I'm not sure that things are so different in the brick & morter world. If you own a retail establishment in a downtown business district (or even a shopping mall), location is extremely important, precisely because it dictates exposure to potential customers. The difference between being on a street with a high volume of foot traffic and being just a block off of the beaten path is huge.
In that setting, revenues get divided thus: You get whatever component is due to the appeal and uniqueness of whatever you're selling, and your landlord gets whatever component is attributable to your location, which (s)he owns. If the location becomes more valuable - say by reaching a critical mass that attracts more visitors - then businesses will prosper for a while until their leases come up for renewal, and then landlords will raise rents until they are again compensated for the full value of the location.
What we have here is a situation where Google and a handful of others are the only landlords in town.
Let me guess. I think he doesn't want to give up the traffic that search engines generate. He just wants search engines not to make money. Did I guess correctly?
More like: He needs the traffic that the search engines generate, but would prefer that they not let users know about his competitors, too.
If someone merely bootlegs your work without enhancing it, I don't see how they can really profit more than the original person can
Possibly WalMart could. Or Amazon or anyone with a more visible and effective distribution system. Would people bother to visit individual band sites rather than just going to Bootlegs-R-Us.com? Would they even be able to distinguish between the "official" and bootleg sites, if the latter have as much legal claim to your material as you do?
an' don't do all 'dey can to mix the ideas of th' devil and Albert E; dat is, dey don't have some invisible hand puttin the smack down at th' speed of light.'
You had me until the semicolon followed by "dat is,"...
I heard recently that there have been something like 10,000 National Security Letters sent so far; is this correct? These are one of the more objectionable manifestations of the Patriot Act: The government demands anything of you that it wants, no warrant is needed, there is no judicial review or right of appeal, and it is a crime to reveal to anyone that you've received one!
Oh joy - yet another idiot conservative who thinks we will all be safe and snug only if we willingly hand over absolute power to a trusted benevolent dictator. And power without review or limit is absolute power.
Have you thought at all about why secrecy and exemption from judicial review - along with dentention without charge or trial and, I have to add, torture - is so important to this administration? Well, think about it now. Those things may not help catch the bad guys, but they certainly do help cover your incompetence if you don't. They have no purpose except to erase the distinction between guilt and innocence, because the public will be equally and ignorantly satisfied with either.
He was too busy chasing interns I guess to worry about Al Qaeda.
I'm no fan of Clinton, but he was in fact very concerned about Al Qaeda. It was the Bush people that failed to take the threat seriously, despite the urging of career intelligence professionals. But politics has trumped expertise in just about every other field (science, law, etc.) with this administration, so we could hardly have expected anything else.
I don't think they made it happen, but it's just possible that they let it happen, perhaps not realizing the full scale of what "it" would be. Anything more than that is just expecting too much evil from too many people, each knowing that they could be facing a death sentence if the cat got out of the bag.
But it's still a little spooky that (if I remember correctly) the "New American Century" document that anticipated Bush's Iraq policy included an observation that a catastrophe "on the order of Pearl Harbor" might be necessary to win public support for a prolonged war in the Middle East. Many of the authors of that 1990s paper later played (and still play) key roles in the Bush administration.
Do you know this, or are you merely assuming it based on your deep trust of those to whom we're granting these powers, now and forever more? Or perhaps it's just the excellent track record through history of leaders that have achieved absolute power?
the tinfoil brigade is helping to bring down the very free society they claim to want to protect.
And this concerns you exactly why? How could you possibly define "free society" in a way that is compatible with a permanent Patriot Act, as currently formulated?
I mean, what do you think would happen if we allowed warrantless searches, really?
Warrantless searches can be extremely useful in many circumstances. Suppose that you're in a position of power and somebody is being a pain in the ass by criticizing you in public or - God forbid - campaigning against you? Chances are they have a skeleton or two in their closet, and you need to be able to find it (or put one there for them) to put them in their place. Or, suppose you have connections in high places and you find out that your daughter is dating some liberal hippie? Surely there's something in his house that'll send him to jail for a couple of years (hopefully sans conjugal visits). Or, maybe you want to buy some poor schmuck's house, and he wants more money than you feel a person of your stature should have to pay. He'll reconsider after he starts finding muddy boot tracks on his bedroom carpet.
But even warrantless searches aren't always enough to shield the Prince from those who would spite him. It would also be Good and Necessary to be able to detain people indefinitely without charge, solely on your own authority and without judicial oversight. But I'm dreaming here - no leader of any free society could ever even suggest such a thing!
Frankly I have no problem giving up a little safety in order to maintain the freedoms this country was created on.
