Gordon says: Old Andrew Carnegie's formula still applies. Whether you're making steel or software, you invest to be the low-cost producer.
Could there be any two products more different than steel and software? Could the costs of production be calculated any more differently?
In software economics, there are no economies of scale. There's no concept of a vertical monopoly like Carnegie had. Assets for software companies are all labour, not capital equipment. Cost of manufacturing software is trivial while for steel, cost of manufacturing is the name of the game. In the steel industry you can invest to cut cost; in software you invest to improve quality.
Steel is capital intensive. Software companies have been started for pocket change.
Successful software companies can meet any competitive threat through upgrades and innovation. Steel companies are nearly powerless to deal with competitive threats from cheaper and stronger materials like new plastics and alloys.
Carnegie is, in fact, better remembered today for his idealistic theories of philanthropy. I suspect that the 19th century industrialists probably don't have much of value to tell the information economy beyond the homilies of thrift and hardwork. Even those don't apply so much.
Read some books about the lifestyle of the average person in the middle ages and then compare that to the wage slaves of the Industrial Revoloution. Were they better off? You bet.
Nothing so clearly contradicts your statement than the condition of child labour in 19th century England, which was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. It was only after the recommendation of a Royal Commission in 1833 that children age 9 to 11 were limited to working a mere 8 hours a day in the textile industry. In mining, where there was no regulation, children began work at five years old and were typically dead by 25.
The purpose of this example is to show that the improvement in the lives of ordinary people did not come about as a result of the Industrial Revolution, but from legislation and trade unions that mitigated the depredations of industrialization.
It is also important to remember that at the same time as the Industrial Revolution another tremendous accumulation of wealth was going on that involved simply conquering weaker countries, dispossesing the natives and keeping their land and resources. A large part of the wealth from the Industrial Revolution didn't come from the factories, it was stolen from abroad with as much brutality as necessary.
The pendulumn swings and over time things balance out.
Is this pronouncement your alternative to "regurgitated historical pablum"?
It's amazing our bodies work as well as we do... And did you ever think that having some defective organisms is neccessary?
More excuses! How acceptable would it be for the builders of the space shuttle to account for the Challenger disaster by saying that some defects are necessary?
I quote Richard Dawkins in the The Blind Watchmaker: A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all."
If I understand you correctly, you are postulating the existence of intelligent creators who are without vision or foresight. As such, they resemble natural selection rather than intelligence as we normally understand it.
You suggest that natural selection is a mechanism to correct initial defects in the design of life. It also appears sufficient to account for the miserable design of life by itself. There is no need to bring in intelligent intervention and then try to defend the shoddy job that resulted.
Natural selection doesn't require any excuses for its failures. Failure is a feature, not a bug.
If you would like the last word in this debate I would be happy to read it, but I have nothing more to say on the subject that can't be found in Dawkins' books.
She recieved no respect whatsoever. The school treated teachers like children. Forcing them to attend 30 minute weekly meetings where nothing was accomplished. Allowing them very little input into the shape of their curriculum.
The experience you describe would fit most private sector environments just as well, although the number of photocopiers is generally greater.
People who go into teaching hoping to escape from the stupidity and incompetence that is rampant in the rest of society are in for an education themselves. Their students eventually are going to have to make a living in the very world the teacher hopes to escape.
Somehow a teacher has to remember that the education of the student is what is important, not the teacher's expectations of how the education system ought to be run. The example of dedication and sacrifice that a teacher sets is often the most important lesson he or she has to teach. Students are not likely to see such an example outside the classroom or the battlefield.
And I don't see you coming up with a better method for propagating life.
In fact there is a vast human enterprise devoted to correcting and improving on the incompetent design of life. It is called Medical Science.
As for computer scientists, no programmer who wrote a program with the failure rate of child birth would pass his first programming course. Until about 100 years ago, 1 per cent of mothers and over 10 per cent of children died in child birth or soon after. Morton Thiokol Inc. faced an official investigation for a substantially better performance.
they may have had no idea that something sentient would eventually evolve from the whole thing
Maybe they did and maybe they didn't. It's interesting that even with our meagre intelligence you feel the need to cover for them.
