No doubt that's bad, but I don't believe it falls under the definition of corruption. This was done fairly openly, definitely sanctioned by the voters and usually was intended to further US interests. That it didn't end up furthering US interests but rather damage them has more to do with incompetence than corruption.
There is of course plenty of corruption in the US, but most people are not corrupt and most transactions can be completed without bribes. There is bribery on high levels (like K-Street, Super-PACs etc) but that could be fixed by electing better representatives and changing the system. If you have all-permeating corruption on all levels, then you have nothing to build on. That's way harder to fix than the problems the US has currently. (Mainly lethargy and ideological thinking).
I'm proposing a way to get money to content creators. It's not a subsidy it's payment. MAFIAA is involved only if people want to see their content. If content creators don't offer their content via the MAFIAA, then the latter is out of business.
The business plan of the MAFIAA is very much your problem, because it means subordinating your freedom to their profit, and they won't pay you they'll pay your representatives instead. You are essentially proposing a "wait and see" approach, hoping that they'll adjust to the internet or be replaced by others. I'm not too hopeful on that.
If you want to compare that to buggy whips... They'll ban car manufacturing, label anyone traveling over 35mph a pirate and are asking government to destroy roads whenever pirates are sighted on them.
Also please keep in mind that getting granted an injunction in Germany, says very little about the validity of the case. Unless you very obviously don't have a case you'll get your injunction. This is balanced by the fact that you are then liable for damages if you later fail to win your case. So Apple getting an injunction merely means they felt sure enough of their case to risk it.
Yes, correct I wasn't proposing magical unicorns. Everybody pays. However you also direct where your money goes. It's not true that your share goes to stuff you don't like. That only applies if you want to pay less then your fair share, then that control goes away.
Well *your* part of the money goes only to the content creators *you* like. The MAFIAA only gets money if people are willing to tip for their content. If they do that with their money, you'll just have to live with that.
I don't know, maybe I didn't explain this very well. The money the artist gets is the amount he gets from tips, plus his share from the flat rate. However his share depends on the tips he's getting. So his income is: money_from_tips + money_from_tips * flat_rate_share_factor. Let's say the factor is 50%, than his total income is 1.5 times the money he gets from tips. The factor is the same for everybody, the contribution for the flat rate is the same for everybody.
Let's the say the average amount of tips people give out is $5/month, the amount distributed via flat rate contributions is $2.5 per month and person (has to be because flat rate factor is 50%). So if you give your favorite artist $5/month, they will receive 1.5*$5 = $7.50 from you as combined income. Since you are an average tipper, all the money you pay in the flat rate is distributed to artists you like.
Now if you were a below-average tipper, you might only tip $2/month. Your artists receive only 1.5 times that - i.e. $3/month from you. That means the remaining flat-rate funds of $1.50 are used to fund rap yodelling (or other stuff you don't like).
If you are a good tipper you might tip $20/month - your favorite artists receive $30/month - $7.50 more than would normally come out of your flat-rate share. The rest comes from people who love rap yodelling but are lousy tippers.
So good tippers are shaping the direction in which content creators develop. They also help keep the flat-rate down, because they contribute more to the total. Extremely lousy tippers don't have to spend anything other than the flat rate, but they also exercise no control.
Note: I didn't pick realistic amounts here, just wanted a simple example for the numerical side of things.
You're basically saying that the creative people should be given as much free rein as they like
Nonsense, I was saying nothing even remotely related to that. Nor was I arguing arguing anywhere that documentation wasn't important. I was however arguing that badgering won't get you there - which matches my experience and apparently yours, too. Anyway TFA makes some suggestions how to get there - it's not a particularly great article, but it's worth a look.
Trying to fix this via piracy prevention seems just hopeless as well as ethically dubious. We now have the technology for everyone in the world with an internet connection to access basically the entire wealth of human culture. I don't think there is ethical case to be made that this should be artificially restricted. The question we need to solve is not how we can maintain outdated business models under these circumstances, but how we can make that happen and still enable content creators to make a living.
One way might be to simply collect tips - people put money in the jar if they enjoyed the work. If that on it's own doesn't bring in sufficient funds, then the tip jar could be augmented with a culture flat rate. E.g. you pay a fixed amount every month for media consumption and the content producer additionally receives the tip jar multiplied by a certain factor. That would help to ensure that they get payed for stuff people actually want to see, not just for the pure amount of stuff produced. Also a nice side effect would be that it's not enough to trick people to see your content, they'd have to appreciate it, too. (Maybe that would put a stop to George Lucas? We can only hope.)
