- the cup didn't melt, she attempted to open it while holding it between her knees; - the high temperature was not for optimum yield, but for optimum taste.
A judge going ballistic and awarding large damages because he felt his court wasn't receiving due respect is hardly the image I have of Justice.
Actually, the 'no sense' part was in response to the comment that I didn't know why the money was awarded when the reason for the comment in the first place was because of people like him who start flaming at the merest mention.
But since you bring up your lack of sense, the judge didn't decide that McDonalds was negligent, that was left in the capable hands of the jury. And although judges do make a living judging, they are generally elected (meaning appointed by the controlling party since these races are not hotly contested) so your contention as to their competence is pretty weak, in my Humble opinion.
As to being sued for falling from high places, see below:
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS ARTICLE 9/25/01
Widow files suit in climbing death
Husband was killed during fall in class conducted in Ouray By John Accola, News Staff Writer
The widow of a man who fell to his death last January while taking a masters ice climbing course in Ouray has sued San Juan Mountain Guides and Jeff Lowe, one of Colorado's foremost ice climbing experts. The negligence lawsuit, filed in Denver federal court, alleges Lowe, who was leading the class, was so hoarse with bronchitis that students were unable to understand his instructions and warnings.
Lowe, who has produced several books and films on alpine climbing, could not be reached Monday. A recorded phone message at the Ouray guide service said the staff was out of town on business.
According to police reports, Pete Ro, an experienced climber from Concord, Calif., was killed Jan. 17 at the Ouray Ice Park when his belayer let go of the safety rope and Ro lost his balance, plummeting 140 feet to the bottom of Box Canyon.
The Ouray Police Department concluded Ro's death was an accident, apparently triggered by a series of misunderstood or unheard commands between Lowe and the climbers in the class. Ro's belayer, a British climber also named as defendant, told police when Ro shouted he was "OK" near the top of the ice falls that she thought he was telling her to let go of the belay.
Lowe told police he immediately realized Ro was in danger, but that he had bronchitis and neither Ro nor the belayer appeared to hear his warning shouts.
Ro, 35, who worked for the American Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo, had paid $1,200 for the four-day climbing course, one of the featured events at the annual Ouray Ice Festival.
San Francisco attorney Walter Walker, retained by Ro's wife, said Pete Ro signed a liability waiver after enrolling in the ice climbing class. Although waivers are typically upheld in recreational accident cases, Walker maintains the negligence was so extreme the defendants should be held accountable.
San Juan's insurers, Colorado Western Insurance Co. in Wheat Ridge, said Monday the case remains under investigation.
"We spent months trying to negotiate with the insurance company," Walker said. "But they said, 'We have his release. We don't have to worry.'"
September 25, Rocky Mountain News, Denver Colorado
Well, aside from having no sense of humor, you don't really seem to have any sense. I wouldn't have made the comment if I hadn't read the innumerable screeds written by people like yourself on this very topic.
But, since you have no sense, and since I'm in a bad mood, I will offer you a hint: coffee is hot, don't spill it on yourself. I like my coffee hot, but if you come over to my house you will have to sign a waiver, and don't spill it on the couch please.
Some more hints: - tea is also hot, see coffee, don't put the paper cup between your legs; - knives are sharp--even though some are not so sharp, some are very sharp--don't test them on your body parts; - heights are high, so although you can jump off a chair, you can't jump off a balcony; - you can't breathe water, so although you can swim under water for a limited time, you can't stay under too long; - smoking is bad for you, you may die earlier if you smoke--you have been told this for a very long time, so don't plead ignorance; - french-fries and whoppers have a lot of calories and will make you fat, so you can have them once in a while, but don't eat them every day.
Perhaps we should write up a list of things you probably should already know for you?
Would this was so. But, note how long silly lawsuits have been going on and being ridiculed in the press with absolutely no action being taken by our 'representatives.' I would include a reference to a coffee-hot lawsuit except that defenders of the right to be stupid would start flaming me.
The US Congress is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate america, reporting directly to the Disney corporation. As long as they can get away with having their cake (money from corporations) and eating it too (getting reelected by the voters they are screwing) they will. It stands to nature, at least the corrupt cesspool-like nature of anyone who would become a politician.
One solution: vote. And ask questions of the people you are voting for, like: who, exactly, do you plan to represent? Me, or NYSE:DIS?
Well, I wasn't arguing the morality of it, I'm not really prepared to do that. Although when my sister went to business school and became a marketing major, my grandfather told her that marketing was immoral: trying to get people to buy things they didn't need at inflated prices. I think deep down inside I sort of believe that he was right.
Absolutely. An argument in favor of Lexmark is that Lexmark has the right to do whatever it wants with its property and if the customer doesn't want it, then the customer doesn't have to buy it. But, this business model is really just an attempt by Lexmark to obscure the true price of owning the printer and so is bad from an economic policy perspective.
As for legality, I would be surprised if Lexmark doesn't win this battle though--if not through the DMCA route, then through some other route--since it is reminiscent of battles fought between console manufacturers and software companies over licensing rights. The console manufacturers seem to be coming out on top there.
On the other hand, this is good news for us, since a company with reasonably deep pockets and a very large interest in the outcome will be challenging the DMCA, not just as law but as policy. I bet they will carry more weight with Congressmen's wallets... er, with Congressmen that is, than the EFF ever could.