The main question in your escatogy is whether life has been botched up by malice or incompetence. In either case, they would have flunked any genetic engineering class in the 21st century.
it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act.
The problem with this approach is it raises some questions about the level of intelligence behind creation. Why, for instance, did whoever designed DNA stop at such a cruel and inefficient method of propagating life? When trying to account for congenital illnesses, the blind forces of evolution make more sense than claiming somebody actually thought this scheme was a good idea.
Postulating that there is some bonehead intelligence at work in the Universe is hardly more plausible than climbing Mount Improbable.
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent. (Observe that I am not prejudicing the discussion by assuming that the software I write is my property.)
So far as the United States is concerned, this flerbage sounds like it was dealt with by the 5th Amendment and the 14th Amendment, to wit, no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Observe that the Constitution extends protection to all property, not just physical property, which would include software.
Since citizens elect the people who make the laws, due process is about all you can hope for. The alternative is anarchy where you defend your property as best you can with a gun. Anarchy is generally considered to reduce flerbage more than a constitution, elections, a judicial system and a police force.
But now let's suppose that, after years of lobbying, messrs Kuhn and Stallman get a law passed that makes proprietary licenses illegal.
In that case, the quarrel is with the legislators more than Kuhn and Stallman. Only the legislators have the power to expand or contract flerbage. Kuhn and Stallman have asserted some provocative rights, which are worth debating, but they have no more control over flerbage than any other registered voter.
Re:so let me get this straight...
on
Mob Software
·
· Score: 1
I always thought that the bigger the project, the fewer people should work on it...
This statement is a common misreading of Brook's The Mythical Man-Month. He writes:
The dilemma is a cruel one. For efficiency and conceptual integrity, one prefers a few good minds doing design and construction. Yet for large systems one wants a way to bring considerable manpower to bear, so that the product can make a timely appearance.
Brooks then goes on to suggest ways of organizing and managing large teams. He writes in the supplemental chapter to the 2nd edition:
If one believes, as I have argued at many places in this book, that creativity comes from individuals and not from structures or processes, then a central question facing the software manager is how to design structure and process so as to enhance, rather than inhibit creativity and initiative.
He then quotes E.F. Shumacher:
The Principle of Subsidiary Function teaches us that the centre will gain in authority and effectivenes if the freedom and responsibility of the lower formations are carefully preserved, with the result that the organization as a whole will be "happier and more prosperous."
Brook's analysis appears to supplement or anticipate the problem that Gabriel & Goldman are trying to solve.
The outrage was naturally focused on the greedy, gimme-money-for-nothing-for-we-sue demand for payment made by... nobody.
The issue of compensation goes to the heart of the ethical issue. It points up the difficulty of applying legal principles of ownership in situations that were completely unanticipated in framing the principles.
For instance, under the The Three Stooges principle, the Lack family might have a claim unless the users of the cells transformed them so that they were deriving benefit from the result rather than the original cells.
If conventional property rights to do not apply to cells, then what rights do apply? If the cells are not the property of the individual, what other parts of the body are not the property of the individual? If the cells have value, who has claim on that value?
The issues did not arise in the past because cells, unlike property, did not survive outside the body. Now that they do, all cellular matter inadvertently takes on the attributes of property.
If you argue that cells are not property for legal purposes but something new, you might have to define a new right in the U.S. Constitution that resembles the 5th Amendment that says no one shall be "deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."
Such an amendment might say "No person shall be deprived of cellular matter, limbs, organs or bodily fluids without due process of law. The rights attached to cellular matter shall not apply to any material derived, decended or cloned from said cellular matter. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Many "... for dummies" books may be fine but this review of Perl for Dummies made me suspicious of the whole series.
Re:The real possible impact of this
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 1
For a 6-time-a-year loose-leaf service we investigated the cost of printing on demand using photocopying technology vs. printing a fixed number of copies using offset printing.
The print-on-demand approach was several times as expensive as the photocopying approach that this machine appears to use.
