yes, because the area was colonized at a later time, and the people hadn't managed to domesticate as many different plants/animals as had the people of EurAsia... and therefor they didn't develop as many useful natural immunities to the diseases carried by such and such related animals, nor did they produce so much extra food as to be able to sustain specialists at the same rate as in E/A whereby production, and general growth of the territory, could be accelerated... the way that the invaders had so done.
Eating shit, if it has enough good stuff with not so much bad stuff, probably actually helped them to survive in a land that is today still largely undeveloped (that is, if this factoid is true)... you know what, just read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond...
and please, try not to think of yourself as any better than anyone else.
technically true, however, you don't have to sync your device with a computer in order to load music onto it. In fact, I've found that you only need to sync for pictures, and apps. I never sync music, not even from one computer, but I use 3 different computers regularly to load music onto my iTouch (the limitations in this area are the same between touch and phone) and have used 2 others as well with no problems.
I've actually considered this. Here's what happens, let's say I offer an album with 16 tracks, and people buy it whole for $9.99 but I'd be content to let it go for $5 even or so... so a net difference of $4.99... Apple takes, I think, $0.45 for every $0.99 track, and I imagine $4.50 for every $9.99 album... so essentially I'd gain $5.49 from each album. I would still make $0.50 on each copy of the album, which is consistent with what I would be making, at least if I'm correct about all the numbers, the same amount as if I sold it for $5 in the first place.
But here's the major thing that I'm not sure about: tracking sales, and verifying purchases. I can't afford to hand out gift-cards to people who didn't buy the album, but claimed they did. I don't think I have much to worry about as a total unknown, but... you get the idea.
I'm not going to say that what I do is any good (I like it, but that's irrelevant), but I can go from basic idea to writing, arranging, performing, recording, producing, mixing, mastering, and even converting to mp3/aac/whatever, all by myself. tricky thing about making movies is that you can't easily play all parts by yourself... actually, you probably could, but it would show more than if you did the same as with music (which I do).
I'm going to submit my first album to iTunes in the near future through a company called Tunecore... I only wish they'd let me lower the offering price. Maybe 2 or 3 other people will have anything to do with my music getting all the way into the iTunes store...
but you're right, so far as current, that it takes a lot more to put together a movie, plus the software to do it is much more expensive (at least if you roll legal, which I do for music recording, I don't do much in movies anymore... made 3, had to have other actors to get it right)
the generic converter that I use, for video and audio, is MediaCoder, and it has default settings for converting video into the proper format and formatting for both iPod and iTouch. It will also do the same for PSP, and other such and such.
It supports a lot of different file types, and can be used for a wide variety of circumstances for which I have a need.
I would be willing to put up money as well, just for a tool to be made, regardless of what anyone does with it. Heck, I probably won't even end up using the tool(s) myself at all.
Here's the catch: there is no way to eliminate all pinch points as far as having parties unauthorized being unable to determine content. Some sort of key and or addressing information exchange will have to happen somewhere. A system has to be made to allow certain people in and keep other people out. However, that sort of negates the whole free information thing.
At a minimum, in order to facilitate anything useful being made, a safe harbor must be found in a location where the vast masses will be able to access it. In order for such to happen there has got to be a vested interest for capitalists to keep the place otherwise connected (despite anything that happens), but not having so much interest therein vested that laws are created to stop such things.
Where-ever people are congregated, organization will commence, structure will be formed, power/authority will be assumed, laws will be created, currency will be minted, corruption will ensue, and, for the most part, unless enough sympathy can be generated on behalf of a cause, persons found to be without adequate funding will find themselves unable to alter the situation.
I just don't see that happening around the cause of file-sharing. And attempts to monetize the traffic generated, as means to provide resources, will be seen in a negative light by those who assumed authority under whatever pretext (democracy or dictatorship), so long as laws and regulations in those same jurisdictions remain at odds with the goals and desires of the entities participating. Cases abound where legal uses of such technology are wide-spread, but writ large, not happening.
yeah... well I had to try to explain how to fix an iTouch whose battery was totally drained on a flight from Chicago to Warsaw to a girl who knew enough English to get by, but not enough about computers... after a week I finally managed to get across that when she would plug in the iPod to charge it, she'd have to leave it all day (well, not quite) instead of just an hour or two.