Caught me. My source is the WSJ, sometime in the last two months. But, like you, I have heard various numbers and various metrics--generally depending on the affiliation of the quoted congressperson. But if said congresspeople don't have to footnote references, why do I?:-)
Looking, quickly, at the tax stats at the IRS site I can't find the link between people and taxes owed. The best I can do is find that tax returns with more than $100,000 in adjusted gross income account for 48.4% of taxable income and 61.5% of income tax after credits. This is for 1999, the latest year readily available. I understand that this is not the same thing as people, but it is directionally correct. I believe the average household income is below $100,000 (somewhere in the $60k range?)
I believe the numbers I quoted in my prior post were 50% of the absolute population, which is the most aggressive way to count (which is to be expected of the WSJ.) But, aside from minors, who can't vote, this supports my point (also note that the rich half have children too--whether thay have more or fewer than the poor half is difficult to say, especially since the poor half includes many people just starting in the work force who may not have children yet while the rich half is overrepresented by older people who will have had the children they are going to have.)
There was a quote in the NYT in the past couple of weeks from a Democrat who quoted number of taxpayers versus most of the tax paid and it was much more than 50%, which makes sense since there were 127 million returns filed in a nation of 281 million people.
Sorry for the scattered response, I wish I was more conversant with the actual stats, but it's hard to fit that into my job description:-). Note that all these numbers are for individual returns (ie. not corporate, partnerships, etc.) Anyway, my whole argument might be mooted by my definition of rich as more adjusted gross income than average: clearly wealth has a fixed asset component, not just a cash flow component. Also, the argument is mightily skewed by including just income tax and not sales tax, property tax, tariffs and all the other governmental fees. Which way it is skewed is anybody's guess. My wish would be to see an overall comparison of who pays for our government and who benefits. At least then we could have a real argument about our priorities.
What strikes me, in the current debate over Bush's proposed tax cuts, is that the media seems to be willfully ignoring the fact that only the richer half of the country pays taxes. When they say that Bush's tax cuts favor the rich, it's a sort of tautology: only the 'rich' (meaning those wealthier than average) pay taxes. The argument should be how much money to take from the rich and give to the poor (in the form of increased government services), not whether or not the rich are paying their 'fair share.' I think that people aren't willing to face up to what you call greed in this country: the majority of people here demand a welfare state that they can not actually afford.
Now, I am not willing to call this immoral, and I believe it is the same situation as in my thought experiment--people giving up certain principles (the Jeffersonian principles of owning the fruits of your labor and minimal government that were moral mainstays until, well probably until the 1930s) in exchange for money or services. I hesitate to call it greed, although it is tempting as I contemplate my W-2, since it has always been presented to me as a different set of principles (ie. helping those less fortunate.) I believe that in the world of my thought experiment, the same process would take place: the hard-line communists would be outvoted by those who are willing to switch principles to those of capitalism, partly because they don't believe strongly in either and partly because under the bastardized system their lives, as well as their neighbors', parents' and childrens', are better.
One of the interesting things about the "law", tho, is its self-fulfilling nature. I believe, and many of you probably do, too, that computing power will continue to double every year and a half or so, for a long time. Why? Well, because people are pretty damn ingenious when they have a goal to meet. Moore's Law, as it is often interpreted (not as it was originally expounded) is that goal.
As an aside, a story that strikes me as somewhat a propos. Where I used to rock climb (in the Shawanagunks, when I was 30 pounds lighter) there was a story of a route noone had managed to climb before. Two world-class climbers were attempting to be the first. Despite many efforts, neither had been able to make it. One of the climbers arrived one morning and met a friend, to try one last attempt before declaring it impossible. His friend gave him the bad news: his rival had climbed it the day before. Not willing to be outdone, the climber went up the route first try. Only afterwards did his friend congratulate him: he had lied about his rival climbing it, he was the first. (The rival climbed it the next day.)
It seems the history of human progress is littered with examples of fast followers: a new technology is developed, and immediately afterwards it is developed in many other places. I think that knowing it can be done is, perhaps, the biggest hurdle. Maybe Moore's Law bridges that hurdle for us.
Democracy and communism have no reason why they cannot [co-]exist.
Interesting question--I can think of an argument and a counter-argument, both pretty weak. Do you have stronger arguments?
Argument: Sweden (strong because democracy, weak because socialism, not communism.)
Counter-argument: deToqueville's analysis of the economy of a democracy in Democracy in America (see Chapter XIII). Basically, he argues that a principal cause of instability in a democracy is that the citizens find they can vote themselves money. In effect, the majority can ride herd, economically, on the minority (ie. in the US, 50% of the population pays 98% of the taxes.) The incentive to do this is so great that it may prevent a communistic society from forming, unless the society were much more uniformly moral (the morality here being a communist one--everyone works, everyone gains) than a society could be.
My thought experiment goes like this: (1) a democratic communism exists; (2) a small minority learns how to become more comfortable than the rest, somehow; (3) the majority finds that they can do less work and live just as well if they allow the minority to make more and take some of it for themselves; (4) the majority votes to do so, explicitly allowing stratification of earnings pre-tax and some incentive to the higher-earning minority to incent them to continue to do so; (5) stratification and taxation continues until just less than half the voters pay all the taxes.
