Well, I would agree with the greens, at least with some of the ideas of factoring externalities like the environment into the cost of goods, but there are two major problems, and they aren't going to go away.
1. Its impossible to put a price on inevitable environmental destruction. i.e: That tree costs $100 if you chop it down on your own land? What about $1000? What? You thought you actually "owned" your own land? Think again. Property rights go out the window.
2. The sole beneficiary will be the government, by necessity. These environmental costs, for the most part, will be passed on to the consumer, and will end up in the government's hand to spend in their infinite wisdom. (Yeah right).
Certain programs will work, such as the current "send-back" programs that toner cart manufacturers have, but as far as having the government factor in all environmental costs, it will result in having the same effect as passing extra taxes that the government will go spend on something like the military. (The largest polluter in the US)
suffering radiation burns and maybe even a long and slow painful death
Um, what are you talking about.... the radiation from a 2Ghz chip, while in the microwave range, is not going to be enough to be dangerous from a RF heating standpoint. If it were radiating that much RF energy, it would cause arching all over the place, just like when you put a spoon in a microwave.
Besides, you are confusing ionizing radiation with non-ionizing radiation. Either your post was made out of ignorance, or it was a really bad joke. -----------------------------
Just as a clarification, I mean the escalation of the War on Drugs in the 60s and Nixon era. I know the beginnings, what I am saying is that I believe a driving force behind the escalation of the war on drugs was the ability to pigeonhole drug users into a subculture. -----------------------------
I do not see how a free market should involve the idea of government-created artificial entities competing against individuals
Any individual can incorporate their own private corporation and have all the benefits given to corporations.
You act as if it is some complicated process to form a corporation. It isn't, you don't even need a lawyer.
So people, quit bitching about corporations. It isn't an "us and them" thing. You are given the same opportunity as everyone else in business. -----------------------------
Ever hook up the keyboard when it is apart? Typing on those three plastic layers without the rest of the keyboard is fun, if you remember where all the keys are.
I actually almost typed a full sentence without the keys at all. It would be cool to brag that your keyboard is less than 1mm thick. -----------------------------
Unfortunately, instead of embracing the technology, they've been making worse laws restricting our freedoms, and after the mp3 furor, understand if I'm not anxious to see them try to take away all rights to video as well, because of the potential copyright abuse.
...And that is a valid concern. However, it is pointless to complain about the inevitable, there is no way that any legislation designed to address mp3s will not also address any digital media format.
All we can do is hope that the courts will guide us in the right direction. Either they side with the media corps and the government, and decide to declare a "war on copyright", which will be a failure, of course, just like the war on drugs. Of course there is tremendous commercial interest that would benefit, not only those still able to make some money by being the sole distributer of their information, but also the money that will go to prisons to hold all the "pirates", the information criminals.
The other direction is of course a revolutionizing of copyright, the collapse of media as we know it, since there will be no value in a product that can be infinitely reproduced, by anyone, with little cost as far as time or money.
Of course, a hybrid of the two will probably happen, and is the course that I see likely. Bad laws will be passed, they will be so repugnant to the general public that the public will demand a change, such as alcohol prohibition. This will only happen, If a subculture of pirates is not what the public sees.
It doesn't matter if there really is a subculture or not, it only matters if the public views the people who violate the laws regarding copyright as a subculture, or if they view them as the people next door, or even themselves.
So, the best we can hope for is to not come off as a subculture of rebel geeks that want to violate the laws that hold society together. We need to make sure the public realizes that it is people just like them that are violating these laws, people that aren't criminals, people that only act logically in obtaining a product that has no inherent value by the cheapest means available.
You may ask how I know these things, and I can tell you, it is because this is very parallel to the beginnings of the War on Drugs. If the people who used drugs in the 60s weren't subcultured into the title "hippy", we might not see the kinds of senseless wastes of taxpayer money we see putting away pot smokers who havn't committed a real crime.
Just some thoughts, I don't know the future, but I see this as an inevitable choice that we will make as a society, lets hope we make a good one! -----------------------------
This isn't about a silly battle over mp3. This is society changing paradigm. The old rules don't work anymore, and that is the real issue. It doesn't matter which format the battle is over, the ideas that the public adopts in the end will be the only important thing. Copyright has been with us for hundreds of years, its unsettling when our technology changes the way we think, and that is why we are having this battle.
Think of it as a prelude to the Singularity. -----------------------------
Well, I didn't mean to start a philosophical discussion, I just meant our collective morality as a society.