The implication is that even with a 50 per cent return rate mentioned in the article, it is still cheaper for publishers to use conventional printing methods for mass market books.
The device might have a use for out-of-print books but then the local demand would have to justify the capital cost of the equipment, the maintenance and staffing.
The machines would, in any case, be competing with electronic delivery of books over the Internet, which would always be cheaper and faster. A large number people, perhaps most, will take the cheaper and faster approach even if the format isn't as convenient.
Once you look at the drawbacks of print-on-demand, it looks like it will be at best another device that fills a niche in the market rather than supplanting all other methods.
First he says that there are "an abundance of comments from know-it-alls who actually know nothing". I'm browsing at +2 and mostly I find an abundance of thoughtful comments supported by examples.
Despite this blanket condemnation, he says Slashdot is a good site and he checks it every day.
Given that that his statements are inaccurate and contradictory one can legitimately rate it as the type of gratuitous insult typical of a troll.
It would have been helpful if you had offered some reasons or evidence why you thought this post had any merit.
One solution to the attention shortage is Artificial Attention. It is exemplified by a search engine driven by a user profile that biases the search toward the user's interests. Further, the user profile would watch the user's behavior as he peruses the results of the search and modify the profile based on the user's behavior.
The dynamic behavior of the user profile would include a random factor to retrieve information marginally related to the profile. The profile would then watch which of the randomly retrieved items attracted the user's attention and modify itself accordingly.
The profile should be able to monitor the activity of similar profiles belonging to other users to create artificial word-of-mouth.
User could swap profiles with friends to expand their horizons and to build up a community of interests.
Similarly, groups of users could combine profiles to retrieve a common set of information.
A user could adopt and modify standard profiles or incorporate them into his existing profile. These profiles would be based on things of interest to a particular industry, profession or hobby. Organizations might promolgate standard profiles for users to adopt.
If attention becomes the foundation of the New Natural Economy then information might be packaged to conform to the requirements of the standard profiles. There could be an ancillary program to the user profile that rates pieces of information on how attractive it is to a standard profile.
Similarly, users might compare their profile with a standard profile to see how closely their interests are to the norm.
Ultimately, people will have life-long profiles that change overtime and that thereby constitute the intellectual history of the individual. Users will be able to quantify how much they've changed between childhood, when their profile was created, and old age.
Ultimately, user profiles of great men would be archived and made available for users to incorporate into their own profiles. Cult leaders might impose their own user profile on their followers as a way of controlling their thoughts.
Users might specify on their resumes what standard profiles they use as a way of indicating their interests to potential employers. Strangers could compare their profiles to see how much they have in common.
The first step is the creation of an ISO standard for a Profile Markup Language (PML). This standard would enable profiles to interact with search engines in a well-defined way, enable comparing profiles, enable merging profiles, etc.
because gambling and loteries are (as someones sig puts it) it "a tax on stupidity"
The epigram is by William Petty
(1623 - 1687) that lotteries are "a tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools; men that have good opinion of their own luckiness."
For the sake of the fools, it is unfortunate the Australia is banning Australian casinos from establishing online gambling sites because the well-regulated Australian casinos would at least ensure an honest game.
Even more foolish than gambling is gambling at an unregulated casino, particularly an online casino where a computer program determines the payout according to the dictates of a programmer, rather than the laws of chance.
Some unregulated online casinos try to establish some credibility by having their payouts certified by an accounting firm. However, the firm may only perform an analysis of the Web log, not the company books. Presumably an online casino that had a dishonest gambling program would know how to modify their Web logs.
In fact, this auditing method is so weak that it makes one suspicious why it was chosen or why a reputable accounting firm would pretend that it indicating anything about the site's honesty.
It's as if a company could be audited by compiling its own balance sheet and having the outside accountant check the arithmetic.
The Australian legislation makes is easier for gamblers to refuse to pay their offshore gambling debts. However, this scenario would play out in most jurisdictions even without the Australian-type laws.
