages and disadvantages?
Is it basically just distributed scalable redundant web hosting run by a big company? So you're basically renting to avoid the start-up capital costs of those services and to put them in the hands of specialists, while you focus on your web apps?
> Is the US' really broken and bought by and in the pockets of special interests, or is that just/.'s perception? From this Canuck's > point of view, ever since I heard of Senator Byrd, I'm inclined to believe this. I never imagined this could happen when I was a > kid.
Broken? Not in a permanent sense. It does many things very well, but it also has areas that need a lot of work. Like Canada, although they are different areas and they are broken in different ways.
The special interests wield a huge amount of power, because we don't have a good system of public funding for Congressional elections. But there are also NGOs that wield a large amount of power through influencing votes energizing voters. And the Fourth Estate, of course. And the meta-fourth estate.
But seriously, it's the money for elections. Any time a senator is between meetings or events, he's on the phone to a potential donor. That's what he does. That's his job.
Sometimes there's lawmaking or serious concern, as opposed to grandstanding. Actually, frequently there is, it's just not their primary concern, because you get reelected by getting lots of money and not putting your foot wrong. Politics, for the most part, incentivizes very risk-averse behavior. The wrong word spoken at the wrong moment can cost you an election.
No. The law, as it currently stands, is that issued patents are presumed to be valid. Applications are not presumed to be valid, but issued patents are. The accused infringer may try to disprove patent validity; the burden is on them to disprove validity because the patent is presumed to be valid. The rule that there is a presumption cannot be overturned by a court, because it is written into the patent act. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxl_35_U_S_C_282.htm
The question is whether that presumption can be disproven by a mere preponderance of the evidence, or whether it requires clear and convincing evidence. Either way, the patent retains a presumption of validity.
A preponderance of the evidence standard does not mean no presumption--it just means a weaker one.
> Perhaps in the short term. But in the long term...
Yes, certain mean things work for the individual, often at the expense of the group or even the individual's long-term success, depending on what the mean things are. Sometimes mean things improve individual success but hurt the group. Such as negative campaigning--at least if the observer values integrity and counts the loss of the system's legitimacy as a massive negative externality.
I find the "White Man's burden" label racist. I am also unclear what the burden is--or is the term burden meant ironically?
> I don't think people, overall, are that smart. the world seems to be run by 'the people of walmart'.
Some people are good at what they're trained for. A lot of people are "smart," or at least effective, in at least a few specific tasks. And don't make the mistake of assuming people working or shopping at walmart aren't intelligent, sometimes in their own way at their own tasks, sometimes like Dilbert's great garbage man.
The world is definitely *run* by smart people. They may not be as smart as engineers--it depends on the particular "runner" and the engineer--but they are much smarter than your average bear. The people on the Hill and in the White House were in the top 10% of their high schools. A lot of them are assholes. A lot of them are nice people. They all have learned certain skill sets. The elected ones have to develop skill sets that make them seem stupid to smart people. They also, mostly, have do mean things because empirically, mean things WORK. Lying to the public--spin--works. Going negative in campaigning works. If you don't do it, you're at a huge disadvantage. Without consensus not to do it, pretty much everyone does it.
Businesspeople vary in intelligence. The best are usually quite intelligence. Again, they can be good people or not. They tend to think differently than you or I.
"People, overall," don't run the world--they accept the world, or they rise up. Their needs have been catered to for millenia by those running things. The Romans for control of the senate--panem et circenses--the nations following the infantry revolution at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and the gunpowder revolution.
There are also thugs. A lot of thugs in power. Warlords, torturers, thieves and brigangs and thugs who somehow have nations behind them. Not so much in the West. But in Africa, in Chechneya, many places. And of course local crime lords.
Some of them are quite personable. Some are quite intelligent. Others are puppets of other people who are intelligent. They may not have formal schooling, or they may. And of course, sometimes they're just a bully. But it usually takes a bully with intelligence to get a nation behind him. Even a crappy nation.
Not really, no. I can see where you might think that based on a few slashdot articles, though.
The courts are responsible for adjudicating disputes. If someone asks them to enforce a patent, that is definitely their problem.
Patent disputes are only a small part of the work load of most District Courts. The Federal Circuit, on the other hand, handles lots of patent cases. They are in some ways the most rule-bound Circuit Court of Appeals in the country. They like patent cases. They dislike bad practice in patent cases, but they get to shape much of the law in the way they want to. Nobody is really getting tired of enforcing "sloppy patents"--patents have to be pretty technically specific and definite about what they cover.