Values that are widely held, or viewed as widely held. (such as drug use, lots of people have no problem with it, but the anti-drug people have convinced most people of the "right" way to think). Those are the things that make up our collective morality. There is no need to search for a deeper "right or wrongness" in our morality. To do so is pretty impossible. -----------------------------
Moderators, mod this parent message up, its really true!
Drives me crazy when corps are made out to be evil. They have no concept of morality, good or evil, only making money. We try to shape the system around them so that it is economically adventagous for them to act in a way that we consider moral, but oftentimes we create situations that are worse than what we had originally.
The market provides an almost perfect system of fairness, it is only when people want special treatment do we break things. Morality is equality of fairness, don't forget that. -----------------------------
Insist on bringing up free software in the middle of your classes.
GOD I hate those kind of people.
Rant on your spare time, but don't waste my time in class showing off, promoting your agenda, or whatever. Sit there and shut up unless you have a real question and are not trying to upstage the professor. -----------------------------
If they have money to buy options it would be great for Sega to sell them the stocks (And thereby getting the revenue from the pirate copies)
Hehe, at the same time diluting their stock with new issues. Issuing stock is never considered revenue in the traditional sense. -----------------------------
Anyway, a price floor will create inefficiencies, iff it is above the current market price for a good. Workers are a market that is not excempt from this rule. If indeed min wage did not have much effect in the UK, it is most likely because not many people were paying below that rate to start with.
My point is that no one will work at a job they are unhappy with, if they can find a better job that pays more. (Pay may not always be money, but even something as intangible as personal satisfaction.) Efficient Market Theory rules in this case, workers are valued at what they are actually worth.
I don't like the government telling me that I can't work for less than $5.15 per hour, even if I want to. Thats BS. -----------------------------
Weren't minimum wage laws put into effect to protect workers who were recieving unfair pay? It seems to me that this is none of the government's business. The volunteers are getting paid, in their own way, and they don't have a problem with it. Why is this even an issue? BR
It is of course, none of the Governments business. No one is working at any particular place against their will, they can always leave and try to find a better paying job. Minimum wage laws create inefficiencies in any economy, and are only argued for by the selfish, lazy, or the economically ignorant. -----------------------------
This isn't as much of a copyright (write?:) issue anymore.
I think this falls more closly under trademark law, which is designed to prevent competitors from providing a competing product that is confusingly similar to an existing product.
As always, IANAL.
In fact, I'm real ANAL.:) -----------------------------
There are some barriers with radio and physics. The reason for the dish is because of the frequencies used. Too see broadband in your car will be difficult, because:
1. You have to use an omnidirectional antenna, for mobile operation. This means you have to use more wattage and cause more interference to the band.
2. It would generally have to be below 1 Ghz, which would limit bandwidth, and also, a lot of frequencies are already allocated to Cell and Comsumer products in that band. -----------------------------
Hmmm... perhaps there is a way to profit from this... advertising companies make ads so annoying that people will pay the free content carriers not to display those ads. The advertising agency then takes their cut of the "no ads" payment.
We already did this with premium channels on TV. I don't think it will be micropayments, but I do think it will be subscriber based like Premium Cable. Micropayments are too expensive, especially if the company is going to have to pay most of it to the credit card company in processing fees... Of course, some sort of "online currency" fixes that a little, but I still think it is a lot more overhead than subscription. -----------------------------
doh, I forgot to mention, we didn't use the Promise hardware RAID, we used the linux software RAID to get RAID5 and to use the onboard controller. -----------------------------
3ware seems to have a good product, but has anyone been able to get the Promise IDE RAID controllers to work on linux?
put 2 of those and a slew of IBM's 10K rpm drives and you'll have a kickass box...
I beat you to it.
I don't want to give everything away, since I am thinking about submitting a web page featuring it to/., but we built a 390 Gigabyte (usable space) RAID5 server for around $3000, using eight 60 Gig Maxtor IDE drives (5400 RPM), and Red Hat 6.2.
This was using the onboard IDE with a Promise IDE, both UDMA66. The performance is no so great, but it's big and cheap and that was our goal. The performance bottleneck is because we used two devices per IDE channel. It took about a day to fill it up with files over NFS. I think we got something like 2-3 megs per second.
It took a kernel upgrade via RPM, and some other tweaking to get it to work right, but it wasn't too hard. I hear the 2.4 kernel has full support, but we got it running on 2.2, with the patch. -----------------------------
Slashdot Mirror
http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html It is very interesting. Scroll down to the part regarding nano tech if you would like.