One reason people use online casinos is because gambling is banned within reasonable commuting distance. However, gambling debts are generally not enforceable where gambling is banned. Diligent losers can refuse to pay their credit card bills attributed to loses in another jurisdiction. In some cases, they can cancel payment on checks written to pay debts as well.
Since most online gamblers inevitably must lose and yet cannot be required to pay, it would seem that the online gambling revenue model is fatally flawed.
The laws intent was to protect broadcasters in Canada.
That statement is certainly the case for the defense.
The situation is somewhat analogous to countries that aren't signatories to international copyright conventions. They reproduce and distribute copyrighted material with impunity within their own countries without paying royalties.
The agrieved parties have no legal recourse but it's still not civilized behavior.
In Canada, telecommunications is a federal responsibility. Because of strong separatist sentiment in Quebec, there is always a suspicion that Quebec judges are biased in favor of Quebec defendants prosecuted under federal regulation.
In this case, the judge's reasoning is consistent with other rulings but it appears to be a loophole at best.
Regardless of Canadian law, the defendants clearly have a civil liability under U.S. laws. The civil judgment arguably is enforceable in Canada.
Since the purpose of the laws appears to be to protect the interests of Canadians...
Protect which Canadians?
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission protects the Canadian cable companies and satellite TV companies from competition by U.S. satellite TV companies. CRTC regulations prevent the Canadian public from seeing many U.S. channels like HBO that are only available from DirecTV.
The debate is over who will deliver U.S. television shows to Canadian homes. Right now the law favors Canadian corporations. Perversely, this approach creates a market for pirate decoders of DirecTV, which the law was designed to exclude.
Actually, it's a matter of dispute. Recent court rulings have supported pirating DirecTV signals in Canada. However, the Crown is appealing the decisions.
(c) decode an encrypted subscription programming signal or encrypted network feed otherwise than under and in accordance with an authorization from the lawful distributor of the signal or feed;
(d) operate a radio apparatus so as to receive an encrypted subscription programming signal or encrypted network feed that has been decoded in contravention of paragraph (c); or
(e) retransmit to the public an encrypted subscription programming signal or encrypted network feed that has been decoded in contravention of paragraph (c).
In any case, the main issue is whether it is ethical to pirate DirecTV even if there is a loophole in Canada's perverse telecommunications laws.
There is a similar question of whether it is ethical to even pay for DirecTV in Canada since DirecTV cannot be legally sold in Canada. The practical reason is that DirecTV can disable illegal receivers. Their measures might now work against the device described in this article.
(And don't talk about Sweden like it was paradise either - they have a yearly national dept equal to 133% of their GNP. That's a burn rate that would make some dot coms flinch!)
I think you may be confusing deficit and debt and the GNP with the government revenue.
Swedish government statistics show that government expenditures are about 56 per cent of the GDP (roughly comparable to the GNP).
Sweden indeed uses deficit financing as the United States did until recently. However, national economic accounting principles are quite different from corporate accounting principles. Among many other reasons, governments can cover debt costs by printing money or raising taxes, an option obviously not open to private enterprise.
In addition, many companies stay in business with high losses as long as their income can cover the interest payments on their debt. Successful startups typically lose money for years before making a profit.
The economics of bankrupt dotcoms is much different. They had expenditures several times their revenue and thus ran through their venture capital. They usually had very low debt since their working capital was provided by investment, not loans. Banks will rarely lend money to startups.
The Swedish growth rate of 3.8% is reasonably healthy compared to the U.S. growth rate of 4.1%
The Swedes are doing okay. The dotcoms should be so lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
Gordon says: Old Andrew Carnegie's formula still applies. Whether you're making steel or software, you invest to be the low-cost producer.
Could there be any two products more different than steel and software? Could the costs of production be calculated any more differently?
In software economics, there are no economies of scale. There's no concept of a vertical monopoly like Carnegie had. Assets for software companies are all labour, not capital equipment. Cost of manufacturing software is trivial while for steel, cost of manufacturing is the name of the game. In the steel industry you can invest to cut cost; in software you invest to improve quality.
Steel is capital intensive. Software companies have been started for pocket change.