I'd also be fine with replacing the flat rate with an internet traffic tax - a kind of sales tax on the downstream data and funding content creation this way.
Anyway just some random thoughts on the topic, but certainly better thought out than SOPA.
It's a pity you didn't read the article, because you are one of the people who could benefit from it.
What happens if your only management tool is badgering? People are going to be frustrated and bored. Their productivity will go down, the quality of their output will be reduced. You'll respond with more badgering and the situation will get worse. You can of course fire them, or they might look for more fun places to work by themselves, but then you are in the worst case scenario with heaps of undocumented code and no access to the people who understand it.
This is basically unavoidable, because working creatively means - among other things - that you'll have to motivate yourself to do the work. It's not as easy as picking up a shovel and doing the only thing you can do with it (the work there is in the shoveling, though). Unfortunately the energy people have to motivate themselves is not unlimited. The harder a place of work makes it, the less the employees will succeed. Any basic management handbook will tell you that, any research available on the topic will tell you that - but still people prefer to manage by what they think ought to be true, instead of what's known to be true.
At least Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr (the long distance branch of the German railway system) is turning a profit. (In 2002 they introduced an innovative new pricing system, but they recovered from that 2.5 years later...)
They are running their third generation HSR now (ICE 3) and have recently placed orders for 300 IC X trains.
I second that. My dad has a Samsung smart TV. It can record to an external harddrive, but you can't watch that content on your PC at a later timer (someone managing your digital rights for you...). It has a Skype app, but you can't use it in full screen mode, and mysteriously you can't make video calls to Linux machines with it. It can theoretically play youtube videos, but the playback interrupts so often to make them unwatchable. (Sure he has a slow internet connection, but every other device on his WLAN can handle youtube videos just fine.) ASCII input is taking the old cellphone input schemes to new heights - never seen something more inconvenient. Leaving the skype app in the wrong way will make it forget the password, and entering that again will keep you busy for 10 painful minutes.
A small media computer connected to his screen would probably be better in just about any aspect. Eventually I'll hook that up for him.
The economics and peace prizes aren't real Nobel prices and aren't awrded by the Nobel commitee. They've just stolen the name.
That's not correct - the Nobel Peace prize is one of the 6 original prizes. The Economics prize was funded later by the central bank of Sweden but is also administered by the Nobel foundation. The Nobel prizes are given out by four organizations: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Economics), the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute (Medicine), the Swedish Academy (Literature), and the Norwegian Nobel Committee (Peace).
That the Nobel Peace prize is intended to be political should be somewhat obvious.
[...] their only possible approach was something that historians will find familiar: Approve them all, and let the Courts sort them out.
I don't see how that's the only possible approach. Seems to me, a far better approach would have been to check each thoroughly and accumulate a huge backlog. That would have created pressure to hire more examiners, and would have lowered the incentive to file more patents.
Why did they build it in an earthquake zone and in a zone vulnerable to tsunamis?
It's Japan, the whole country is an earthquake zone. But yeah, there was no reason to build so close to the shore. The Onagawa nuclear power plant was 75 km closer to the epicenter, but it was built at 15 meters above sea level. It was fine.
I'm a Mythbusters fan, but their remote-controlled vehicles suck. They don't even build-in an automatic brake when the vehicle gets out of range of the remote. Furthermore, it's damn difficult to build electronics which can operate in an environment where they are constantly subjected to intense electromagnetic radiation. IIRC the first robots they used in Chernobyl basically drove in and stopped without accomplishing anything.
Finally, the US, France and Germany offered to loan Japan suitable robots. The best thing Japan should have done right after the disaster would have been to accept these offers immediately.
The Onagawa nuclear power plant was 75 km closer to the epicenter, but it was built at 15 meters above sea level. It did fine. Maybe you want to look that up? Maybe if you try to designs and one performs far worse than the other (under better circumstances), that's some indication which design is better?
Based upon what was understood about the risks they built what they could
They assumed the risks so their site would be viable, and they put protections in place which were not too expensive to run the reactor economically. This was a very large tsunami, yes - but the site was not where the waves were highest. A smaller quake could have occurred at a worse location, and the site would have been hit even harder.