Note that this is a problem of democracy, not communism or capitalism. I would conclude that pure communism or pure capitalism requires some sort of minority rule.
Well, we talk about the problems that what Brin calls the Enlightenment causes all the time. I mean, the topic you mention is talked about on/. at least once a week. And I think/. is representative of conversations taking place in other forums all over the world (except the Linux part:)).
I think Brin's point is one worth thinking about: why are we so critical of such a new and hopeful experiment as an Enlightened society? So corporations have too much power; do they have more than the previous aristocracy? Isn't one of the points of our system to eliminate undeserved sources of power? The fact that we are still working to do so doesn't mean the experiment has failed--we just started.
Another example: It has always confused me, as a US citizen, that so many people here are so entranced with the UK royalty. More so than the British (well, at least if you believe their tabloids.) Isn't Royalty something we should congenitally despise, even after all these years? It is a mystery to me why the true architects of our progress--scientists, engineers, researchers--don't get the girls (or boys, if you insist.) But, grow up a do-nothing scion of fourth generation wealth and you're the toast of the town.
I read Brin's article as a caution against forgetting that the Enlightenment has made life better for the 99% of us who weren't either local strong-men or nobility. The LotR tie is obviously just an attention-getter, but the questions are valid: why would we rather fantasize about a society in which we would be miserable than a society in which we would be happy? And does the incessant fantasizing about a fuedalistic society make it more likely that one would be accepted here if it were introduced?
Hooold on a second. Don't throw out that "grab an econ book" canard without saying something that would actually be in an econ book.
There are two things going on here:
1) The telephone companies have dark fiber. You are saying they are not lighting it because that would lower their pricing power. How is that? If you mean they aren't going to double the bandwidth to a particular customer without increasing the price, I agree, but I don't think that's the issue--if they don't have pricing power it's because they're regulated, but it sounds like the Oregon PUC might allow them to make money on increased bandwidth. I think the increase in bandwidth we're talking about here would be to *new* customers. A new customer to the telephone monopoly doesn't change their pricing power at all. They may have to lower their prices to get new customers, but that's a different issue--it's not the increase in quantity that would lower prices, it's the lower prices that would be needed to bring about an increase in paying customers. This is a problem that every high fixed-cost, low variable-cost business has (ie. airlines, telcos, pharma companies, software companies, etc.): how do we get the people willing to pay a lot to pay a lot (and cover the fixed expense) while allowing the people who only want to pay a little to pay a little (and cover a little more than the marginal cost)? The answer is usually either a balanced price, meant to maximize revenue, or some sort of price discrimination (ie. business users pay more, home users pay less.)
2) Companies other than the telephone monopolies have dark fiber: these companies (or their creditors, who now are the proud owners of the fiber) should be, and probably are, perfectly willing to degrade the telcos' pricing power if they can make any money. The fact that they don't is because they *can't* make any money... for two reasons: (a) the cost of equipping the dark fiber is higher than the revenue they could generate from the few people who want broadband, and (b) the excess dark fiber at the telcos means they could push their pricing down to squash any new entrant (typical of industries that require high up-front investment: once the sunk cost is sunk, competitive threats are met by temporarily lowering the price to just above marginal cost, making it untenable for new.
Farming and steel are bad analogies: the US government pays subsidies to keep those industries alive in the US because they are strategic and the workers are influential voters. If there were no subsidies, those industries would migrate to where they belong: in countries where the cost of labor is lower.
Oil is a bad analogy for other reasons (as was the gold rush analogy in the article): this is a low variable-cost industry with a low fixed-cost as well, but restricted by the luck of having the natural resource in the first place. So, no member of OPEC produces *no* oil, the cartel simply tries to lower overall production to keep prices up. This would be analogous to *each* of the dark fiber owners agreeing to only use 5% of their fiber, to keep prices up. This is clearly not what is happening: some fiber owners are using none, while some are using substantially more than 5% (if 5% is the average, this has to be true.)
A good analogy is the railroad price wars of the 19th century. Early on, high up-front investments led to little competition, good pricing power and large margins and very profitable businesses. The early successes led to a large inflow of investment capital and the building of competitive railroads on the same routes (sometimes with tracks laid parallel to each other.) This led to price wars where both roads would charge just above marginal cost, not enough to cover fixed costs. While this made some economic sense, it led to the eventual demise and/or consolidation of one of the roads. These types of industries are generally considered natural monopolies.
I don't document at all... I'm not a pro, I generally code for my own use. My point wasn't see how great a coder I am, I'm not. My point was that software designed to spec is, IMHO, often an inferior solution to software designed from the gut. The best algorithms show flashes of genius, not design.
I agree that if you understand something well you should be able to explain it (although I doubt you have children or you wouldn't say to a child)--that was my point: I didn't understand it, it came out of my gut and worked. That, to me, made it a creative process rather than an analytical one. If I had sat down, tried to understand the process and written code to address the problem as described, I would have spent a really long time replicating the broken code already in place.
In any case, it was too small a piece of code to be disorganized, so maybe my entire comment is moot. It was definitely undisciplined. Frankly, I'm surprised anyone disagrees with me: every coder has had this experience--writing code without thinking about it that turns out to be the best they've written.
I agree with the guy. Maybe because I'm not a professional software engineer. I write code to do things I need done instead of doing them myself (I Am Lazy.)