Successful software companies can meet any competitive threat through upgrades and innovation. Steel companies are nearly powerless to deal with competitive threats from cheaper and stronger materials like new plastics and alloys.
Carnegie is, in fact, better remembered today for his idealistic theories of philanthropy. I suspect that the 19th century industrialists probably don't have much of value to tell the information economy beyond the homilies of thrift and hardwork. Even those don't apply so much.
Read some books about the lifestyle of the average person in the middle ages and then compare that to the wage slaves of the Industrial Revoloution. Were they better off? You bet.
Nothing so clearly contradicts your statement than the condition of child labour in 19th century England, which was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. It was only after the recommendation of a Royal Commission in 1833 that children age 9 to 11 were limited to working a mere 8 hours a day in the textile industry. In mining, where there was no regulation, children began work at five years old and were typically dead by 25.
The purpose of this example is to show that the improvement in the lives of ordinary people did not come about as a result of the Industrial Revolution, but from legislation and trade unions that mitigated the depredations of industrialization.
It is also important to remember that at the same time as the Industrial Revolution another tremendous accumulation of wealth was going on that involved simply conquering weaker countries, dispossesing the natives and keeping their land and resources. A large part of the wealth from the Industrial Revolution didn't come from the factories, it was stolen from abroad with as much brutality as necessary.
The pendulumn swings and over time things balance out.
Is this pronouncement your alternative to "regurgitated historical pablum"?
The Internet is supposed to be...
It's amazing our bodies work as well as we do... And did you ever think that having some defective organisms is neccessary?
More excuses! How acceptable would it be for the builders of the space shuttle to account for the Challenger disaster by saying that some defects are necessary?
I quote Richard Dawkins in the The Blind Watchmaker: A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all."
If I understand you correctly, you are postulating the existence of intelligent creators who are without vision or foresight. As such, they resemble natural selection rather than intelligence as we normally understand it.
You suggest that natural selection is a mechanism to correct initial defects in the design of life. It also appears sufficient to account for the miserable design of life by itself. There is no need to bring in intelligent intervention and then try to defend the shoddy job that resulted.
Natural selection doesn't require any excuses for its failures. Failure is a feature, not a bug.
If you would like the last word in this debate I would be happy to read it, but I have nothing more to say on the subject that can't be found in Dawkins' books.
She recieved no respect whatsoever. The school treated teachers like children. Forcing them to attend 30 minute weekly meetings where nothing was accomplished. Allowing them very little input into the shape of their curriculum.
The experience you describe would fit most private sector environments just as well, although the number of photocopiers is generally greater.
People who go into teaching hoping to escape from the stupidity and incompetence that is rampant in the rest of society are in for an education themselves. Their students eventually are going to have to make a living in the very world the teacher hopes to escape.
Somehow a teacher has to remember that the education of the student is what is important, not the teacher's expectations of how the education system ought to be run. The example of dedication and sacrifice that a teacher sets is often the most important lesson he or she has to teach. Students are not likely to see such an example outside the classroom or the battlefield.
And I don't see you coming up with a better method for propagating life.
In fact there is a vast human enterprise devoted to correcting and improving on the incompetent design of life. It is called Medical Science.
As for computer scientists, no programmer who wrote a program with the failure rate of child birth would pass his first programming course. Until about 100 years ago, 1 per cent of mothers and over 10 per cent of children died in child birth or soon after. Morton Thiokol Inc. faced an official investigation for a substantially better performance.
they may have had no idea that something sentient would eventually evolve from the whole thing
Maybe they did and maybe they didn't. It's interesting that even with our meagre intelligence you feel the need to cover for them. The main question in your escatogy is whether life has been botched up by malice or incompetence. In either case, they would have flunked any genetic engineering class in the 21st century.
it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act.
The problem with this approach is it raises some questions about the level of intelligence behind creation. Why, for instance, did whoever designed DNA stop at such a cruel and inefficient method of propagating life? When trying to account for congenital illnesses, the blind forces of evolution make more sense than claiming somebody actually thought this scheme was a good idea.