Actually, I lie, the first week was spent trying to figure out why it died in the first place, and part of the second week was explaining that she doesn't have three years of warranty (as per law in Poland) because the iPod was purchased locally in the United States... and how she could contact Apple, in Polish, if she needed to.
actually, the deal breaker for me is ever having to look at even a single line of code to do any sort of installation or update what-so-ever.
I would rather be a farmer using an ox and plow than to have to read a line of code for such purposes ever again.
don't get me wrong, sometimes I enjoy looking at code to see how something that I find interesting is done. And I have even installed *nix a few times, just to see if I could... but never again until all such things can be obfuscated to the point that all I have to do is click yes/no buttons a couple of times to get everything working (maybe up to 5 yes or no questions, but that's pushing it)
actually, for me, the deal breaker is ever having to deal with code at all.
I don't mind every now and then having to see a command prompt, but I don't want to have to see any code at any point in time in order to get anything to work, be-it a driver, an update, a kernel patch, what-have-you. I can follow logic paths, even in code. Hell, I even enjoy looking at code now and then to see just what goes on when I find something particularly interesting. But I do not like having to look at code in any other situation. I just don't want to deal with it.
I want a relatively straightforward install-anything process, although I don't mind having to visit a website to download a driver.
There are some other things that I don't particularly enjoy about *nix, but the big one is ever having to deal with code at any point in time.
I would rather have no system than one where I have to deal with that. I've done it before, to see if I could, a few times, but never again. Computers are just not important enough to me. Yes, they're everywhere, and most of modern life wouldn't exist without them... but I would rather farm with an ox and plow than to have to deal with code during any sort of installation process ever again.
What do you believe is right? Do you care about sucking up your morals to do your job? If not, you probably won't have this same job for long. I'd contact a local news station to "break" the news about the coming traffic shaping, etc.
Or you can suck it up and do what you're being paid to do.
From my experience, life is a long series of having two choices
not everyone is recession proof
or you could do a really good job of filtering etc, but go back to show your boss that even with filtering etc, you're still up against a wall, and need to expand. But that's not going to happen because even if the customers complain, they'll be reminded that in order for their complaints to be justified the problem has to persist for a full 24 hours, or whatever is in the contract. My parents have had their cable-net go down for 18 hours and some change, but were told flat out they don't get credit for the day because it had to be a solid 24 hours. They changed to DSL (no better) etc etc
better yet, demand a raise if they want you to fuck shit up, make it cost them less to pay you than having someone else do the job correctly plus the cost of your current salary, but not more than seems reasonable.
In Los Angeles, 47 seems to be a magic number. I got a speeding ticket once, I was doing exactly 42 mph in a 35 zone- 47 mph. Another time, I was doing exactly 35 mph- 47 mph. It is sort of a waste of everyone's time to go to court with nothing but the truth on your side.
Well, yeah... see, as far as I can tell, every 10mph over you are is another tier. If you attempt to "fight" a ticket, you can usually get it reduced by about one tier or so by means of a few phone calls after sending in your "not guilty" notice/notice to contest. If you're only within that 10mph tier 1 above the limit, and you contest, you can usually get the ticket reduced to half the points and half the money, all of the points and no money, or all of the money and no points, the first is the most common that I've seen, I've had many tickets.
But here's the thing, if you indicate that you're going to contest the ticket, and make the requisite phone calls, starting from the second tier (11-20mph over), they can drop it down to tier 1, no problem usually, and you pay the full tier 1 amount.
It gets really interesting when you actually do go to court, just hope the cop has better things to do that day.
