What are you talking about? If I have 30 computers running Windows XP under a own and not lease volume license agreement (which a lot of companies do actually use), I've bought and paid for 30 XP licenses. If one of my computers breaks, I can replace the hardware and be out $0, because theses aren't OEM licenses so I can just reinstall using the same license. If I need to get 5 more computers, my cost is 5 copies of Windows. At that point, I can either do license downgrades to XP to keep standarized equipment or I can have 5 Windows 7 rigs and 30 XP rigs. I can see arguments both ways on whether you let the 5 be upgraded to Windows 7, but I've still got to lay out huge sums of money to upgrade the other 30 if I want an all Windows 7 shop. I could take all the money that I would have been spending for 8 years of leased software after Windows XP came out and spend it on upgrading to Windows 7, but even if that was the initial intention, that money has already been spent and I'm left with this year's budget (because hey, that's what the bean counters do to look better).
Yes, these are frequently the same arguments we use day in and day out to try to get you upgraded equipment. Because, let's be honest. My job is a hell of a lot easier if everybody is on a brand spanking new rig with enough resources to run a few extra toolbars in your browser without slowing you down. Why would I want to argue against it? It's not like your IT department has its own income that they are using to buy computer parts.
"I had my old machine loaded with all sorts of tools I had custom crafted for my needs. DSP stuff. Digitizers and digitizing software. Unusual displays. Dual disk drives and RAM drives, along with drivers of my own design. Assemblers. C++ compilers. Schematic capture and PCB layout software. SPICE circuit simulators. Mathcad. Thermodynamics software. Disassemblers and debugging tools just in case something didn't work like it oughta."
As an IT guy, the first thing I would start checking when I saw that you just came on in with thousands of dollars of software on your computer was whether you had legal licenses for what you were using. My guess is that you either couldn't or wouldn't demonstrate the legality of your software to your IT department and so they wouldn't let you use it. Because seriously, we're the people who get in trouble when somebody else finds out that your copy of Mathcad was licensed to your previous employer and you were supposed to uninstall it.
Yes, even plugging in a monitor isn't something you can take for granted. A few months back, a user was having a problem because dialog windows were coming up halfway off the screen. Her monitor was plugged into her PC with both a DVI and VGA cable, so it was being detected twice by Windows and it therefore thought she had two monitors. I unplugged one, it fixed the problem, and then explained what had happened to her. Several months later, they called with the same problem. It had been a while and it had taken only a few seconds to figure out last time, so I didn't remember what the solution was until I sat back down at the machine and realized that the computer had been moved across the room and both cables were plugged back in. I'm not even sure it was the same person who plugged both in both times, but you really do have to start with the basics because the first time you start skipping inane steps, you'll waste significant time on something you should have been able to solve in a few minutes.
"Semantics."
The semantic distinction in this case is incredibly important.
"And so what? Just because one phrase isn't functionally equivalent to another doesn't make it any less wrong, illegal, and/or immoral/amoral."
Yes it does, at least in the case of being wrong or immoral. And in the case of illegality, noncommercial piracy might not be technically less illegal, but only in the sense that murder is not more illegal than piracy.
Now that I am of age and education to have a job that pays enough to afford my software/music/movies/etc, I don't pirate them anymore, but I did years ago. And you know what? It was wrong, but sometimes distinctions about how wrong something is are incredibly important. People listen to honest arguments a lot more readily than trumped up exaggerations, and conflating stealing with piracy is dishonest. They are fundamentally different, and you aren't going to convince anybody to quit pirating movies by lying.
"And of course the irony of us bitching about things like DRM is you have to wonder how many businesses today would have gone the way of Napster had it NOT been for some sort of electronic countermeasure to prohibit (or at least deter) theft and protect their revenue source enough to stay operational."
It is a nonzero number, but probably not for the reasons you are thinking. It has nothing to do with keeping people from piracy. I'd be highly surprised if anybody sold copies of music in excess of the cost of requiring DRM, but investors need to be pleased. Investing in DRM probably kept people from going under at the whim of ignorant investors.