You may be thinking about abstractions, algorithms, and obvious things that we might think the USPTO should never have granted. If you were looking at just some of the banner cases, you would see the cases where the Supreme Court steps in, which are rare. The Supreme Court has raised the bar for patentability somewhat in recent years, which I think is a good thing, although it makes getting patents on genuinely legitimate new Patentable subject matter harder. But they are only addressing one or two patent cases a year, and they are definitely not doing it because they are tired of enforcing sloppy patents. They don't enforce patents. They try to figure out what the law should be on issues that enough justices (four Supreme Court Justices) agree are important cases to hear. They tend to look at whether there is a split between the circuits (which is less relevant in patent cases because they all go to the federal circuit), whether the case below was decided wrongly, how important it is to establish more clearly what the law is in a given area, and whether the particular case before them is a good case on which to decide the issue they feel is important.
Patent law is written by Congress, but they have not changed it in quite a while. There are new changes put forth every year, but they haven't made it through Congress since 1999. (Although one patent bill passed the Senate this year.)
The USPTO is not granting anywhere near as many patents as possible--I believe their grant rate is lower than 50%, and the examiners take their jobs seriously and try to figure out whether each patent should be rejected or not under the MPEP (their guide, which is mostly the law, but organized with guidance for them).
The patent office is... mmm... interesting. You are right, they are sort of using them as a piggy bank--or more accurately, a tax on invention and government backed monopoly. They are taking about 5% of the fees collected by the USPTO this year for the general federal budget. That is definitely not the only use or interest in them that Congress or the Administration have. (Or even the biggest interest. They are only looking to get $100 million that way. There are lots of individual patents out there worth much more than that, although most are worth much less.)
The Courts cannot [usually] throw things back to Congress, although they can decide which way to rule based on a feeling that Congress is better capable of acting than they are. (e.g. "You made a good argument for a new rule, but a legislative body that is making social policy decisions and that can engage in extensive factfinding is better suited to change the law in that way; we lack the institutional competence or authority to do so.")
Courts also don't tell companies to use their lobby money for particular things. They decide cases. They may, as I said, say that legislative action would be necessary for the company to get the result it wants--but it usually says that to the side that loses. And it usually does not result in congressional action. Sometimes it does--although to be fair, companies lobby to overturn court decisions by legislative action regardless of whether the court accepted an institutional competence argument.
> the definition of "prior art" to the PTO is published academic documents, certain trade publications, and US registered Patents.... it's > not really "ever used anywhere" and the Patent office and courts have routinely said "tough luck" to those not filing a patent to > protect their invention when somebody else did first.
No. That is not the definition of prior art. Review the MPEP. Read the cases. It is broader.
Also, routinely perhaps, but that does not always mean unfairly. For example, they will say tough luck to people who keep things as trade secrets and then try to patent their inventions only when someone else patents it. Why? Because the whole idea of a patent is you disclose the invention to the public in order to get the benefit of a monopoly for a limited time. If you kept it secret, you generally have shown you were unwilling to make that deal when you invented the thing. So if someone else patents your trade secret, you don't get to claim the patent.
> Anything beyond a spell checker is excessive bloat.
Have you ever tried to edit a document with multiple people? Wanted internal cross-references? Headers and Tables of Contents? Multiple sections with alternate pagination? There are lots of circumstances where you want something beyond a spell checker, and most people don't have the time or skill-set to use LaTeX all the time.
More or less, although jury instructions don't usually use percentages, I think. Patents are entitled to a presumption of validity based on the office's examination, and that's very well-established law, but the question of preponderance v. clear and convincing is open for debate.
Not necessily. If the process were truly "corrupted," whatever that means, you might take away the presumption of validity for the corrupt patents, but it would be silly to revoke them all--the delays in future prosecution it would cause, not to mention the problems of re-prosecuting hundreds of thousands of patents for inventions made years ago by inventors who work at different companies...
> Dissident speech instills terror in the minds of authority.
Not for the most part. Mostly they just find it annoying and respond by being authoritarian because they're pissed off. When reporters report on torture in Chechneya by the local strongman, they get killed because they're a pain to him. Not because the guy who tortures people every day is somehow afraid of them. He *should* be afraid of them. But mostly he's pissed at them. And he runs the apparatus of the state. He's not afraid of them--at most he's afraid that his bosses will replace him if anybody cares about new public knowledge that Russia sponsors terrorism.