Copying music is analogous to going to a library and photocopying an entire book. See, it's perfectly legit to copy sections from a book to use for academia or reviews, but doing the whole thing, and for what? Probably just to fill up space on your bookshelf at home, or worse, read it, without providing any incentive to any of the parties involved, including the author(s) to continue to create anything. Yeah, so you don't like the distribution model? Somehow I really doubt this is what's behind the claim, but it's the one that I hear most often, and so I'm going after the throat kill on this one. Do you send money to artists after you download their music? Seriously, it isn't difficult to figure out how to get money to them. and no I don't mean do you go to a show and spend other money on them. I mean, do you hand over money, with no premise of gaining anything further such as a t-shirt, or even just the ticket to the show... do you still pay the artist, even if you circumvent everyone else involved?
How about the engineer(s) and producers who help make the music not sound like it was recorded in a closet? Oh, wait, you'd be fine with music that sounds like that? There are tons of bands who go that route for one reason or another, no reason to copy the music of an artist who has a big budget studio behind them. If you don't like it, don't download it. If you like it buy it. If you can't decide first, download it, try it, buy it or delete it. Copying music does cause a loss of money if and only if that money would have been spent on the music otherwise; and a generally accepted view is that if you earn $x for doing work z, but you could be earning $y (more) doing the same job, then you're losing $y-x yes, you still make money, but really, you lose money that you could have made. As per this example, music piracy is theft, because there is a loss. If you want to avoid the theft claim, you have to show that you wouldn't have purchased the music otherwise. And if you can prove that, then you shouldn't be keeping the music.
p.s. I love to download music, but I also love that music I love keeps being made, and so I buy my music. and as far as a dead artist goes.... see, people like to leave things for their heirs. That's part of the motivation for doing it. That's not your prerogative, it's theirs. Circumventing the part where you actually have to spend money reduces the incentive for other artists. Yeah you can tell me if they don't like that fact, they don't have to make music. But you, by the same token, should follow the axiom: if you don't like the system being used to offer the goods, don't consume the goods; support only the artists who do things how you like. Help those artists out by encouraging others to do the same. You really want to "change" the system, convert your friends and family away from the systems you despise.
Eth, I think you were a little harsh with your slurs. Yes, I can understand your anger, even if I don't agree (which I'm a little too drunk to figure out exactly right now), but could you please attempt to be a little more focused in your criticisms of other/.ers?
I'm not trying to tell you what to do, just making a little request in lieu of having a flame war, or worse, mod-ing down.
your assumption about the devaluation of a company's stock is possibly flawed... I totally agree that this is how it should work, and probably would if all investors were as versed in research as they ought be... but a lot of people are not versed in such matters.
That bit is all their own fault. However, having a fairly open stock exchange, especially with the advent of low-cost trading online, there is suddenly an exposure where people who don't know that they don't know enough are playing with real money in a situation they are under-prepared for. This is actually a large problem across all sorts of cross-sections of humans: not knowing that one does not know something, and therefore not knowing that there is anything to do about it.
Where should the education come from? Under-funded public schools? Perhaps everyone should decide for themselves how their children become educated, perhaps even with private schooling, but wait, there's that pesky problem of not knowing what you don't know... cropping up in how to choose a schooling path...
seems like there should be some sort of organized body established to take some of everyones money in exchange for things such as protection, education, and infrastructure... and maybe a little art, to make it look a little better.
The system is bloated. It moves very slow, and that can be a big problem sometimes. But sometimes things are allowed to move so fast that something happens, it gets way too big, and nobody can stop it before a threshold is crossed, and there's no turning back... for example.... dot-com bubble, 193x stock market crash, housing bubble, richard nixon (that last one was a joke, sort-of)
and finding that middle ground is difficult.
should there be limits to earnings? maybe performance based incentives? maybe
what happens if person z does a great job by doing something which falls into a non-black/white area, and is rewarded for stellar performance, but it come back later, perhaps too late, that this task wasn't so good... if you lessen the incentive, you potentially lessen the solid performance, especially because explicit cheaters will still cheat, but a soft limit might keep things a little slower moving, so they can be reviewed better, trying to limit the exposure on potentially very bad things.