The fallacy you are falling for is that having a healthy economy is about moving money in. An economic ecosystem that imports exactly as much value as it exports can still be anything from completely horrible to stellar, and a lot of it has to do with how quickly money is moving around. I mean, when people talk about the economic crash of 2008 destroying x number of dollars of wealth, they aren't claiming that dollar bills spontaneously combusted.
Er, the target audience of an internal email with the eventual goal of being published in a peer reviewed journal is either direct colleagues or peers. And I highly doubt they are making a guess on each individual year. The numbers are coming from some model that they have come up with that matches the data they have as closely as possible, and that model isn't giving an output of "14.9 +/- 0.2", it is giving an output of 14.971. Margin of Error is a real statistical concept that is calculated later (and not just pulled out of one's ass like you just did). At that point, sometimes numbers are rounded, but not when we're discussing raw data.
I haven't looked at the email in question, but I suspect your problem is perspective. Just because you post an error rate doesn't mean you don't present the raw, unrounded data in a research paper. I am pretty sure their target audience isn't going to draw any unfounded conclusions based on the specificity of the numbers generated by the model being discussed.
The answer to any hypothetical you pose to me, regardless of details, is the same. If you will die if you do not take action x, I am going to interpret it a drastically different manner from an ethical standpoint than if you take action x because you feel like it. If you have to eat a person to survive, I don't see the ethical concern as such with making it taste better insofar as you do not degrade its nutritional value in doing so (although I doubt most people in that situation have any interest or ability to season their human meat).
Who says Google is a typical company? If the company culture is such that he reasonably expected to not get management's panties in a wad over this, I don't see the issue. And given Larry Page's purported directness, there is a reasonable possibility that he does encourage this sort of up front discussion in his company.
I think the idea is that forcing the star to emit a larger number of highly energetic x-rays is likely costing the star energy, which will lead to it dying somewhat earlier. By some metrics, that would count as damage.
Right, it is actually much worse than that. There are indeed completely outrageous patents that get the thumbs up, but a whole lot get rejected, as well. This means one of two things: either there is some metric besides actual value by which patent applications are being judged that big corporations understand and the little guy inventor doesn't, or it is being determined randomly, in which case only the big guys can afford to file and see what sticks. Either way, the system is much worse for anybody but large corporations than the rubber stamp would be.
Your post is very sad, because it indicates that you don't know how often exactly what you are describing happens with corporations. It doesn't work outside of accounting practices, so murder is not a good analogy, but your middle paragraph there otherwise works perfectly for a description of the process of incorporation as long as you settle for more mundane liability abstractions like tax liabilities and debts.
Is that a problem? The answer for most conservatives when they don't have a chip on their shoulder for a particular issue would be to just decrease taxes on the rich in the deep blue states so that they can afford to buy more expensive food from the red states and let the free market manage everything else. How people get over the doublethink required to tell me that we should have government mandated and run insurance for food production and then turn around and complain about how the same thing for health insurance would be Unconstitutional (tm) is beyond me.
Them's some Fuzzy Math. Taxes on corporate profits and capital gains are concepts so wildly different that blindly adding together the rates doesn't make any sense at all. For an easy to understand example for why this is true, take hypothetical corporation MonkeyCat Inc. MonkeyCat lost $200 billion yesteryear in its worst loss in decades, and its stocks slumped tremendously as a result. Let's say I buy 100 shares of MonkeyCat at that point. This year, they have rallied and posted a net profit of $0. This has caused the stock to rally substantially from last year's slump, raising by a full 60%. If I sell off now, the money has been taxed exactly one time at the capital gains rate when it gets to my hands.
Now, there is some truth in the idea of the net tax rate on the money involved being higher than just the capital gains rate, but it turns out to be not by much. Even if a company posts a profit margin of 100%, their net is still only half of their gross, so they are only paying on half the company's total income. This is also relatively rare, because almost every company will re-invest profits over a few percentage points back into growth, and the re-invested money is expensed out and not taxed.