Similarly (and obviously very differently, since most TSA employees are good people who are not actively torturing lots of innocent civilians, but similarly for the point about whether terror is inspired), TSA employees, like cops, are generally not terrified by dissident speech. They are annoyed by it because someone is making their day harder.
> Why would a publisher put a book on the shelf if they know it's going to lose money?
Oh, sorry--I just realized you were asserting that they didn't need to recover the cost of the print run out of the ebook sales. Yes, you're right--I had thought you were asserting the money they made on ebook sales was irrelevant and just extra. I agree that if they already have a print book most of the work is done, but you do the work for both distribution channels, so I don't know if that's the right way to look at it economically.
Is 70% to the publisher the default figure for major publishers for Kindle? I'm surprised it's that high, given Amazon's market dominance, but they may still be trying to lock people into their contracts.
> That only changes if dead tree book sales drop to the point where they no longer cover their production costs, and that's unlikely to happen for quite a few years..
They make decisions about what books to buy and how many authors to support based on whether the book will make a profit and whether it has the potential to make a good one. ebook sales factor into that decision.
The ebook sales also aren't "free money." First, they're not free in the Lochean income-should-be-earned sense because you have at least some further work to be done or already done, including contract negotiations and new typesetting. Second, they're not free in the bottom-line real-world economic sense because they are a competing product with the physical books. Third, either way, their free money isn't as much as you think it is, because distributor-retailers [e.g. Amazon] have monopolies that significantly limit publisher profits.
Try not to. Publishers have *very* slim profit margins, and supporting them lets them buy more works, which tends to increase the number of published books. Also, when you are thinking of Amazon, buy Barnes and Noble if you can--not because they're better, but because it's so important they stay in business. If Amazon becomes the sole major player, they will not only take a bigger slice of the pie than they already are (making it even harder to publish or write books), there will be one private channel controlling the majority of mass-disseminated literature.
> It would seem like an absolute blessing for one with questionable morals to be able to steal identities, obtaining records for advert purposes, etc
This reminds me of how the government has a system in place to warn them when officials are misusing their passport record access to access information about important people--e.g. presidential candidates. Nice of them to design access restriction that only cares when the information about *important* people is accessed without reason.
> Ironically, the republican party has instead chosen to give up on Christianity rather than eliminating stock options.
I... what?:)
Stock options are one form of pay. There have been massive loopholes in the taxes regulating them that companies have used to defraud the public. Sometimes those loopholes are closed and sometimes the companies are fined heavily for that.
Paying people in stock options is actually a *good* idea if it's done right, because it incentivizes them to work for the best long-term interests of the company rather than the best near-quarter results. The problem is the tax structure around them, and around other forms of income, that allows for loopholes. Because the tax code is usually interpreted close to literally, and because it is highly technical, people get away with a lot.
The republicans actually tried to simplify the tax code a number of years ago--Dole ran on that platform. But politically, it didn't go anywhere. Policy and politics, sadly, are often disjoint. (To be fair, I do not know the details of the plan--but I remember it was a large element of their platform.)
> Is it just me or is the America-is-over sentiment growing by leaps and bounds lately?
That's because unemployment has gone up a lot, almost everyone has less money, we've shifted from having a great industrial base to having a service-based economy, and our last two wars have been expensive asymmetric wars where there are non-state actors on the other side. Also, those wars combined with different economic and social policies have made us politically unpopular.
But it certainly isn't *over* yet--it's just not the rising star these days. It still has the most effective military on the planet. But those expenses are being curtailed while China's are increasing. I suspect we'll have a pre-WWI England/Germany type race, where the US outspends china for a long time to the great expense of both nations, but the US retains superiority in a number of fields for so long as it can afford to do so.
China is greatly increasing the number of patents it issues--that will be good for us the day they actually support patents for extraterritorial inventors. They'll do that when they have enough IP and we refuse to honor their patents because they don't honor ours. There will be political games, but long-term it may be good for us. (Although we do need better science and math education--and more importantly, better cultural education on the value of science and math).
"being an adult" can mean two things. One is having survived on the planet until you reach some age determined to be adulthood by your culture. The other is being some form of ideal adult, within which there can be broad variation but there are behaviors we expect in the ideal adult that are not present in the most annoying characteristics of children. Like name-calling.