Free markets sound good; but then again people become less inclined to think of how their own actions affect anyone else the further removed from directly facing each-other they become. Why should anyone think about how they affect anyone else? Well, down to brass tax, take the Hobbsian view of the natural state. After considering that, there is still the problem with people, though: that some people end up with disproportionately large sticks, and others' sticks are rather small, and some people (too many, IMO) abuse this imbalance, which sort of undermines the 'fabric' of society. This was among the issues that the US founding fathers were trying to consider when forming the country: How do you strike the perfect balance. Over 200 years later with this experiment, and it's still being refined... Unfortunately, people with bigger sticks tend to be able to modify the experiment disproportionately to other people, and thus the results get generally skewed in their favor...
PM me if you care to have a rational discussion about this matter further
but it was Bill's tenacity... I don't recall ever hearing of a gun being held to his head while using the mainframe...;) thought that might explain somethings if it were true.... just kidding
but then again, his tenacity might in part been a product of his genetics and environment growing up... at least half of which (the environment part) coincides with the whole bit about there being a computer for him to access... I mean, the sort of people who raise kids like B.G. also, apparently, are the sort of people who do said raising in the place where he was raised... my head is going to explode
Slashdot Mirror
yes, because the area was colonized at a later time, and the people hadn't managed to domesticate as many different plants/animals as had the people of EurAsia... and therefor they didn't develop as many useful natural immunities to the diseases carried by such and such related animals, nor did they produce so much extra food as to be able to sustain specialists at the same rate as in E/A whereby production, and general growth of the territory, could be accelerated... the way that the invaders had so done.
Eating shit, if it has enough good stuff with not so much bad stuff, probably actually helped them to survive in a land that is today still largely undeveloped (that is, if this factoid is true)... you know what, just read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond...
and please, try not to think of yourself as any better than anyone else.
you can only sync to one computer
technically true, however, you don't have to sync your device with a computer in order to load music onto it. In fact, I've found that you only need to sync for pictures, and apps. I never sync music, not even from one computer, but I use 3 different computers regularly to load music onto my iTouch (the limitations in this area are the same between touch and phone) and have used 2 others as well with no problems.
Just drag and drop inside of iTunes
Those are entertaining movies, but that's not what Trek has ever been about.
I want you to read this over a few more times until you realize what is being implied ...
I, for one, find most Star Trek quite entertaining...
You damn right, it is a design problem. IN YOUR HEAD.
Thanks. Made me shoot beer out of my nose.
I've actually considered this. Here's what happens, let's say I offer an album with 16 tracks, and people buy it whole for $9.99 but I'd be content to let it go for $5 even or so... so a net difference of $4.99 ... Apple takes, I think, $0.45 for every $0.99 track, and I imagine $4.50 for every $9.99 album ... so essentially I'd gain $5.49 from each album. I would still make $0.50 on each copy of the album, which is consistent with what I would be making, at least if I'm correct about all the numbers, the same amount as if I sold it for $5 in the first place.
But here's the major thing that I'm not sure about:
tracking sales, and verifying purchases. I can't afford to hand out gift-cards to people who didn't buy the album, but claimed they did. I don't think I have much to worry about as a total unknown, but... you get the idea.
I guess I'll just have to try, eh? :-)
I'm not going to say that what I do is any good (I like it, but that's irrelevant), but I can go from basic idea to writing, arranging, performing, recording, producing, mixing, mastering, and even converting to mp3/aac/whatever, all by myself. tricky thing about making movies is that you can't easily play all parts by yourself... actually, you probably could, but it would show more than if you did the same as with music (which I do).
I'm going to submit my first album to iTunes in the near future through a company called Tunecore... I only wish they'd let me lower the offering price.