In my first engineering job, before I had the creativity squeezed out of me by the brutal gears of corporate America, there was a whole department writing a CAD program using the engineering method: identify problems, solve problems, repeat. This program (meant to generate instructions to rewire circuits between design iterations) was thousands of lines long and worked about 75% of the time. The engineers had to go through the output and fix it by hand. The software people would say that each mistake was because there was a new wiring topology that the program hadn't seen before and then add code to do that particular change correctly. The program was like kudzu.
So, I sat down one lunchtime and wrote a simple, elegant program (in REXX!) that would do all wiring changes correctly. How? I thought about how all of the engineers did it in our own heads, when fixing the mistakes this program generated. It worked. The other program was scrapped.
When I left that job, two of my co-workers took over the program. They sat down and tried to decipher the program, where I used variables like "n" and "i", just like in BASIC class in high-school. They quizzed me as to meaning ("so, when n is 1, it means the pen is up?") and, quite frankly, I had absolutely no idea what it meant, it had come directly from my brain.
It was exactly like my college lit class dissecting a poem ("so, he's really talking about sex?") I always thought about my hacking as creative, not analytic. I guess professional programming is different.
Well, I got >1100 pieces of spam over the recent four day weekend. Luckily, 90% of it was blocked because it came from one of the >1700 domains I have in my outlook blocklist. I am, and have always been, careful not to give my email address to anyone who would sell it or use it for spam. Unfortuneately, one of my addresses is common_name@big_isp.com, and is guessed by all the non-optin spammers. But I have had it for more than ten years, so I don't want to change it and potentially miss email from old friends.
Filtering it is not rocket science, but every week or so somebody buys a new domain and hits me with about a hundred pieces of spam before I can block it. I don't want to play cat-and-mouse with these people, I just want them to leave me alone.
Guess I'm a shithead. Although theft might be a stronger word than I would use when it comes to commercial skipping: I think the provision of content without any sort of compensation is unfair to the broadcast networks.
I think it's great that the technology exists to stop people from looking at your site when they don't watch the pop-ups. Now noone can call it theft if you use a pop-up stopper. When I turn off cookies, many of the websites I visit stop functioning, so I leave them on even though it makes me uneasy. If a website blocked me because of my pop-up stopper, I would stop going there.
I like the fact that I don't have to pay for most content on the web and am willing to put up with some amount of being marketed to so it stays free. I even click on a banner now and again. That's the price I'm willing to pay. I'm not willing to be bombarded with pop-ups and, especially, pop-unders. I would rather not have free content than have that.
If the TV networks could block anyone who uses TiVo to skip commercials from watching their shows and broadcast them without that protection anyway, then I would not think it unfair to skip the commercials.
No, no. Frob is right. Embarassed for not saying so myself, but I was steamed.
These people are generally on our side. Look at the other things they have done. In fact, we are their constituency, and they are part of our community. They should understand, and listen.
More importantly, here is the list of their Board of Directors. This group is far too diverse to actually be agreeing on this. Some of the companies have to be in favor of more free content: it would improve their business of providing access to that content (I mean, what the hell is the SVP of NetSchools thinking?)
If you want to target companies for protest, start with those of the board of directors:
- Riverdeep Interactive Learning
- Edge Technology Group - Oracle Corporation - AOL Time Warner - The Thomson Corporation - Borland Software Corporation - The McGraw-Hill Companies - Citrix Systems, Inc. - NetSchools Corporation - Bloomberg, L. P. - RealNetworks - Reed Elsevier Inc. - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Novell, Inc.
And, of course, Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 in which he argues that a power is a result of the ability or inability to finance war. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the topic of history repeating. Ask yourself this question: how long does it take for another country (say, France) to duplicate what the US has shown to be achievable and how much does the US have to spend remaining on the cutting edge? As cutting-edge weapons systems become more expensive at a greater rate than US economic growth, how long until the cost of being the sole world power sinks the country so deep in debt that it has to retreat to isolationism?
Or, an alternative and simpler question: who was the last sole world power before the US and why did they lose that position? (Hint: they spoke the same language.)
Only really big moster countries sufficient power to challenge this reality.
Well, globalisation as a force has been around for millenia, in a smaller slower form. That didn't stop the US from challenging this reality a hundred years ago, and with its (by far) largest trading partner to boot. What I am saying is that there is a functional difference between accepting EU/US law and enforcing it. This is exactly what the US did in the 19th century and pretty much what China does today. Even if British copyright law wasn't the law of the land in the US, I am sure there were foot-dragging negotiations going on to make it so, given just enough energy and attention to prevent the British from cutting off trade entirely. If you are trying to make an issue of this distinction, then it is a political point, not a practical one. I prefer George Washington's strategy: the longer you can avoid engaging in real battle, the better the chance you have of winning the war. Somehow I doubt that if African countries started to distribute low-cost generic AIDS drugs without drawing any attention to themselves that the US or EU would cut off what little foreign trade or aid they now offer. Why should they?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I may be a twit, but at least I'm not an anonymous one.
If you want facts, get facts:
- the cup didn't melt, she attempted to open it while holding it between her knees;
- the high temperature was not for optimum yield, but for optimum taste.
A judge going ballistic and awarding large damages because he felt his court wasn't receiving due respect is hardly the image I have of Justice.