> You haven't addressed my assertion that the highly progressive income tax system of the 1950's greatly strengthened the American middle class.
I didn't see the assertion as relevant to the underlying point once we see that the progressive income tax structure does not result in $1/$1 inequality.
That being said, a highly progressive system may make sense. The big problem is the gini coeffficient, the increasing divide between rich and everyone else. Our economic system has only minimal rules in effect to counter that, and those rules usually mostly hit hard-working professionals who aren't rich enough to get into good tax evasion, often in unfair ways. I do think a 92% tax is ridiculously high on its face, but I am used to modern tax rates. I could see a 80% tax or so, but would want constraints on it. For example, perhaps it does not apply to the first five million dollars of income in a person's life, and perhaps there are good charitable donation laws to encourage personal philanthropy.
Politically, our culture is hesitant about very redistributive solutions because they seem contrary to the ideal of income being something we earn. But there are some contexts where it is well accepted: colleges are the big one. That being said, as more belongs to the richest families and less belongs to everyone else, redistributive solutions take on a lot of political impetus and importance. The normative problem I have with that is that you have a *lot* of hard workers who are not among the richest families who get hit hard for making enough to be lumped in with the richest people.
As to the fifties, a lot of things strengthened the middle class--perhaps the progressive system helped. (Theoretically any progressive income tax that favors the middle class does, I suppose.) You also had almost every other world economy ravaged by war--Great Britain had spent the accumulated wealth of its empire, Russia had literally had to disassemble its factories and move them on train lines and tied production to food supply. We also had in some ways a better-educated populace than we do today--certainly I think the median was better, looking at literature, history, and English. [Although I don't have a good study to cite for that.]
Slashdot Mirror
> Yes and how many have put petrol into desiel engines? Can you imagine the KABOOM when you do this with CHEMICAL ELECTRICITY BATTERIES?
Why not just use different shaped plugs for different standards? (We could do that with fuel too, if it weren't such a de minimis problem with such an infrastructure already in place.)
Why is so much in the cloud? I've heard it touted in lots of marketing speak, but I've never worked with it.
As someone who has never worked with the cloud (shocking, I know), what are the advantages and disadvantages?
Is it basically just distributed scalable redundant web hosting run by a big company? So you're basically renting to avoid the start-up capital costs of those services and to put them in the hands of specialists, while you focus on your web apps?
Or is it more?
> Is the US' really broken and bought by and in the pockets of special interests, or is that just /.'s perception? From this Canuck's
> point of view, ever since I heard of Senator Byrd, I'm inclined to believe this. I never imagined this could happen when I was a
> kid.
Broken? Not in a permanent sense. It does many things very well, but it also has areas that need a lot of work. Like Canada, although they are different areas and they are broken in different ways.
The special interests wield a huge amount of power, because we don't have a good system of public funding for Congressional elections. But there are also NGOs that wield a large amount of power through influencing votes energizing voters. And the Fourth Estate, of course. And the meta-fourth estate.
But seriously, it's the money for elections. Any time a senator is between meetings or events, he's on the phone to a potential donor. That's what he does. That's his job.
Sometimes there's lawmaking or serious concern, as opposed to grandstanding. Actually, frequently there is, it's just not their primary concern, because you get reelected by getting lots of money and not putting your foot wrong. Politics, for the most part, incentivizes very risk-averse behavior. The wrong word spoken at the wrong moment can cost you an election.
No. The law, as it currently stands, is that issued patents are presumed to be valid. Applications are not presumed to be valid, but issued patents are. The accused infringer may try to disprove patent validity; the burden is on them to disprove validity because the patent is presumed to be valid. The rule that there is a presumption cannot be overturned by a court, because it is written into the patent act. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxl_35_U_S_C_282.htm
The question is whether that presumption can be disproven by a mere preponderance of the evidence, or whether it requires clear and convincing evidence. Either way, the patent retains a presumption of validity.
A preponderance of the evidence standard does not mean no presumption--it just means a weaker one.
Interesting. Yet a different term for it should be used today, given widespread technical knowledge and organizational ability.
> Perhaps in the short term. But in the long term...
Yes, certain mean things work for the individual, often at the expense of the group or even the individual's long-term success, depending on what the mean things are. Sometimes mean things improve individual success but hurt the group. Such as negative campaigning--at least if the observer values integrity and counts the loss of the system's legitimacy as a massive negative externality.
I find the "White Man's burden" label racist. I am also unclear what the burden is--or is the term burden meant ironically?