Maybe 2 or 3 other people will have anything to do with my music getting all the way into the iTunes store...
but you're right, so far as current, that it takes a lot more to put together a movie, plus the software to do it is much more expensive (at least if you roll legal, which I do for music recording, I don't do much in movies anymore... made 3, had to have other actors to get it right)
the generic converter that I use, for video and audio, is MediaCoder, and it has default settings for converting video into the proper format and formatting for both iPod and iTouch. It will also do the same for PSP, and other such and such.
It supports a lot of different file types, and can be used for a wide variety of circumstances for which I have a need.
several decades in a little box with no windows.
Sounds like FOSS heaven
I would be willing to put up money as well, just for a tool to be made, regardless of what anyone does with it. Heck, I probably won't even end up using the tool(s) myself at all.
Here's the catch: there is no way to eliminate all pinch points as far as having parties unauthorized being unable to determine content. Some sort of key and or addressing information exchange will have to happen somewhere. A system has to be made to allow certain people in and keep other people out. However, that sort of negates the whole free information thing.
At a minimum, in order to facilitate anything useful being made, a safe harbor must be found in a location where the vast masses will be able to access it. In order for such to happen there has got to be a vested interest for capitalists to keep the place otherwise connected (despite anything that happens), but not having so much interest therein vested that laws are created to stop such things.
Where-ever people are congregated, organization will commence, structure will be formed, power/authority will be assumed, laws will be created, currency will be minted, corruption will ensue, and, for the most part, unless enough sympathy can be generated on behalf of a cause, persons found to be without adequate funding will find themselves unable to alter the situation.
I just don't see that happening around the cause of file-sharing. And attempts to monetize the traffic generated, as means to provide resources, will be seen in a negative light by those who assumed authority under whatever pretext (democracy or dictatorship), so long as laws and regulations in those same jurisdictions remain at odds with the goals and desires of the entities participating. Cases abound where legal uses of such technology are wide-spread, but writ large, not happening.
I felt so bad for the poor people that had to sit near me on the plane home. No chairs there either.
wow, I'm impressed. Did you at least get to sit on the floor during takeoff and landing /playing ignorant
yeah... well I had to try to explain how to fix an iTouch whose battery was totally drained on a flight from Chicago to Warsaw to a girl who knew enough English to get by, but not enough about computers... after a week I finally managed to get across that when she would plug in the iPod to charge it, she'd have to leave it all day (well, not quite) instead of just an hour or two.
Actually, I lie, the first week was spent trying to figure out why it died in the first place, and part of the second week was explaining that she doesn't have three years of warranty (as per law in Poland) because the iPod was purchased locally in the United States... and how she could contact Apple, in Polish, if she needed to.
actually, the deal breaker for me is ever having to look at even a single line of code to do any sort of installation or update what-so-ever.
I would rather be a farmer using an ox and plow than to have to read a line of code for such purposes ever again.
don't get me wrong, sometimes I enjoy looking at code to see how something that I find interesting is done. And I have even installed *nix a few times, just to see if I could... but never again until all such things can be obfuscated to the point that all I have to do is click yes/no buttons a couple of times to get everything working (maybe up to 5 yes or no questions, but that's pushing it)
actually, for me, the deal breaker is ever having to deal with code at all.
I don't mind every now and then having to see a command prompt, but I don't want to have to see any code at any point in time in order to get anything to work, be-it a driver, an update, a kernel patch, what-have-you.
I can follow logic paths, even in code. Hell, I even enjoy looking at code now and then to see just what goes on when I find something particularly interesting. But I do not like having to look at code in any other situation. I just don't want to deal with it.
I want a relatively straightforward install-anything process, although I don't mind having to visit a website to download a driver.
There are some other things that I don't particularly enjoy about *nix, but the big one is ever having to deal with code at any point in time.
I would rather have no system than one where I have to deal with that. I've done it before, to see if I could, a few times, but never again. Computers are just not important enough to me. Yes, they're everywhere, and most of modern life wouldn't exist without them... but I would rather farm with an ox and plow than to have to deal with code during any sort of installation process ever again.
What do you want out of life?
What do you believe is right?