Actually, the 'no sense' part was in response to the comment that I didn't know why the money was awarded when the reason for the comment in the first place was because of people like him who start flaming at the merest mention.
But since you bring up your lack of sense, the judge didn't decide that McDonalds was negligent, that was left in the capable hands of the jury. And although judges do make a living judging, they are generally elected (meaning appointed by the controlling party since these races are not hotly contested) so your contention as to their competence is pretty weak, in my Humble opinion.
As to being sued for falling from high places, see below:
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS ARTICLE 9/25/01
Widow files suit in climbing death
Husband was killed during fall in class conducted in Ouray By John Accola, News Staff Writer
The widow of a man who fell to his death last January while taking a masters ice climbing course in Ouray has sued San Juan Mountain Guides and Jeff Lowe, one of Colorado's foremost ice climbing experts.
The negligence lawsuit, filed in Denver federal court, alleges Lowe, who was leading the class, was so hoarse with bronchitis that students were unable to understand his instructions and warnings.
Lowe, who has produced several books and films on alpine climbing, could not be reached Monday. A recorded phone message at the Ouray guide service said the staff was out of town on business.
According to police reports, Pete Ro, an experienced climber from Concord, Calif., was killed Jan. 17 at the Ouray Ice Park when his belayer let go of the safety rope and Ro lost his balance, plummeting 140 feet to the bottom of Box Canyon.
The Ouray Police Department concluded Ro's death was an accident, apparently triggered by a series of misunderstood or unheard commands between Lowe and the climbers in the class. Ro's belayer, a British climber also named as defendant, told police when Ro shouted he was "OK" near the top of the ice falls that she thought he was telling her to let go of the belay.
Lowe told police he immediately realized Ro was in danger, but that he had bronchitis and neither Ro nor the belayer appeared to hear his warning shouts.
Ro, 35, who worked for the American Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo, had paid $1,200 for the four-day climbing course, one of the featured events at the annual Ouray Ice Festival.
San Francisco attorney Walter Walker, retained by Ro's wife, said Pete Ro signed a liability waiver after enrolling in the ice climbing class. Although waivers are typically upheld in recreational accident cases, Walker maintains the negligence was so extreme the defendants should be held accountable.
San Juan's insurers, Colorado Western Insurance Co. in Wheat Ridge, said Monday the case remains under investigation.
"We spent months trying to negotiate with the insurance company," Walker said. "But they said, 'We have his release. We don't have to worry.'"
September 25, Rocky Mountain News, Denver Colorado
I apologize, that was uncalled for, and very insensitive, even for sarcasm. No more posting today.
Perhaps we should shoot all the Buffalo so the Indians will have nothing to eat. That will teach them to compete with us.
Well, aside from having no sense of humor, you don't really seem to have any sense. I wouldn't have made the comment if I hadn't read the innumerable screeds written by people like yourself on this very topic.
But, since you have no sense, and since I'm in a bad mood, I will offer you a hint: coffee is hot, don't spill it on yourself. I like my coffee hot, but if you come over to my house you will have to sign a waiver, and don't spill it on the couch please.
Some more hints:
- tea is also hot, see coffee, don't put the paper cup between your legs;
- knives are sharp--even though some are not so sharp, some are very sharp--don't test them on your body parts;
- heights are high, so although you can jump off a chair, you can't jump off a balcony;
- you can't breathe water, so although you can swim under water for a limited time, you can't stay under too long;
- smoking is bad for you, you may die earlier if you smoke--you have been told this for a very long time, so don't plead ignorance;
- french-fries and whoppers have a lot of calories and will make you fat, so you can have them once in a while, but don't eat them every day.
Perhaps we should write up a list of things you probably should already know for you?
Would this was so. But, note how long silly lawsuits have been going on and being ridiculed in the press with absolutely no action being taken by our 'representatives.' I would include a reference to a coffee-hot lawsuit except that defenders of the right to be stupid would start flaming me.
The US Congress is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate america, reporting directly to the Disney corporation. As long as they can get away with having their cake (money from corporations) and eating it too (getting reelected by the voters they are screwing) they will. It stands to nature, at least the corrupt cesspool-like nature of anyone who would become a politician.
One solution: vote. And ask questions of the people you are voting for, like: who, exactly, do you plan to represent? Me, or NYSE:DIS?
Well, I wasn't arguing the morality of it, I'm not really prepared to do that. Although when my sister went to business school and became a marketing major, my grandfather told her that marketing was immoral: trying to get people to buy things they didn't need at inflated prices. I think deep down inside I sort of believe that he was right.
Absolutely. An argument in favor of Lexmark is that Lexmark has the right to do whatever it wants with its property and if the customer doesn't want it, then the customer doesn't have to buy it. But, this business model is really just an attempt by Lexmark to obscure the true price of owning the printer and so is bad from an economic policy perspective.
As for legality, I would be surprised if Lexmark doesn't win this battle though--if not through the DMCA route, then through some other route--since it is reminiscent of battles fought between console manufacturers and software companies over licensing rights. The console manufacturers seem to be coming out on top there.
On the other hand, this is good news for us, since a company with reasonably deep pockets and a very large interest in the outcome will be challenging the DMCA, not just as law but as policy. I bet they will carry more weight with Congressmen's wallets... er, with Congressmen that is, than the EFF ever could.