> I don't think people, overall, are that smart. the world seems to be run by 'the people of walmart'.
Some people are good at what they're trained for. A lot of people are "smart," or at least effective, in at least a few specific tasks. And don't make the mistake of assuming people working or shopping at walmart aren't intelligent, sometimes in their own way at their own tasks, sometimes like Dilbert's great garbage man.
The world is definitely *run* by smart people. They may not be as smart as engineers--it depends on the particular "runner" and the engineer--but they are much smarter than your average bear. The people on the Hill and in the White House were in the top 10% of their high schools. A lot of them are assholes. A lot of them are nice people. They all have learned certain skill sets. The elected ones have to develop skill sets that make them seem stupid to smart people. They also, mostly, have do mean things because empirically, mean things WORK. Lying to the public--spin--works. Going negative in campaigning works. If you don't do it, you're at a huge disadvantage. Without consensus not to do it, pretty much everyone does it.
Businesspeople vary in intelligence. The best are usually quite intelligence. Again, they can be good people or not. They tend to think differently than you or I.
"People, overall," don't run the world--they accept the world, or they rise up. Their needs have been catered to for millenia by those running things. The Romans for control of the senate--panem et circenses--the nations following the infantry revolution at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and the gunpowder revolution.
There are also thugs. A lot of thugs in power. Warlords, torturers, thieves and brigangs and thugs who somehow have nations behind them. Not so much in the West. But in Africa, in Chechneya, many places. And of course local crime lords.
Some of them are quite personable. Some are quite intelligent. Others are puppets of other people who are intelligent. They may not have formal schooling, or they may. And of course, sometimes they're just a bully. But it usually takes a bully with intelligence to get a nation behind him. Even a crappy nation.
Not really, no. I can see where you might think that based on a few slashdot articles, though.
The courts are responsible for adjudicating disputes. If someone asks them to enforce a patent, that is definitely their problem.
Patent disputes are only a small part of the work load of most District Courts. The Federal Circuit, on the other hand, handles lots of patent cases. They are in some ways the most rule-bound Circuit Court of Appeals in the country. They like patent cases. They dislike bad practice in patent cases, but they get to shape much of the law in the way they want to. Nobody is really getting tired of enforcing "sloppy patents"--patents have to be pretty technically specific and definite about what they cover.
You may be thinking about abstractions, algorithms, and obvious things that we might think the USPTO should never have granted. If you were looking at just some of the banner cases, you would see the cases where the Supreme Court steps in, which are rare. The Supreme Court has raised the bar for patentability somewhat in recent years, which I think is a good thing, although it makes getting patents on genuinely legitimate new Patentable subject matter harder. But they are only addressing one or two patent cases a year, and they are definitely not doing it because they are tired of enforcing sloppy patents. They don't enforce patents. They try to figure out what the law should be on issues that enough justices (four Supreme Court Justices) agree are important cases to hear. They tend to look at whether there is a split between the circuits (which is less relevant in patent cases because they all go to the federal circuit), whether the case below was decided wrongly, how important it is to establish more clearly what the law is in a given area, and whether the particular case before them is a good case on which to decide the issue they feel is important.
Patent law is written by Congress, but they have not changed it in quite a while. There are new changes put forth every year, but they haven't made it through Congress since 1999. (Although one patent bill passed the Senate this year.)
The USPTO is not granting anywhere near as many patents as possible--I believe their grant rate is lower than 50%, and the examiners take their jobs seriously and try to figure out whether each patent should be rejected or not under the MPEP (their guide, which is mostly the law, but organized with guidance for them).
The patent office is... mmm... interesting. You are right, they are sort of using them as a piggy bank--or more accurately, a tax on invention and government backed monopoly. They are taking about 5% of the fees collected by the USPTO this year for the general federal budget. That is definitely not the only use or interest in them that Congress or the Administration have. (Or even the biggest interest. They are only looking to get $100 million that way. There are lots of individual patents out there worth much more than that, although most are worth much less.)
The Courts cannot [usually] throw things back to Congress, although they can decide which way to rule based on a feeling that Congress is better capable of acting than they are. (e.g. "You made a good argument for a new rule, but a legislative body that is making social policy decisions and that can engage in extensive factfinding is better suited to change the law in that way; we lack the institutional competence or authority to do so.")