Why people accept - usually without thinking - that there is some trade-off between safety and liberty is beyond me. The supposition is that those who wield power are (and will forever remain) benevolent, conscientious, and selfless in their exercise of it. Nobody was safe under Stalin, not even his ardent bootlickers!
But we both know the American people would have roasted the politicians alive, if they had done NOTHING after 9/11.
The sad thing is that they had all the intelligence they needed to do something before 9/11, without anything resembling the Patriot Act. The repubs have benefitted so much from the attack that I'm not so sure that their regrets - if any - run very deep at all.
The only concern I'd have with this is that "the poor" would have difficulty with the initial cash outlay, since they're effectively fronting a loan to the government. At the other end of the spectrum, there'll always be conspicuous consumption of fuel, but since the Hummer will only come out when the neighbors are looking that shouldn't amount to much in the aggregate...
Doesn't this fall into the category of "don't live there?"
Perhaps, but the same argument can be made regarding any city that isn't completely self-sufficient in resources, which is every city that I can think of. Bringing water to cities in the desert is an obvious example, but even supplying food requires that big money be spent on transportation infrastructure.
A quick ps auwx will show me if there are evil deeds afoot.
Unless/bin/ps gets replaced with a version that is blind to the evil deeds, as any reasonable rootkit would do. I was rooted back in 2001 and that's one of the very first things that it did.
Few would claim that, say, UNICEF is some sort of organization in which the Chinese ambassador steps in to try and stop aid to Indian children, or whatnot
Ironically (or not), it is the U.S. that has meddled more than anyone in international aid programs, particularly where family planning, contraception, and abortion are involved.
I have a B.S. from Rochester Institute of Technology, and completed my entirely at night through their Distance Learning program...
In my case, there is no difference between my degree and the same degree earned on campus.
Just about everybody here claiming that online degrees are equivalent actually got theirs from a "real" brick-and-mortar school - like RIT - that is recognized as such by employers and graduate schools. The key seems to be that the online nature of the program is concealed, or at least not made immediately obvious.
The purpose of universities is not only to educate people, but to screen them as well. When you're being evaluated by employers, they are depending on that screening function as much (or more) than on what you may or may not have learned there. Graduating from Harvard means you were smart enough (or well-connected enough) to be admitted to and graduate from Harvard; it doesn't matter that you might have actually learned more at South Podunk College, where everyone gets in and degrees are handed out like candy. The degree is a certification that you could handle the demands of the institution that granted it, and as such it's never worth more than than the reputation of that institution.
So, the bottom line is: It's not how you get the degree that matters, but rather where.
NASA didn't offer enough money to get any remotely reasonable solution to the problem.
I'm just speculating, but perhaps the $50K was considered by NASA to be mainly PR money, useful for generating some enthusiasm and a sense of participation among the SF fandom community. If NASA regarded it as something even remotely feasible, the prize would have been very much larger.
Next up: transporter beams, cloaking devices, and female yeomen with really short skirts!
Slashdot Mirror
In that setting, revenues get divided thus: You get whatever component is due to the appeal and uniqueness of whatever you're selling, and your landlord gets whatever component is attributable to your location, which (s)he owns. If the location becomes more valuable - say by reaching a critical mass that attracts more visitors - then businesses will prosper for a while until their leases come up for renewal, and then landlords will raise rents until they are again compensated for the full value of the location.
What we have here is a situation where Google and a handful of others are the only landlords in town.
More like: He needs the traffic that the search engines generate, but would prefer that they not let users know about his competitors, too.
Possibly WalMart could. Or Amazon or anyone with a more visible and effective distribution system. Would people bother to visit individual band sites rather than just going to Bootlegs-R-Us.com? Would they even be able to distinguish between the "official" and bootleg sites, if the latter have as much legal claim to your material as you do?
Well, there is such a hue-and-cry, and you've just contributed to it.
On the other hand, back when I studied economics, we called it "econ" rather than "econs". Of course, this was in the States...
You had me until the semicolon followed by "dat is,"...
You just answered your own question, there...
They're doing a heckuva job, aren't they?
I heard recently that there have been something like 10,000 National Security Letters sent so far; is this correct? These are one of the more objectionable manifestations of the Patriot Act: The government demands anything of you that it wants, no warrant is needed, there is no judicial review or right of appeal, and it is a crime to reveal to anyone that you've received one!
Have you thought at all about why secrecy and exemption from judicial review - along with dentention without charge or trial and, I have to add, torture - is so important to this administration? Well, think about it now. Those things may not help catch the bad guys, but they certainly do help cover your incompetence if you don't. They have no purpose except to erase the distinction between guilt and innocence, because the public will be equally and ignorantly satisfied with either.