Postulating that there is some bonehead intelligence at work in the Universe is hardly more plausible than climbing Mount Improbable.
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent. (Observe that I am not prejudicing the discussion by assuming that the software I write is my property.)
So far as the United States is concerned, this flerbage sounds like it was dealt with by the 5th Amendment and the 14th Amendment, to wit, no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Observe that the Constitution extends protection to all property, not just physical property, which would include software.
Since citizens elect the people who make the laws, due process is about all you can hope for. The alternative is anarchy where you defend your property as best you can with a gun. Anarchy is generally considered to reduce flerbage more than a constitution, elections, a judicial system and a police force.
But now let's suppose that, after years of lobbying, messrs Kuhn and Stallman get a law passed that makes proprietary licenses illegal.
In that case, the quarrel is with the legislators more than Kuhn and Stallman. Only the legislators have the power to expand or contract flerbage. Kuhn and Stallman have asserted some provocative rights, which are worth debating, but they have no more control over flerbage than any other registered voter.
I always thought that the bigger the project, the fewer people should work on it...
This statement is a common misreading of Brook's The Mythical Man-Month. He writes:
The dilemma is a cruel one. For efficiency and conceptual integrity, one prefers a few good minds doing design and construction. Yet for large systems one wants a way to bring considerable manpower to bear, so that the product can make a timely appearance.
Brooks then goes on to suggest ways of organizing and managing large teams. He writes in the supplemental chapter to the 2nd edition:
If one believes, as I have argued at many places in this book, that creativity comes from individuals and not from structures or processes, then a central question facing the software manager is how to design structure and process so as to enhance, rather than inhibit creativity and initiative.
He then quotes E.F. Shumacher:
The Principle of Subsidiary Function teaches us that the centre will gain in authority and effectivenes if the freedom and responsibility of the lower formations are carefully preserved, with the result that the organization as a whole will be "happier and more prosperous."
Brook's analysis appears to supplement or anticipate the problem that Gabriel & Goldman are trying to solve.
The number 19 also had some other signifigance to the Japanese but the reason escapes me at the moment.
The number 19 has attracted a large following, for a number. Maybe not as much as 7 or 13 or 666 but still respectable.
Nineteen squared equals 361, one degree more than a full circle
WAHD or ONE = NINETEEN
IT is the number of light.
Spherical Geometry & 19.5 Degrees throughout the solar system
19 is a prime number.
QURAN'S MATHEMATICAL CODE
Nineteen names of God (Bahá'í Calendar)
In Japan, 19 is a sign carrying misfortune because it is said JUKU, which means also "sorrows repeated"
The outrage was naturally focused on the greedy, gimme-money-for-nothing-for-we-sue demand for payment made by ... nobody.
The issue of compensation goes to the heart of the ethical issue. It points up the difficulty of applying legal principles of ownership in situations that were completely unanticipated in framing the principles.
For instance, under the The Three Stooges principle, the Lack family might have a claim unless the users of the cells transformed them so that they were deriving benefit from the result rather than the original cells.
If conventional property rights to do not apply to cells, then what rights do apply? If the cells are not the property of the individual, what other parts of the body are not the property of the individual? If the cells have value, who has claim on that value?
The issues did not arise in the past because cells, unlike property, did not survive outside the body. Now that they do, all cellular matter inadvertently takes on the attributes of property.
If you argue that cells are not property for legal purposes but something new, you might have to define a new right in the U.S. Constitution that resembles the 5th Amendment that says no one shall be "deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."
Such an amendment might say "No person shall be deprived of cellular matter, limbs, organs or bodily fluids without due process of law. The rights attached to cellular matter shall not apply to any material derived, decended or cloned from said cellular matter. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Many "... for dummies" books may be fine but this review of Perl for Dummies made me suspicious of the whole series.
For a 6-time-a-year loose-leaf service we investigated the cost of printing on demand using photocopying technology vs. printing a fixed number of copies using offset printing.
The print-on-demand approach was several times as expensive as the photocopying approach that this machine appears to use.