Courts also don't tell companies to use their lobby money for particular things. They decide cases. They may, as I said, say that legislative action would be necessary for the company to get the result it wants--but it usually says that to the side that loses. And it usually does not result in congressional action. Sometimes it does--although to be fair, companies lobby to overturn court decisions by legislative action regardless of whether the court accepted an institutional competence argument.
It is also not an unfunded mandate on th
> 250 gigs of data is their normal cap across the board.
250 GigaBYTES of data is their normal cap.
250 GigaBITS of data is 1/8th of that.
> the definition of "prior art" to the PTO is published academic documents, certain trade publications, and US registered Patents.... it's > not really "ever used anywhere" and the Patent office and courts have routinely said "tough luck" to those not filing a patent to
> protect their invention when somebody else did first.
No. That is not the definition of prior art. Review the MPEP. Read the cases. It is broader.
Also, routinely perhaps, but that does not always mean unfairly. For example, they will say tough luck to people who keep things as trade secrets and then try to patent their inventions only when someone else patents it. Why? Because the whole idea of a patent is you disclose the invention to the public in order to get the benefit of a monopoly for a limited time. If you kept it secret, you generally have shown you were unwilling to make that deal when you invented the thing. So if someone else patents your trade secret, you don't get to claim the patent.
The real problem is we should have different--lower standards for challengers--for patents in areas that are only tenuously patentable.
> Anything beyond a spell checker is excessive bloat.
Have you ever tried to edit a document with multiple people? Wanted internal cross-references? Headers and Tables of Contents? Multiple sections with alternate pagination? There are lots of circumstances where you want something beyond a spell checker, and most people don't have the time or skill-set to use LaTeX all the time.
More or less, although jury instructions don't usually use percentages, I think. Patents are entitled to a presumption of validity based on the office's examination, and that's very well-established law, but the question of preponderance v. clear and convincing is open for debate.
> Previously, the Supreme Court has said that the Patent Office has the final say...
What? When, and on what? What can't you appeal from the patent office, except for a few minor procedural issues?
Not necessily. If the process were truly "corrupted," whatever that means, you might take away the presumption of validity for the corrupt patents, but it would be silly to revoke them all--the delays in future prosecution it would cause, not to mention the problems of re-prosecuting hundreds of thousands of patents for inventions made years ago by inventors who work at different companies...
> Dissident speech instills terror in the minds of authority.
Not for the most part. Mostly they just find it annoying and respond by being authoritarian because they're pissed off. When reporters report on torture in Chechneya by the local strongman, they get killed because they're a pain to him. Not because the guy who tortures people every day is somehow afraid of them. He *should* be afraid of them. But mostly he's pissed at them. And he runs the apparatus of the state. He's not afraid of them--at most he's afraid that his bosses will replace him if anybody cares about new public knowledge that Russia sponsors terrorism.
Similarly (and obviously very differently, since most TSA employees are good people who are not actively torturing lots of innocent civilians, but similarly for the point about whether terror is inspired), TSA employees, like cops, are generally not terrified by dissident speech. They are annoyed by it because someone is making their day harder.
> Why would a publisher put a book on the shelf if they know it's going to lose money?
Oh, sorry--I just realized you were asserting that they didn't need to recover the cost of the print run out of the ebook sales. Yes, you're right--I had thought you were asserting the money they made on ebook sales was irrelevant and just extra. I agree that if they already have a print book most of the work is done, but you do the work for both distribution channels, so I don't know if that's the right way to look at it economically.
Is 70% to the publisher the default figure for major publishers for Kindle? I'm surprised it's that high, given Amazon's market dominance, but they may still be trying to lock people into their contracts.
> That only changes if dead tree book sales drop to the point where they no longer cover their production costs, and that's unlikely to happen for quite a few years..
They make decisions about what books to buy and how many authors to support based on whether the book will make a profit and whether it has the potential to make a good one. ebook sales factor into that decision.
The ebook sales also aren't "free money." First, they're not free in the Lochean income-should-be-earned sense because you have at least some further work to be done or already done, including contract negotiations and new typesetting. Second, they're not free in the bottom-line real-world economic sense because they are a competing product with the physical books. Third, either way, their free money isn't as much as you think it is, because distributor-retailers [e.g. Amazon] have monopolies that significantly limit publisher profits.
Why assume double dipping for the publisher? I suspect Amazon does most of the double-dipping.