Caught me. My source is the WSJ, sometime in the last two months. But, like you, I have heard various numbers and various metrics--generally depending on the affiliation of the quoted congressperson. But if said congresspeople don't have to footnote references, why do I? :-)
:-). Note that all these numbers are for individual returns (ie. not corporate, partnerships, etc.) Anyway, my whole argument might be mooted by my definition of rich as more adjusted gross income than average: clearly wealth has a fixed asset component, not just a cash flow component. Also, the argument is mightily skewed by including just income tax and not sales tax, property tax, tariffs and all the other governmental fees. Which way it is skewed is anybody's guess. My wish would be to see an overall comparison of who pays for our government and who benefits. At least then we could have a real argument about our priorities.
Looking, quickly, at the tax stats at the IRS site I can't find the link between people and taxes owed. The best I can do is find that tax returns with more than $100,000 in adjusted gross income account for 48.4% of taxable income and 61.5% of income tax after credits. This is for 1999, the latest year readily available. I understand that this is not the same thing as people, but it is directionally correct. I believe the average household income is below $100,000 (somewhere in the $60k range?)
I believe the numbers I quoted in my prior post were 50% of the absolute population, which is the most aggressive way to count (which is to be expected of the WSJ.) But, aside from minors, who can't vote, this supports my point (also note that the rich half have children too--whether thay have more or fewer than the poor half is difficult to say, especially since the poor half includes many people just starting in the work force who may not have children yet while the rich half is overrepresented by older people who will have had the children they are going to have.)
There was a quote in the NYT in the past couple of weeks from a Democrat who quoted number of taxpayers versus most of the tax paid and it was much more than 50%, which makes sense since there were 127 million returns filed in a nation of 281 million people.
Sorry for the scattered response, I wish I was more conversant with the actual stats, but it's hard to fit that into my job description
What strikes me, in the current debate over Bush's proposed tax cuts, is that the media seems to be willfully ignoring the fact that only the richer half of the country pays taxes. When they say that Bush's tax cuts favor the rich, it's a sort of tautology: only the 'rich' (meaning those wealthier than average) pay taxes. The argument should be how much money to take from the rich and give to the poor (in the form of increased government services), not whether or not the rich are paying their 'fair share.' I think that people aren't willing to face up to what you call greed in this country: the majority of people here demand a welfare state that they can not actually afford.
Now, I am not willing to call this immoral, and I believe it is the same situation as in my thought experiment--people giving up certain principles (the Jeffersonian principles of owning the fruits of your labor and minimal government that were moral mainstays until, well probably until the 1930s) in exchange for money or services. I hesitate to call it greed, although it is tempting as I contemplate my W-2, since it has always been presented to me as a different set of principles (ie. helping those less fortunate.) I believe that in the world of my thought experiment, the same process would take place: the hard-line communists would be outvoted by those who are willing to switch principles to those of capitalism, partly because they don't believe strongly in either and partly because under the bastardized system their lives, as well as their neighbors', parents' and childrens', are better.
One of the interesting things about the "law", tho, is its self-fulfilling nature. I believe, and many of you probably do, too, that computing power will continue to double every year and a half or so, for a long time. Why? Well, because people are pretty damn ingenious when they have a goal to meet. Moore's Law, as it is often interpreted (not as it was originally expounded) is that goal.
As an aside, a story that strikes me as somewhat a propos. Where I used to rock climb (in the Shawanagunks, when I was 30 pounds lighter) there was a story of a route noone had managed to climb before. Two world-class climbers were attempting to be the first. Despite many efforts, neither had been able to make it. One of the climbers arrived one morning and met a friend, to try one last attempt before declaring it impossible. His friend gave him the bad news: his rival had climbed it the day before. Not willing to be outdone, the climber went up the route first try. Only afterwards did his friend congratulate him: he had lied about his rival climbing it, he was the first. (The rival climbed it the next day.)
It seems the history of human progress is littered with examples of fast followers: a new technology is developed, and immediately afterwards it is developed in many other places. I think that knowing it can be done is, perhaps, the biggest hurdle. Maybe Moore's Law bridges that hurdle for us.
Main Entry: prejudice
... (2) : an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.
Pronunciation: 'pre-j&-d&s
Function: noun
2 a
(Merriam-Webster)
Democracy and communism have no reason why they cannot [co-]exist.
Interesting question--I can think of an argument and a counter-argument, both pretty weak. Do you have stronger arguments?
Argument: Sweden (strong because democracy, weak because socialism, not communism.)
Counter-argument: deToqueville's analysis of the economy of a democracy in Democracy in America (see Chapter XIII). Basically, he argues that a principal cause of instability in a democracy is that the citizens find they can vote themselves money. In effect, the majority can ride herd, economically, on the minority (ie. in the US, 50% of the population pays 98% of the taxes.) The incentive to do this is so great that it may prevent a communistic society from forming, unless the society were much more uniformly moral (the morality here being a communist one--everyone works, everyone gains) than a society could be.
My thought experiment goes like this: (1) a democratic communism exists; (2) a small minority learns how to become more comfortable than the rest, somehow; (3) the majority finds that they can do less work and live just as well if they allow the minority to make more and take some of it for themselves; (4) the majority votes to do so, explicitly allowing stratification of earnings pre-tax and some incentive to the higher-earning minority to incent them to continue to do so; (5) stratification and taxation continues until just less than half the voters pay all the taxes.