I'm no fan of Clinton, but he was in fact very concerned about Al Qaeda. It was the Bush people that failed to take the threat seriously, despite the urging of career intelligence professionals. But politics has trumped expertise in just about every other field (science, law, etc.) with this administration, so we could hardly have expected anything else.
But it's still a little spooky that (if I remember correctly) the "New American Century" document that anticipated Bush's Iraq policy included an observation that a catastrophe "on the order of Pearl Harbor" might be necessary to win public support for a prolonged war in the Middle East. Many of the authors of that 1990s paper later played (and still play) key roles in the Bush administration.
Do you know this, or are you merely assuming it based on your deep trust of those to whom we're granting these powers, now and forever more? Or perhaps it's just the excellent track record through history of leaders that have achieved absolute power?
the tinfoil brigade is helping to bring down the very free society they claim to want to protect.
And this concerns you exactly why? How could you possibly define "free society" in a way that is compatible with a permanent Patriot Act, as currently formulated?
Warrantless searches can be extremely useful in many circumstances. Suppose that you're in a position of power and somebody is being a pain in the ass by criticizing you in public or - God forbid - campaigning against you? Chances are they have a skeleton or two in their closet, and you need to be able to find it (or put one there for them) to put them in their place. Or, suppose you have connections in high places and you find out that your daughter is dating some liberal hippie? Surely there's something in his house that'll send him to jail for a couple of years (hopefully sans conjugal visits). Or, maybe you want to buy some poor schmuck's house, and he wants more money than you feel a person of your stature should have to pay. He'll reconsider after he starts finding muddy boot tracks on his bedroom carpet.
But even warrantless searches aren't always enough to shield the Prince from those who would spite him. It would also be Good and Necessary to be able to detain people indefinitely without charge, solely on your own authority and without judicial oversight. But I'm dreaming here - no leader of any free society could ever even suggest such a thing!
Why people accept - usually without thinking - that there is some trade-off between safety and liberty is beyond me. The supposition is that those who wield power are (and will forever remain) benevolent, conscientious, and selfless in their exercise of it. Nobody was safe under Stalin, not even his ardent bootlickers!
The sad thing is that they had all the intelligence they needed to do something before 9/11, without anything resembling the Patriot Act. The repubs have benefitted so much from the attack that I'm not so sure that their regrets - if any - run very deep at all.
Have you ever tried to write his name out in cursive? It's hard to know when to stop the resulting sine wave...
You mean, like Clippy, but even more annoying?
The only concern I'd have with this is that "the poor" would have difficulty with the initial cash outlay, since they're effectively fronting a loan to the government. At the other end of the spectrum, there'll always be conspicuous consumption of fuel, but since the Hummer will only come out when the neighbors are looking that shouldn't amount to much in the aggregate...
Perhaps, but the same argument can be made regarding any city that isn't completely self-sufficient in resources, which is every city that I can think of. Bringing water to cities in the desert is an obvious example, but even supplying food requires that big money be spent on transportation infrastructure.
Unless you're downloading executable programs and running them, how are you supposed to get a virus by reading Usenet?
Unless /bin/ps gets replaced with a version that is blind to the evil deeds, as any reasonable rootkit would do. I was rooted back in 2001 and that's one of the very first things that it did.
Ironically (or not), it is the U.S. that has meddled more than anyone in international aid programs, particularly where family planning, contraception, and abortion are involved.
In my case, there is no difference between my degree and the same degree earned on campus.
Just about everybody here claiming that online degrees are equivalent actually got theirs from a "real" brick-and-mortar school - like RIT - that is recognized as such by employers and graduate schools. The key seems to be that the online nature of the program is concealed, or at least not made immediately obvious.
The purpose of universities is not only to educate people, but to screen them as well. When you're being evaluated by employers, they are depending on that screening function as much (or more) than on what you may or may not have learned there. Graduating from Harvard means you were smart enough (or well-connected enough) to be admitted to and graduate from Harvard; it doesn't matter that you might have actually learned more at South Podunk College, where everyone gets in and degrees are handed out like candy. The degree is a certification that you could handle the demands of the institution that granted it, and as such it's never worth more than than the reputation of that institution.
So, the bottom line is: It's not how you get the degree that matters, but rather where.
I'm just speculating, but perhaps the $50K was considered by NASA to be mainly PR money, useful for generating some enthusiasm and a sense of participation among the SF fandom community. If NASA regarded it as something even remotely feasible, the prize would have been very much larger.
Next up: transporter beams, cloaking devices, and female yeomen with really short skirts!