> I'll be pirating my ebooks
Try not to. Publishers have *very* slim profit margins, and supporting them lets them buy more works, which tends to increase the number of published books. Also, when you are thinking of Amazon, buy Barnes and Noble if you can--not because they're better, but because it's so important they stay in business. If Amazon becomes the sole major player, they will not only take a bigger slice of the pie than they already are (making it even harder to publish or write books), there will be one private channel controlling the majority of mass-disseminated literature.
> It would seem like an absolute blessing for one with questionable morals to be able to steal identities, obtaining records for advert purposes, etc
This reminds me of how the government has a system in place to warn them when officials are misusing their passport record access to access information about important people--e.g. presidential candidates. Nice of them to design access restriction that only cares when the information about *important* people is accessed without reason.
> Ironically, the republican party has instead chosen to give up on Christianity rather than eliminating stock options.
I... what? :)
Stock options are one form of pay. There have been massive loopholes in the taxes regulating them that companies have used to defraud the public. Sometimes those loopholes are closed and sometimes the companies are fined heavily for that.
Paying people in stock options is actually a *good* idea if it's done right, because it incentivizes them to work for the best long-term interests of the company rather than the best near-quarter results. The problem is the tax structure around them, and around other forms of income, that allows for loopholes. Because the tax code is usually interpreted close to literally, and because it is highly technical, people get away with a lot.
The republicans actually tried to simplify the tax code a number of years ago--Dole ran on that platform. But politically, it didn't go anywhere. Policy and politics, sadly, are often disjoint. (To be fair, I do not know the details of the plan--but I remember it was a large element of their platform.)
> Is it just me or is the America-is-over sentiment growing by leaps and bounds lately?
That's because unemployment has gone up a lot, almost everyone has less money, we've shifted from having a great industrial base to having a service-based economy, and our last two wars have been expensive asymmetric wars where there are non-state actors on the other side. Also, those wars combined with different economic and social policies have made us politically unpopular.
But it certainly isn't *over* yet--it's just not the rising star these days. It still has the most effective military on the planet. But those expenses are being curtailed while China's are increasing. I suspect we'll have a pre-WWI England/Germany type race, where the US outspends china for a long time to the great expense of both nations, but the US retains superiority in a number of fields for so long as it can afford to do so.
China is greatly increasing the number of patents it issues--that will be good for us the day they actually support patents for extraterritorial inventors. They'll do that when they have enough IP and we refuse to honor their patents because they don't honor ours. There will be political games, but long-term it may be good for us. (Although we do need better science and math education--and more importantly, better cultural education on the value of science and math).
"being an adult" can mean two things. One is having survived on the planet until you reach some age determined to be adulthood by your culture. The other is being some form of ideal adult, within which there can be broad variation but there are behaviors we expect in the ideal adult that are not present in the most annoying characteristics of children. Like name-calling.
> You haven't addressed my assertion that the highly progressive income tax system of the 1950's greatly strengthened the American middle class.
I didn't see the assertion as relevant to the underlying point once we see that the progressive income tax structure does not result in $1/$1 inequality.
That being said, a highly progressive system may make sense. The big problem is the gini coeffficient, the increasing divide between rich and everyone else. Our economic system has only minimal rules in effect to counter that, and those rules usually mostly hit hard-working professionals who aren't rich enough to get into good tax evasion, often in unfair ways. I do think a 92% tax is ridiculously high on its face, but I am used to modern tax rates. I could see a 80% tax or so, but would want constraints on it. For example, perhaps it does not apply to the first five million dollars of income in a person's life, and perhaps there are good charitable donation laws to encourage personal philanthropy.
Politically, our culture is hesitant about very redistributive solutions because they seem contrary to the ideal of income being something we earn. But there are some contexts where it is well accepted: colleges are the big one. That being said, as more belongs to the richest families and less belongs to everyone else, redistributive solutions take on a lot of political impetus and importance. The normative problem I have with that is that you have a *lot* of hard workers who are not among the richest families who get hit hard for making enough to be lumped in with the richest people.
As to the fifties, a lot of things strengthened the middle class--perhaps the progressive system helped. (Theoretically any progressive income tax that favors the middle class does, I suppose.) You also had almost every other world economy ravaged by war--Great Britain had spent the accumulated wealth of its empire, Russia had literally had to disassemble its factories and move them on train lines and tied production to food supply. We also had in some ways a better-educated populace than we do today--certainly I think the median was better, looking at literature, history, and English. [Although I don't have a good study to cite for that.]