The other problem is that they are also completely different taxes taxed for different reasons. The maid's employer is paying corporate profit as well. Only by trying to scale the corporate profit tax to scale by how much money each person involved has made directly or indirectly from a company's activity in a year can you even begin to try to make the tax burden match up to anything Buffet is taking home. Again, for a really simple example for why this doesn't make sense, if MonkeyCat hires an additional employee, each employee's theoretical burden with regard to the corporate tax is decreased both because there are more expenses and more people to distribute the burden over. Meanwhile, if the employee is any good, the net result of their hire will likely increase the real money gain of an owner.
I guess that was a pretty long-winded way of saying that adding up those tax rates doesn't make any sense at all and you should stop listening to whatever talking head, if any, that you are parroting, but there you have it.
If my neighbor could steal my lawnmower but I'd still have a lawnmower after the theft occured, then copyright infringement would be analogous to theft. Since this is not the case, we need different terminology for different crimes.
Calling somebody "Dubya", while moderately disrespectful and not an idiom I commonly use, is not a transparent attempt to capitalize on people's racism. When you go out of your way to highlight a middle name which the man himself never uses, the only rational conclusion I can make is that you think it has some special meaning, and in this particular case, the only potential meaning in bringing it up would be to link him to other people with the same name. Hussein is a very common Arabic surname, and the likelihood that you are trying to associate Obama with a man who was dead before he even began his bid for the presidency seems much less likely than the idea that you are acting as part of the long, ongoing campaign to associate him with his alleged Muslim ties.
It's lame, petty, and not in the least bit clever. It might elicit ass slapping among your like-minded friends, but it causes the rest of us to write you off as either bigoted or at the very least willing to exploit the bigotry of others.
When it comes to language, you can't express content without getting the form right. We just have to guess what you mean, and some of the time we're going to get it wrong.
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What are you talking about? If I have 30 computers running Windows XP under a own and not lease volume license agreement (which a lot of companies do actually use), I've bought and paid for 30 XP licenses. If one of my computers breaks, I can replace the hardware and be out $0, because theses aren't OEM licenses so I can just reinstall using the same license. If I need to get 5 more computers, my cost is 5 copies of Windows. At that point, I can either do license downgrades to XP to keep standarized equipment or I can have 5 Windows 7 rigs and 30 XP rigs. I can see arguments both ways on whether you let the 5 be upgraded to Windows 7, but I've still got to lay out huge sums of money to upgrade the other 30 if I want an all Windows 7 shop. I could take all the money that I would have been spending for 8 years of leased software after Windows XP came out and spend it on upgrading to Windows 7, but even if that was the initial intention, that money has already been spent and I'm left with this year's budget (because hey, that's what the bean counters do to look better).
Yes, these are frequently the same arguments we use day in and day out to try to get you upgraded equipment. Because, let's be honest. My job is a hell of a lot easier if everybody is on a brand spanking new rig with enough resources to run a few extra toolbars in your browser without slowing you down. Why would I want to argue against it? It's not like your IT department has its own income that they are using to buy computer parts.
"I had my old machine loaded with all sorts of tools I had custom crafted for my needs. DSP stuff. Digitizers and digitizing software. Unusual displays. Dual disk drives and RAM drives, along with drivers of my own design. Assemblers. C++ compilers. Schematic capture and PCB layout software. SPICE circuit simulators. Mathcad. Thermodynamics software. Disassemblers and debugging tools just in case something didn't work like it oughta."
As an IT guy, the first thing I would start checking when I saw that you just came on in with thousands of dollars of software on your computer was whether you had legal licenses for what you were using. My guess is that you either couldn't or wouldn't demonstrate the legality of your software to your IT department and so they wouldn't let you use it. Because seriously, we're the people who get in trouble when somebody else finds out that your copy of Mathcad was licensed to your previous employer and you were supposed to uninstall it.