The Fukushima plant assumed a max wave height of 5.5 meters. That's less than historically reported wave height. The Onagawa nuclear power plant was 75 km closer to the epicenter, but it was built at 15 meters above sea level.
According to BBC, the reaction of the London mayor was that he's too busy for things like that.
That's completely wrong. The BBC actually reports [...] the mayor is in awe of his good friend Michael Bloomberg, and if re-elected will explore whether he can join him on that course. I believe you got Boris Johnson (current mayor) confused with Ken Livingstone (former mayor and current candidate for the opposing party). Ken Livingstone stated If I'm elected, I'll be a bit too busy to take any education courses.
Anyway, it's certainly nice if politicians broaden their minds, but it's reasonable that they have to allocate their time and set priorities.
The engineering was fine, they just didn't have a backup backup generator that was hardened against tsunami.
So it wasn't fine. It could have been protected merely by locating the site a little further inland.
Take the village of Aneyoshi - it was basically wiped out in 1896, suffered major destruction in 1933, and in 1960 they were fine because they had moved to higher ground by then. So that gives us around 30 years between major tsunamis - the Fukushima site would have had to assume at least one during the intended operating period. Not planning for that was a major flaw. It doesn't by itself indicate that the reactor _type_ is unsafe, but the design of the site was not correct.
The operators of the existing plants would want to keep them running in any case. Simply because those plants are already paid for, so keeping them running longer typically means to get higher profits. This would apply if you wanted to build new gas-fired plants, offshore wind parks or new nuclear power stations.
If you want to replace old nuclear plants, you have to say: "These plants are unsafe to operate, we need something else, be it energy X, Y or Z". There is no way any energy supplier would replace a plant just because they can build one which is safer as long as the old one is assumed to be safe already.
Slashdot Mirror
Well apart from security there is safety: people fall down or bump into things. There is a reason why that criminal carries a flashlight around.
No doubt that's bad, but I don't believe it falls under the definition of corruption. This was done fairly openly, definitely sanctioned by the voters and usually was intended to further US interests. That it didn't end up furthering US interests but rather damage them has more to do with incompetence than corruption.
There is of course plenty of corruption in the US, but most people are not corrupt and most transactions can be completed without bribes. There is bribery on high levels (like K-Street, Super-PACs etc) but that could be fixed by electing better representatives and changing the system. If you have all-permeating corruption on all levels, then you have nothing to build on. That's way harder to fix than the problems the US has currently. (Mainly lethargy and ideological thinking).
The business plan of the MAFIAA is very much your problem, because it means subordinating your freedom to their profit, and they won't pay you they'll pay your representatives instead. You are essentially proposing a "wait and see" approach, hoping that they'll adjust to the internet or be replaced by others. I'm not too hopeful on that.
If you want to compare that to buggy whips ... They'll ban car manufacturing, label anyone traveling over 35mph a pirate and are asking government to destroy roads whenever pirates are sighted on them.
The German injunction was over a design patent.
Also please keep in mind that getting granted an injunction in Germany, says very little about the validity of the case. Unless you very obviously don't have a case you'll get your injunction. This is balanced by the fact that you are then liable for damages if you later fail to win your case. So Apple getting an injunction merely means they felt sure enough of their case to risk it.
Yes, correct I wasn't proposing magical unicorns. Everybody pays. However you also direct where your money goes. It's not true that your share goes to stuff you don't like. That only applies if you want to pay less then your fair share, then that control goes away.
Well *your* part of the money goes only to the content creators *you* like. The MAFIAA only gets money if people are willing to tip for their content. If they do that with their money, you'll just have to live with that.
I don't know, maybe I didn't explain this very well. The money the artist gets is the amount he gets from tips, plus his share from the flat rate. However his share depends on the tips he's getting. So his income is: money_from_tips + money_from_tips * flat_rate_share_factor. Let's say the factor is 50%, than his total income is 1.5 times the money he gets from tips. The factor is the same for everybody, the contribution for the flat rate is the same for everybody.
Let's the say the average amount of tips people give out is $5/month, the amount distributed via flat rate contributions is $2.5 per month and person (has to be because flat rate factor is 50%). So if you give your favorite artist $5/month, they will receive 1.5*$5 = $7.50 from you as combined income. Since you are an average tipper, all the money you pay in the flat rate is distributed to artists you like.