Do you care about sucking up your morals to do your job? If not, you probably won't have this same job for long. I'd contact a local news station to "break" the news about the coming traffic shaping, etc.
Or you can suck it up and do what you're being paid to do.
From my experience, life is a long series of having two choices
not everyone is recession proof
or you could do a really good job of filtering etc, but go back to show your boss that even with filtering etc, you're still up against a wall, and need to expand. But that's not going to happen because even if the customers complain, they'll be reminded that in order for their complaints to be justified the problem has to persist for a full 24 hours, or whatever is in the contract. My parents have had their cable-net go down for 18 hours and some change, but were told flat out they don't get credit for the day because it had to be a solid 24 hours. They changed to DSL (no better) etc etc
better yet, demand a raise if they want you to fuck shit up, make it cost them less to pay you than having someone else do the job correctly plus the cost of your current salary, but not more than seems reasonable.
Hack the Planet, I'll drink beer for you tonight!
Have you ever tried decaf? Seriously, look into it.
-jcr
Oh here we go with the flavor-of-the-moment religious zeal again ;)
I RTFA, and the "suspect" claimed the gun and ammo were planted on him
In Los Angeles, 47 seems to be a magic number. I got a speeding ticket once, I was doing exactly 42 mph in a 35 zone- 47 mph. Another time, I was doing exactly 35 mph- 47 mph. It is sort of a waste of everyone's time to go to court with nothing but the truth on your side.
Well, yeah... see, as far as I can tell, every 10mph over you are is another tier. If you attempt to "fight" a ticket, you can usually get it reduced by about one tier or so by means of a few phone calls after sending in your "not guilty" notice/notice to contest. If you're only within that 10mph tier 1 above the limit, and you contest, you can usually get the ticket reduced to half the points and half the money, all of the points and no money, or all of the money and no points, the first is the most common that I've seen, I've had many tickets.
But here's the thing, if you indicate that you're going to contest the ticket, and make the requisite phone calls, starting from the second tier (11-20mph over), they can drop it down to tier 1, no problem usually, and you pay the full tier 1 amount.
It gets really interesting when you actually do go to court, just hope the cop has better things to do that day.
I agree completely, but driving fatigued is not yet a violation of law (at least in the US iirc)
I don't know if most of what you're saying is true, but you are most likely actually an Englishman, or so your dry humour leads me to believe
http://www.prisonexp.org/
Stanford University
iirc they had to shut it down early because it got out of hand
Copying music is analogous to going to a library and photocopying an entire book. See, it's perfectly legit to copy sections from a book to use for academia or reviews, but doing the whole thing, and for what? Probably just to fill up space on your bookshelf at home, or worse, read it, without providing any incentive to any of the parties involved, including the author(s) to continue to create anything. Yeah, so you don't like the distribution model? Somehow I really doubt this is what's behind the claim, but it's the one that I hear most often, and so I'm going after the throat kill on this one. Do you send money to artists after you download their music? Seriously, it isn't difficult to figure out how to get money to them. and no I don't mean do you go to a show and spend other money on them. I mean, do you hand over money, with no premise of gaining anything further such as a t-shirt, or even just the ticket to the show... do you still pay the artist, even if you circumvent everyone else involved?
How about the engineer(s) and producers who help make the music not sound like it was recorded in a closet? Oh, wait, you'd be fine with music that sounds like that? There are tons of bands who go that route for one reason or another, no reason to copy the music of an artist who has a big budget studio behind them. If you don't like it, don't download it. If you like it buy it. If you can't decide first, download it, try it, buy it or delete it. Copying music does cause a loss of money if and only if that money would have been spent on the music otherwise; and a generally accepted view is that if you earn $x for doing work z, but you could be earning $y (more) doing the same job, then you're losing $y-x
yes, you still make money, but really, you lose money that you could have made. As per this example, music piracy is theft, because there is a loss. If you want to avoid the theft claim, you have to show that you wouldn't have purchased the music otherwise. And if you can prove that, then you shouldn't be keeping the music.