The implication is that even with a 50 per cent return rate mentioned in the article, it is still cheaper for publishers to use conventional printing methods for mass market books.
The device might have a use for out-of-print books but then the local demand would have to justify the capital cost of the equipment, the maintenance and staffing.
The machines would, in any case, be competing with electronic delivery of books over the Internet, which would always be cheaper and faster. A large number people, perhaps most, will take the cheaper and faster approach even if the format isn't as convenient.
Once you look at the drawbacks of print-on-demand, it looks like it will be at best another device that fills a niche in the market rather than supplanting all other methods.
I have to agree with the troll rating.
First he says that there are "an abundance of comments from know-it-alls who actually know nothing". I'm browsing at +2 and mostly I find an abundance of thoughtful comments supported by examples.
Despite this blanket condemnation, he says Slashdot is a good site and he checks it every day.
Given that that his statements are inaccurate and contradictory one can legitimately rate it as the type of gratuitous insult typical of a troll.
It would have been helpful if you had offered some reasons or evidence why you thought this post had any merit.
One solution to the attention shortage is Artificial Attention. It is exemplified by a search engine driven by a user profile that biases the search toward the user's interests. Further, the user profile would watch the user's behavior as he peruses the results of the search and modify the profile based on the user's behavior.
The dynamic behavior of the user profile would include a random factor to retrieve information marginally related to the profile. The profile would then watch which of the randomly retrieved items attracted the user's attention and modify itself accordingly.
The profile should be able to monitor the activity of similar profiles belonging to other users to create artificial word-of-mouth.
User could swap profiles with friends to expand their horizons and to build up a community of interests.
Similarly, groups of users could combine profiles to retrieve a common set of information.
A user could adopt and modify standard profiles or incorporate them into his existing profile. These profiles would be based on things of interest to a particular industry, profession or hobby. Organizations might promolgate standard profiles for users to adopt.
If attention becomes the foundation of the New Natural Economy then information might be packaged to conform to the requirements of the standard profiles. There could be an ancillary program to the user profile that rates pieces of information on how attractive it is to a standard profile.
Similarly, users might compare their profile with a standard profile to see how closely their interests are to the norm.
Ultimately, people will have life-long profiles that change overtime and that thereby constitute the intellectual history of the individual. Users will be able to quantify how much they've changed between childhood, when their profile was created, and old age.
Ultimately, user profiles of great men would be archived and made available for users to incorporate into their own profiles. Cult leaders might impose their own user profile on their followers as a way of controlling their thoughts.
Users might specify on their resumes what standard profiles they use as a way of indicating their interests to potential employers. Strangers could compare their profiles to see how much they have in common.
The first step is the creation of an ISO standard for a Profile Markup Language (PML). This standard would enable profiles to interact with search engines in a well-defined way, enable comparing profiles, enable merging profiles, etc.
because gambling and loteries are (as someones sig puts it) it "a tax on stupidity"
The epigram is by William Petty (1623 - 1687) that lotteries are "a tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools; men that have good opinion of their own luckiness."
For the sake of the fools, it is unfortunate the Australia is banning Australian casinos from establishing online gambling sites because the well-regulated Australian casinos would at least ensure an honest game.
Even more foolish than gambling is gambling at an unregulated casino, particularly an online casino where a computer program determines the payout according to the dictates of a programmer, rather than the laws of chance.
Some unregulated online casinos try to establish some credibility by having their payouts certified by an accounting firm. However, the firm may only perform an analysis of the Web log, not the company books. Presumably an online casino that had a dishonest gambling program would know how to modify their Web logs.
In fact, this auditing method is so weak that it makes one suspicious why it was chosen or why a reputable accounting firm would pretend that it indicating anything about the site's honesty.
It's as if a company could be audited by compiling its own balance sheet and having the outside accountant check the arithmetic.
The Australian legislation makes is easier for gamblers to refuse to pay their offshore gambling debts. However, this scenario would play out in most jurisdictions even without the Australian-type laws.