Now if you were a below-average tipper, you might only tip $2/month. Your artists receive only 1.5 times that - i.e. $3/month from you. That means the remaining flat-rate funds of $1.50 are used to fund rap yodelling (or other stuff you don't like).
If you are a good tipper you might tip $20/month - your favorite artists receive $30/month - $7.50 more than would normally come out of your flat-rate share. The rest comes from people who love rap yodelling but are lousy tippers.
So good tippers are shaping the direction in which content creators develop. They also help keep the flat-rate down, because they contribute more to the total. Extremely lousy tippers don't have to spend anything other than the flat rate, but they also exercise no control.
Note: I didn't pick realistic amounts here, just wanted a simple example for the numerical side of things.
That would only happen if you are a lousy tipper. Otherwise the money goes to the content you are interested in.
You're basically saying that the creative people should be given as much free rein as they like
Nonsense, I was saying nothing even remotely related to that. Nor was I arguing arguing anywhere that documentation wasn't important. I was however arguing that badgering won't get you there - which matches my experience and apparently yours, too. Anyway TFA makes some suggestions how to get there - it's not a particularly great article, but it's worth a look.
Trying to fix this via piracy prevention seems just hopeless as well as ethically dubious. We now have the technology for everyone in the world with an internet connection to access basically the entire wealth of human culture. I don't think there is ethical case to be made that this should be artificially restricted. The question we need to solve is not how we can maintain outdated business models under these circumstances, but how we can make that happen and still enable content creators to make a living.
One way might be to simply collect tips - people put money in the jar if they enjoyed the work. If that on it's own doesn't bring in sufficient funds, then the tip jar could be augmented with a culture flat rate. E.g. you pay a fixed amount every month for media consumption and the content producer additionally receives the tip jar multiplied by a certain factor. That would help to ensure that they get payed for stuff people actually want to see, not just for the pure amount of stuff produced. Also a nice side effect would be that it's not enough to trick people to see your content, they'd have to appreciate it, too. (Maybe that would put a stop to George Lucas? We can only hope.)
I'd also be fine with replacing the flat rate with an internet traffic tax - a kind of sales tax on the downstream data and funding content creation this way.
Anyway just some random thoughts on the topic, but certainly better thought out than SOPA.
It's a pity you didn't read the article, because you are one of the people who could benefit from it.
What happens if your only management tool is badgering? People are going to be frustrated and bored. Their productivity will go down, the quality of their output will be reduced. You'll respond with more badgering and the situation will get worse. You can of course fire them, or they might look for more fun places to work by themselves, but then you are in the worst case scenario with heaps of undocumented code and no access to the people who understand it.
This is basically unavoidable, because working creatively means - among other things - that you'll have to motivate yourself to do the work. It's not as easy as picking up a shovel and doing the only thing you can do with it (the work there is in the shoveling, though). Unfortunately the energy people have to motivate themselves is not unlimited. The harder a place of work makes it, the less the employees will succeed. Any basic management handbook will tell you that, any research available on the topic will tell you that - but still people prefer to manage by what they think ought to be true, instead of what's known to be true.
Yeah, there is an app for my SGS2 as well, but he doesn't have a smart phone so I didn't spend a lot of time exploring that.
High Speed rail rarely if ever pays for itself
At least Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr (the long distance branch of the German railway system) is turning a profit. (In 2002 they introduced an innovative new pricing system, but they recovered from that 2.5 years later...)
They are running their third generation HSR now (ICE 3) and have recently placed orders for 300 IC X trains.
So is that an argument whether the US or rather the UK should get the credit for the Russian victory?
I second that. My dad has a Samsung smart TV. It can record to an external harddrive, but you can't watch that content on your PC at a later timer (someone managing your digital rights for you ...). It has a Skype app, but you can't use it in full screen mode, and mysteriously you can't make video calls to Linux machines with it. It can theoretically play youtube videos, but the playback interrupts so often to make them unwatchable. (Sure he has a slow internet connection, but every other device on his WLAN can handle youtube videos just fine.) ASCII input is taking the old cellphone input schemes to new heights - never seen something more inconvenient. Leaving the skype app in the wrong way will make it forget the password, and entering that again will keep you busy for 10 painful minutes.
A small media computer connected to his screen would probably be better in just about any aspect. Eventually I'll hook that up for him.