Note that this is a problem of democracy, not communism or capitalism. I would conclude that pure communism or pure capitalism requires some sort of minority rule.
Well, we talk about the problems that what Brin calls the Enlightenment causes all the time. I mean, the topic you mention is talked about on /. at least once a week. And I think /. is representative of conversations taking place in other forums all over the world (except the Linux part :)).
I think Brin's point is one worth thinking about: why are we so critical of such a new and hopeful experiment as an Enlightened society? So corporations have too much power; do they have more than the previous aristocracy? Isn't one of the points of our system to eliminate undeserved sources of power? The fact that we are still working to do so doesn't mean the experiment has failed--we just started.
Another example: It has always confused me, as a US citizen, that so many people here are so entranced with the UK royalty. More so than the British (well, at least if you believe their tabloids.) Isn't Royalty something we should congenitally despise, even after all these years? It is a mystery to me why the true architects of our progress--scientists, engineers, researchers--don't get the girls (or boys, if you insist.) But, grow up a do-nothing scion of fourth generation wealth and you're the toast of the town.
I read Brin's article as a caution against forgetting that the Enlightenment has made life better for the 99% of us who weren't either local strong-men or nobility. The LotR tie is obviously just an attention-getter, but the questions are valid: why would we rather fantasize about a society in which we would be miserable than a society in which we would be happy? And does the incessant fantasizing about a fuedalistic society make it more likely that one would be accepted here if it were introduced?
Hooold on a second. Don't throw out that "grab an econ book" canard without saying something that would actually be in an econ book.
There are two things going on here:
1) The telephone companies have dark fiber. You are saying they are not lighting it because that would lower their pricing power. How is that? If you mean they aren't going to double the bandwidth to a particular customer without increasing the price, I agree, but I don't think that's the issue--if they don't have pricing power it's because they're regulated, but it sounds like the Oregon PUC might allow them to make money on increased bandwidth. I think the increase in bandwidth we're talking about here would be to *new* customers. A new customer to the telephone monopoly doesn't change their pricing power at all. They may have to lower their prices to get new customers, but that's a different issue--it's not the increase in quantity that would lower prices, it's the lower prices that would be needed to bring about an increase in paying customers. This is a problem that every high fixed-cost, low variable-cost business has (ie. airlines, telcos, pharma companies, software companies, etc.): how do we get the people willing to pay a lot to pay a lot (and cover the fixed expense) while allowing the people who only want to pay a little to pay a little (and cover a little more than the marginal cost)? The answer is usually either a balanced price, meant to maximize revenue, or some sort of price discrimination (ie. business users pay more, home users pay less.)
2) Companies other than the telephone monopolies have dark fiber: these companies (or their creditors, who now are the proud owners of the fiber) should be, and probably are, perfectly willing to degrade the telcos' pricing power if they can make any money. The fact that they don't is because they *can't* make any money... for two reasons: (a) the cost of equipping the dark fiber is higher than the revenue they could generate from the few people who want broadband, and (b) the excess dark fiber at the telcos means they could push their pricing down to squash any new entrant (typical of industries that require high up-front investment: once the sunk cost is sunk, competitive threats are met by temporarily lowering the price to just above marginal cost, making it untenable for new.
Farming and steel are bad analogies: the US government pays subsidies to keep those industries alive in the US because they are strategic and the workers are influential voters. If there were no subsidies, those industries would migrate to where they belong: in countries where the cost of labor is lower.
Oil is a bad analogy for other reasons (as was the gold rush analogy in the article): this is a low variable-cost industry with a low fixed-cost as well, but restricted by the luck of having the natural resource in the first place. So, no member of OPEC produces *no* oil, the cartel simply tries to lower overall production to keep prices up. This would be analogous to *each* of the dark fiber owners agreeing to only use 5% of their fiber, to keep prices up. This is clearly not what is happening: some fiber owners are using none, while some are using substantially more than 5% (if 5% is the average, this has to be true.)
A good analogy is the railroad price wars of the 19th century. Early on, high up-front investments led to little competition, good pricing power and large margins and very profitable businesses. The early successes led to a large inflow of investment capital and the building of competitive railroads on the same routes (sometimes with tracks laid parallel to each other.) This led to price wars where both roads would charge just above marginal cost, not enough to cover fixed costs. While this made some economic sense, it led to the eventual demise and/or consolidation of one of the roads. These types of industries are generally considered natural monopolies.
I don't document at all... I'm not a pro, I generally code for my own use. My point wasn't see how great a coder I am, I'm not. My point was that software designed to spec is, IMHO, often an inferior solution to software designed from the gut. The best algorithms show flashes of genius, not design.
I agree that if you understand something well you should be able to explain it (although I doubt you have children or you wouldn't say to a child)--that was my point: I didn't understand it, it came out of my gut and worked. That, to me, made it a creative process rather than an analytical one. If I had sat down, tried to understand the process and written code to address the problem as described, I would have spent a really long time replicating the broken code already in place.
In any case, it was too small a piece of code to be disorganized, so maybe my entire comment is moot. It was definitely undisciplined. Frankly, I'm surprised anyone disagrees with me: every coder has had this experience--writing code without thinking about it that turns out to be the best they've written.
I agree with the guy. Maybe because I'm not a professional software engineer. I write code to do things I need done instead of doing them myself (I Am Lazy.)