Yes, even plugging in a monitor isn't something you can take for granted. A few months back, a user was having a problem because dialog windows were coming up halfway off the screen. Her monitor was plugged into her PC with both a DVI and VGA cable, so it was being detected twice by Windows and it therefore thought she had two monitors. I unplugged one, it fixed the problem, and then explained what had happened to her. Several months later, they called with the same problem. It had been a while and it had taken only a few seconds to figure out last time, so I didn't remember what the solution was until I sat back down at the machine and realized that the computer had been moved across the room and both cables were plugged back in. I'm not even sure it was the same person who plugged both in both times, but you really do have to start with the basics because the first time you start skipping inane steps, you'll waste significant time on something you should have been able to solve in a few minutes.
"Semantics." The semantic distinction in this case is incredibly important. "And so what? Just because one phrase isn't functionally equivalent to another doesn't make it any less wrong, illegal, and/or immoral/amoral."
Yes it does, at least in the case of being wrong or immoral. And in the case of illegality, noncommercial piracy might not be technically less illegal, but only in the sense that murder is not more illegal than piracy.
Now that I am of age and education to have a job that pays enough to afford my software/music/movies/etc, I don't pirate them anymore, but I did years ago. And you know what? It was wrong, but sometimes distinctions about how wrong something is are incredibly important. People listen to honest arguments a lot more readily than trumped up exaggerations, and conflating stealing with piracy is dishonest. They are fundamentally different, and you aren't going to convince anybody to quit pirating movies by lying.
"And of course the irony of us bitching about things like DRM is you have to wonder how many businesses today would have gone the way of Napster had it NOT been for some sort of electronic countermeasure to prohibit (or at least deter) theft and protect their revenue source enough to stay operational."
It is a nonzero number, but probably not for the reasons you are thinking. It has nothing to do with keeping people from piracy. I'd be highly surprised if anybody sold copies of music in excess of the cost of requiring DRM, but investors need to be pleased. Investing in DRM probably kept people from going under at the whim of ignorant investors.
The fallacy you are falling for is that having a healthy economy is about moving money in. An economic ecosystem that imports exactly as much value as it exports can still be anything from completely horrible to stellar, and a lot of it has to do with how quickly money is moving around. I mean, when people talk about the economic crash of 2008 destroying x number of dollars of wealth, they aren't claiming that dollar bills spontaneously combusted.
Er, the target audience of an internal email with the eventual goal of being published in a peer reviewed journal is either direct colleagues or peers. And I highly doubt they are making a guess on each individual year. The numbers are coming from some model that they have come up with that matches the data they have as closely as possible, and that model isn't giving an output of "14.9 +/- 0.2", it is giving an output of 14.971. Margin of Error is a real statistical concept that is calculated later (and not just pulled out of one's ass like you just did). At that point, sometimes numbers are rounded, but not when we're discussing raw data.
I haven't looked at the email in question, but I suspect your problem is perspective. Just because you post an error rate doesn't mean you don't present the raw, unrounded data in a research paper. I am pretty sure their target audience isn't going to draw any unfounded conclusions based on the specificity of the numbers generated by the model being discussed.
The answer to any hypothetical you pose to me, regardless of details, is the same. If you will die if you do not take action x, I am going to interpret it a drastically different manner from an ethical standpoint than if you take action x because you feel like it. If you have to eat a person to survive, I don't see the ethical concern as such with making it taste better insofar as you do not degrade its nutritional value in doing so (although I doubt most people in that situation have any interest or ability to season their human meat).
Irrelevant. The ethical ramifications of doing something for survival and doing it because it is easy/tastes good are completely different.
Who says Google is a typical company? If the company culture is such that he reasonably expected to not get management's panties in a wad over this, I don't see the issue. And given Larry Page's purported directness, there is a reasonable possibility that he does encourage this sort of up front discussion in his company.
So you are saying that any solution that does not close the deficit by itself should be dismissed? I'd certainly like to hear what your plan is!
I think the idea is that forcing the star to emit a larger number of highly energetic x-rays is likely costing the star energy, which will lead to it dying somewhat earlier. By some metrics, that would count as damage.