The economics and peace prizes aren't real Nobel prices and aren't awrded by the Nobel commitee. They've just stolen the name.
That's not correct - the Nobel Peace prize is one of the 6 original prizes. The Economics prize was funded later by the central bank of Sweden but is also administered by the Nobel foundation. The Nobel prizes are given out by four organizations: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Economics), the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute (Medicine), the Swedish Academy (Literature), and the Norwegian Nobel Committee (Peace).
That the Nobel Peace prize is intended to be political should be somewhat obvious.
[...] their only possible approach was something that historians will find familiar: Approve them all, and let the Courts sort them out.
I don't see how that's the only possible approach. Seems to me, a far better approach would have been to check each thoroughly and accumulate a huge backlog. That would have created pressure to hire more examiners, and would have lowered the incentive to file more patents.
Why did they build it in an earthquake zone and in a zone vulnerable to tsunamis?
It's Japan, the whole country is an earthquake zone. But yeah, there was no reason to build so close to the shore. The Onagawa nuclear power plant was 75 km closer to the epicenter, but it was built at 15 meters above sea level. It was fine.
I'm a Mythbusters fan, but their remote-controlled vehicles suck. They don't even build-in an automatic brake when the vehicle gets out of range of the remote. Furthermore, it's damn difficult to build electronics which can operate in an environment where they are constantly subjected to intense electromagnetic radiation. IIRC the first robots they used in Chernobyl basically drove in and stopped without accomplishing anything.
Finally, the US, France and Germany offered to loan Japan suitable robots. The best thing Japan should have done right after the disaster would have been to accept these offers immediately.
The Onagawa nuclear power plant was 75 km closer to the epicenter, but it was built at 15 meters above sea level. It did fine. Maybe you want to look that up? Maybe if you try to designs and one performs far worse than the other (under better circumstances), that's some indication which design is better?
Based upon what was understood about the risks they built what they could
They assumed the risks so their site would be viable, and they put protections in place which were not too expensive to run the reactor economically. This was a very large tsunami, yes - but the site was not where the waves were highest. A smaller quake could have occurred at a worse location, and the site would have been hit even harder.
The Fukushima plant assumed a max wave height of 5.5 meters. That's less than historically reported wave height. The Onagawa nuclear power plant was 75 km closer to the epicenter, but it was built at 15 meters above sea level.
According to this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/tsunami-risk-well-known-to-nuclear-engineers-regulators-who-failed-to-act.html - Three [tsunamis] in the past three decades had waves of more than 10 meters. So they actually regularly get tsunami waves higher than the max assumption made for that site.
According to BBC, the reaction of the London mayor was that he's too busy for things like that.
That's completely wrong. The BBC actually reports [...] the mayor is in awe of his good friend Michael Bloomberg, and if re-elected will explore whether he can join him on that course. I believe you got Boris Johnson (current mayor) confused with Ken Livingstone (former mayor and current candidate for the opposing party). Ken Livingstone stated If I'm elected, I'll be a bit too busy to take any education courses.
Anyway, it's certainly nice if politicians broaden their minds, but it's reasonable that they have to allocate their time and set priorities.
The engineering was fine, they just didn't have a backup backup generator that was hardened against tsunami.
So it wasn't fine. It could have been protected merely by locating the site a little further inland.
Take the village of Aneyoshi - it was basically wiped out in 1896, suffered major destruction in 1933, and in 1960 they were fine because they had moved to higher ground by then. So that gives us around 30 years between major tsunamis - the Fukushima site would have had to assume at least one during the intended operating period. Not planning for that was a major flaw. It doesn't by itself indicate that the reactor _type_ is unsafe, but the design of the site was not correct.
The operators of the existing plants would want to keep them running in any case. Simply because those plants are already paid for, so keeping them running longer typically means to get higher profits. This would apply if you wanted to build new gas-fired plants, offshore wind parks or new nuclear power stations.
If you want to replace old nuclear plants, you have to say: "These plants are unsafe to operate, we need something else, be it energy X, Y or Z". There is no way any energy supplier would replace a plant just because they can build one which is safer as long as the old one is assumed to be safe already.
That's not how the US constitution defines it, so they are not usurping anything, but simply do the job they are obliged to do.
Quite apart from that - it doesn't make sense to restrict government to that role, because game theory tells us that this can not possibly work.