One reason people use online casinos is because gambling is banned within reasonable commuting distance. However, gambling debts are generally not enforceable where gambling is banned. Diligent losers can refuse to pay their credit card bills attributed to loses in another jurisdiction. In some cases, they can cancel payment on checks written to pay debts as well.
Since most online gamblers inevitably must lose and yet cannot be required to pay, it would seem that the online gambling revenue model is fatally flawed.
The laws intent was to protect broadcasters in Canada.
That statement is certainly the case for the defense.
The situation is somewhat analogous to countries that aren't signatories to international copyright conventions. They reproduce and distribute copyrighted material with impunity within their own countries without paying royalties.
The agrieved parties have no legal recourse but it's still not civilized behavior.
In Canada, telecommunications is a federal responsibility. Because of strong separatist sentiment in Quebec, there is always a suspicion that Quebec judges are biased in favor of Quebec defendants prosecuted under federal regulation.
In this case, the judge's reasoning is consistent with other rulings but it appears to be a loophole at best.
Regardless of Canadian law, the defendants clearly have a civil liability under U.S. laws. The civil judgment arguably is enforceable in Canada.
Since the purpose of the laws appears to be to protect the interests of Canadians...
Protect which Canadians?
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission protects the Canadian cable companies and satellite TV companies from competition by U.S. satellite TV companies. CRTC regulations prevent the Canadian public from seeing many U.S. channels like HBO that are only available from DirecTV.
The debate is over who will deliver U.S. television shows to Canadian homes. Right now the law favors Canadian corporations. Perversely, this approach creates a market for pirate decoders of DirecTV, which the law was designed to exclude.
It's not stealing in Canada...
Actually, it's a matter of dispute. Recent court rulings have supported pirating DirecTV signals in Canada. However, the Crown is appealing the decisions.
The law seems fairly clear:
No person shall
(c) decode an encrypted subscription programming signal or encrypted network feed otherwise than under and in accordance with an authorization from the lawful distributor of the signal or feed;
(d) operate a radio apparatus so as to receive an encrypted subscription programming signal or encrypted network feed that has been decoded in contravention of paragraph (c); or
(e) retransmit to the public an encrypted subscription programming signal or encrypted network feed that has been decoded in contravention of paragraph (c).
In any case, the main issue is whether it is ethical to pirate DirecTV even if there is a loophole in Canada's perverse telecommunications laws.
There is a similar question of whether it is ethical to even pay for DirecTV in Canada since DirecTV cannot be legally sold in Canada. The practical reason is that DirecTV can disable illegal receivers. Their measures might now work against the device described in this article.
a bit more reality about Swedish heaven
Incarceration rates per 100,000:
Sweden:69
U.S.:519
Powerty rates among white people are just as low as they ar in Sweden.
U.S. child poverty rates (%)
Afro-American: 33
Latino: 30
White: 9
Very independent and forward thinking society.
Infant mortality rate (deaths/1000)
Sweden: 3.5
U.S.: 6.8
Life Expectancy (years)
Sweden: 79.6
U.S.: 77.1
Child poverty (%)
Sweden: 2.4
U.S.: 20.3
(And don't talk about Sweden like it was paradise either - they have a yearly national dept equal to 133% of their GNP. That's a burn rate that would make some dot coms flinch!)
I think you may be confusing deficit and debt and the GNP with the government revenue.
Swedish government statistics show that government expenditures are about 56 per cent of the GDP (roughly comparable to the GNP).
Sweden indeed uses deficit financing as the United States did until recently. However, national economic accounting principles are quite different from corporate accounting principles. Among many other reasons, governments can cover debt costs by printing money or raising taxes, an option obviously not open to private enterprise.
In addition, many companies stay in business with high losses as long as their income can cover the interest payments on their debt. Successful startups typically lose money for years before making a profit.
The economics of bankrupt dotcoms is much different. They had expenditures several times their revenue and thus ran through their venture capital. They usually had very low debt since their working capital was provided by investment, not loans. Banks will rarely lend money to startups.
The Swedish growth rate of 3.8% is reasonably healthy compared to the U.S. growth rate of 4.1%
The Swedes are doing okay. The dotcoms should be so lucky.