Right, it is actually much worse than that. There are indeed completely outrageous patents that get the thumbs up, but a whole lot get rejected, as well. This means one of two things: either there is some metric besides actual value by which patent applications are being judged that big corporations understand and the little guy inventor doesn't, or it is being determined randomly, in which case only the big guys can afford to file and see what sticks. Either way, the system is much worse for anybody but large corporations than the rubber stamp would be.
Or ship a bitcoin wallet on a thumb drive?
Your post is very sad, because it indicates that you don't know how often exactly what you are describing happens with corporations. It doesn't work outside of accounting practices, so murder is not a good analogy, but your middle paragraph there otherwise works perfectly for a description of the process of incorporation as long as you settle for more mundane liability abstractions like tax liabilities and debts.
Is that a problem? The answer for most conservatives when they don't have a chip on their shoulder for a particular issue would be to just decrease taxes on the rich in the deep blue states so that they can afford to buy more expensive food from the red states and let the free market manage everything else. How people get over the doublethink required to tell me that we should have government mandated and run insurance for food production and then turn around and complain about how the same thing for health insurance would be Unconstitutional (tm) is beyond me.
Them's some Fuzzy Math. Taxes on corporate profits and capital gains are concepts so wildly different that blindly adding together the rates doesn't make any sense at all. For an easy to understand example for why this is true, take hypothetical corporation MonkeyCat Inc. MonkeyCat lost $200 billion yesteryear in its worst loss in decades, and its stocks slumped tremendously as a result. Let's say I buy 100 shares of MonkeyCat at that point. This year, they have rallied and posted a net profit of $0. This has caused the stock to rally substantially from last year's slump, raising by a full 60%. If I sell off now, the money has been taxed exactly one time at the capital gains rate when it gets to my hands.
Now, there is some truth in the idea of the net tax rate on the money involved being higher than just the capital gains rate, but it turns out to be not by much. Even if a company posts a profit margin of 100%, their net is still only half of their gross, so they are only paying on half the company's total income. This is also relatively rare, because almost every company will re-invest profits over a few percentage points back into growth, and the re-invested money is expensed out and not taxed.
The other problem is that they are also completely different taxes taxed for different reasons. The maid's employer is paying corporate profit as well. Only by trying to scale the corporate profit tax to scale by how much money each person involved has made directly or indirectly from a company's activity in a year can you even begin to try to make the tax burden match up to anything Buffet is taking home. Again, for a really simple example for why this doesn't make sense, if MonkeyCat hires an additional employee, each employee's theoretical burden with regard to the corporate tax is decreased both because there are more expenses and more people to distribute the burden over. Meanwhile, if the employee is any good, the net result of their hire will likely increase the real money gain of an owner.
I guess that was a pretty long-winded way of saying that adding up those tax rates doesn't make any sense at all and you should stop listening to whatever talking head, if any, that you are parroting, but there you have it.
Then to bring the analogy back full circle, what about cities that have open wifi access points?
And on that note, I'd suggest refusing to give me a bag full of money as a good starting point.
If my neighbor could steal my lawnmower but I'd still have a lawnmower after the theft occured, then copyright infringement would be analogous to theft. Since this is not the case, we need different terminology for different crimes.
Yes, that must be it. Overt racism makes me cringe, ergo I must want Obama's dick inside of me.
Calling somebody "Dubya", while moderately disrespectful and not an idiom I commonly use, is not a transparent attempt to capitalize on people's racism. When you go out of your way to highlight a middle name which the man himself never uses, the only rational conclusion I can make is that you think it has some special meaning, and in this particular case, the only potential meaning in bringing it up would be to link him to other people with the same name. Hussein is a very common Arabic surname, and the likelihood that you are trying to associate Obama with a man who was dead before he even began his bid for the presidency seems much less likely than the idea that you are acting as part of the long, ongoing campaign to associate him with his alleged Muslim ties.
It's lame, petty, and not in the least bit clever. It might elicit ass slapping among your like-minded friends, but it causes the rest of us to write you off as either bigoted or at the very least willing to exploit the bigotry of others.
When it comes to language, you can't express content without getting the form right. We just have to guess what you mean, and some of the time we're going to get it wrong.