p.s. I love to download music, but I also love that music I love keeps being made, and so I buy my music. and as far as a dead artist goes.... see, people like to leave things for their heirs. That's part of the motivation for doing it. That's not your prerogative, it's theirs. Circumventing the part where you actually have to spend money reduces the incentive for other artists. Yeah you can tell me if they don't like that fact, they don't have to make music. But you, by the same token, should follow the axiom: if you don't like the system being used to offer the goods, don't consume the goods; support only the artists who do things how you like. Help those artists out by encouraging others to do the same. You really want to "change" the system, convert your friends and family away from the systems you despise.
that was actually in response to your other post, not the one that I actually clicked Reply under...
please forgive the error
Eth, I think you were a little harsh with your slurs. Yes, I can understand your anger, even if I don't agree (which I'm a little too drunk to figure out exactly right now), but could you please attempt to be a little more focused in your criticisms of other /.ers?
I'm not trying to tell you what to do, just making a little request in lieu of having a flame war, or worse, mod-ing down.
thanks, either way, thanks
your assumption about the devaluation of a company's stock is possibly flawed... I totally agree that this is how it should work, and probably would if all investors were as versed in research as they ought be... but a lot of people are not versed in such matters.
That bit is all their own fault. However, having a fairly open stock exchange, especially with the advent of low-cost trading online, there is suddenly an exposure where people who don't know that they don't know enough are playing with real money in a situation they are under-prepared for. This is actually a large problem across all sorts of cross-sections of humans: not knowing that one does not know something, and therefore not knowing that there is anything to do about it.
Where should the education come from? Under-funded public schools? Perhaps everyone should decide for themselves how their children become educated, perhaps even with private schooling, but wait, there's that pesky problem of not knowing what you don't know... cropping up in how to choose a schooling path...
seems like there should be some sort of organized body established to take some of everyones money in exchange for things such as protection, education, and infrastructure... and maybe a little art, to make it look a little better.
The system is bloated. It moves very slow, and that can be a big problem sometimes. But sometimes things are allowed to move so fast that something happens, it gets way too big, and nobody can stop it before a threshold is crossed, and there's no turning back... for example .... dot-com bubble, 193x stock market crash, housing bubble, richard nixon (that last one was a joke, sort-of)
and finding that middle ground is difficult.
should there be limits to earnings? maybe
performance based incentives? maybe
what happens if person z does a great job by doing something which falls into a non-black/white area, and is rewarded for stellar performance, but it come back later, perhaps too late, that this task wasn't so good... if you lessen the incentive, you potentially lessen the solid performance, especially because explicit cheaters will still cheat, but a soft limit might keep things a little slower moving, so they can be reviewed better, trying to limit the exposure on potentially very bad things.
Free markets sound good; but then again people become less inclined to think of how their own actions affect anyone else the further removed from directly facing each-other they become. Why should anyone think about how they affect anyone else? Well, down to brass tax, take the Hobbsian view of the natural state. After considering that, there is still the problem with people, though: that some people end up with disproportionately large sticks, and others' sticks are rather small, and some people (too many, IMO) abuse this imbalance, which sort of undermines the 'fabric' of society. This was among the issues that the US founding fathers were trying to consider when forming the country: How do you strike the perfect balance. Over 200 years later with this experiment, and it's still being refined... Unfortunately, people with bigger sticks tend to be able to modify the experiment disproportionately to other people, and thus the results get generally skewed in their favor...
PM me if you care to have a rational discussion about this matter further
but it was Bill's tenacity... I don't recall ever hearing of a gun being held to his head while using the mainframe... ;)
thought that might explain somethings if it were true.... just kidding
but then again, his tenacity might in part been a product of his genetics and environment growing up... at least half of which (the environment part) coincides with the whole bit about there being a computer for him to access... I mean, the sort of people who raise kids like B.G. also, apparently, are the sort of people who do said raising in the place where he was raised... my head is going to explode