In my first engineering job, before I had the creativity squeezed out of me by the brutal gears of corporate America, there was a whole department writing a CAD program using the engineering method: identify problems, solve problems, repeat. This program (meant to generate instructions to rewire circuits between design iterations) was thousands of lines long and worked about 75% of the time. The engineers had to go through the output and fix it by hand. The software people would say that each mistake was because there was a new wiring topology that the program hadn't seen before and then add code to do that particular change correctly. The program was like kudzu.
So, I sat down one lunchtime and wrote a simple, elegant program (in REXX!) that would do all wiring changes correctly. How? I thought about how all of the engineers did it in our own heads, when fixing the mistakes this program generated. It worked. The other program was scrapped.
When I left that job, two of my co-workers took over the program. They sat down and tried to decipher the program, where I used variables like "n" and "i", just like in BASIC class in high-school. They quizzed me as to meaning ("so, when n is 1, it means the pen is up?") and, quite frankly, I had absolutely no idea what it meant, it had come directly from my brain.
It was exactly like my college lit class dissecting a poem ("so, he's really talking about sex?") I always thought about my hacking as creative, not analytic. I guess professional programming is different.
I think the very fact that he singled out ADM means he is kidding. Unless he is an employee.
Well, I got >1100 pieces of spam over the recent four day weekend. Luckily, 90% of it was blocked because it came from one of the >1700 domains I have in my outlook blocklist. I am, and have always been, careful not to give my email address to anyone who would sell it or use it for spam. Unfortuneately, one of my addresses is common_name@big_isp.com, and is guessed by all the non-optin spammers. But I have had it for more than ten years, so I don't want to change it and potentially miss email from old friends.
Filtering it is not rocket science, but every week or so somebody buys a new domain and hits me with about a hundred pieces of spam before I can block it. I don't want to play cat-and-mouse with these people, I just want them to leave me alone.
Guess I'm a shithead. Although theft might be a stronger word than I would use when it comes to commercial skipping: I think the provision of content without any sort of compensation is unfair to the broadcast networks.
I think it's great that the technology exists to stop people from looking at your site when they don't watch the pop-ups. Now noone can call it theft if you use a pop-up stopper. When I turn off cookies, many of the websites I visit stop functioning, so I leave them on even though it makes me uneasy. If a website blocked me because of my pop-up stopper, I would stop going there.
I like the fact that I don't have to pay for most content on the web and am willing to put up with some amount of being marketed to so it stays free. I even click on a banner now and again. That's the price I'm willing to pay. I'm not willing to be bombarded with pop-ups and, especially, pop-unders. I would rather not have free content than have that.
If the TV networks could block anyone who uses TiVo to skip commercials from watching their shows and broadcast them without that protection anyway, then I would not think it unfair to skip the commercials.
Love,
Shithead.
No, no. Frob is right. Embarassed for not saying so myself, but I was steamed.
These people are generally on our side. Look at the other things they have done. In fact, we are their constituency, and they are part of our community. They should understand, and listen.
If you want to target companies for protest, start with those of the board of directors:
- Edge Technology Group
- Oracle Corporation
- AOL Time Warner
- The Thomson Corporation
- Borland Software Corporation
- The McGraw-Hill Companies
- Citrix Systems, Inc.
- NetSchools Corporation
- Bloomberg, L. P.
- RealNetworks
- Reed Elsevier Inc.
- Sun Microsystems, Inc.
- Novell, Inc.
And, of course, Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 in which he argues that a power is a result of the ability or inability to finance war. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the topic of history repeating. Ask yourself this question: how long does it take for another country (say, France) to duplicate what the US has shown to be achievable and how much does the US have to spend remaining on the cutting edge? As cutting-edge weapons systems become more expensive at a greater rate than US economic growth, how long until the cost of being the sole world power sinks the country so deep in debt that it has to retreat to isolationism?
Or, an alternative and simpler question: who was the last sole world power before the US and why did they lose that position? (Hint: they spoke the same language.)
Well, they laugh at science of 100 years ago:
"Ether, hahaha, how stoopid."
Laughing at science less than 100 years old can be dangerous. Witness this student of 20 years ago, laughing at something then 50 years old:
"The cosmological constant, hahaha, how stoopid."
Oops.
Personally, I laugh at science of last week:
"Branes, hahaha, how stoopid."
I figure I won't be proved wrong until after I'm dead.
Only really big moster countries sufficient power to challenge this reality.
Well, globalisation as a force has been around for millenia, in a smaller slower form. That didn't stop the US from challenging this reality a hundred years ago, and with its (by far) largest trading partner to boot. What I am saying is that there is a functional difference between accepting EU/US law and enforcing it. This is exactly what the US did in the 19th century and pretty much what China does today. Even if British copyright law wasn't the law of the land in the US, I am sure there were foot-dragging negotiations going on to make it so, given just enough energy and attention to prevent the British from cutting off trade entirely. If you are trying to make an issue of this distinction, then it is a political point, not a practical one. I prefer George Washington's strategy: the longer you can avoid engaging in real battle, the better the chance you have of winning the war. Somehow I doubt that if African countries started to distribute low-cost generic AIDS drugs without drawing any attention to themselves that the US or EU would cut off what little foreign trade or aid they now offer. Why should they?