-
mmmmm, Running a first person shooter on a 4 inch screen. Now I can play games during classes. :)
-
Well, I would agree with the greens, at least with some of the ideas of factoring externalities like the environment into the cost of goods, but there are two major problems, and they aren't going to go away.
1. Its impossible to put a price on inevitable environmental destruction. i.e: That tree costs $100 if you chop it down on your own land? What about $1000? What? You thought you actually "owned" your own land? Think again. Property rights go out the window.
2. The sole beneficiary will be the government, by necessity. These environmental costs, for the most part, will be passed on to the consumer, and will end up in the government's hand to spend in their infinite wisdom. (Yeah right).
Certain programs will work, such as the current "send-back" programs that toner cart manufacturers have, but as far as having the government factor in all environmental costs, it will result in having the same effect as passing extra taxes that the government will go spend on something like the military. (The largest polluter in the US)
-
Do you have a URL for this type of product? It sounds very interesting.
-----------------------------
suffering radiation burns and maybe even a long and slow painful death Um, what are you talking about.... the radiation from a 2Ghz chip, while in the microwave range, is not going to be enough to be dangerous from a RF heating standpoint. If it were radiating that much RF energy, it would cause arching all over the place, just like when you put a spoon in a microwave.
Besides, you are confusing ionizing radiation with non-ionizing radiation. Either your post was made out of ignorance, or it was a really bad joke.
-----------------------------
Just as a clarification, I mean the escalation of the War on Drugs in the 60s and Nixon era. I know the beginnings, what I am saying is that I believe a driving force behind the escalation of the war on drugs was the ability to pigeonhole drug users into a subculture.
-----------------------------
I do not see how a free market should involve the idea of government-created artificial entities competing against individuals
Any individual can incorporate their own private corporation and have all the benefits given to corporations.
You act as if it is some complicated process to form a corporation. It isn't, you don't even need a lawyer.
So people, quit bitching about corporations. It isn't an "us and them" thing. You are given the same opportunity as everyone else in business.
-----------------------------
Ever hook up the keyboard when it is apart? Typing on those three plastic layers without the rest of the keyboard is fun, if you remember where all the keys are. I actually almost typed a full sentence without the keys at all. It would be cool to brag that your keyboard is less than 1mm thick.
-----------------------------
Unfortunately, instead of embracing the technology, they've been making worse laws restricting our freedoms, and after the mp3 furor, understand if I'm not anxious to see them try to take away all rights to video as well, because of the potential copyright abuse.
...And that is a valid concern. However, it is pointless to complain about the inevitable, there is no way that any legislation designed to address mp3s will not also address any digital media format.
All we can do is hope that the courts will guide us in the right direction. Either they side with the media corps and the government, and decide to declare a "war on copyright", which will be a failure, of course, just like the war on drugs. Of course there is tremendous commercial interest that would benefit, not only those still able to make some money by being the sole distributer of their information, but also the money that will go to prisons to hold all the "pirates", the information criminals.
The other direction is of course a revolutionizing of copyright, the collapse of media as we know it, since there will be no value in a product that can be infinitely reproduced, by anyone, with little cost as far as time or money.
Of course, a hybrid of the two will probably happen, and is the course that I see likely. Bad laws will be passed, they will be so repugnant to the general public that the public will demand a change, such as alcohol prohibition. This will only happen, If a subculture of pirates is not what the public sees.
It doesn't matter if there really is a subculture or not, it only matters if the public views the people who violate the laws regarding copyright as a subculture, or if they view them as the people next door, or even themselves.
So, the best we can hope for is to not come off as a subculture of rebel geeks that want to violate the laws that hold society together. We need to make sure the public realizes that it is people just like them that are violating these laws, people that aren't criminals, people that only act logically in obtaining a product that has no inherent value by the cheapest means available.
You may ask how I know these things, and I can tell you, it is because this is very parallel to the beginnings of the War on Drugs. If the people who used drugs in the 60s weren't subcultured into the title "hippy", we might not see the kinds of senseless wastes of taxpayer money we see putting away pot smokers who havn't committed a real crime.
Just some thoughts, I don't know the future, but I see this as an inevitable choice that we will make as a society, lets hope we make a good one!
-----------------------------
This isn't about a silly battle over mp3. This is society changing paradigm. The old rules don't work anymore, and that is the real issue. It doesn't matter which format the battle is over, the ideas that the public adopts in the end will be the only important thing. Copyright has been with us for hundreds of years, its unsettling when our technology changes the way we think, and that is why we are having this battle.
Think of it as a prelude to the Singularity.
-----------------------------
Well, I didn't mean to start a philosophical discussion, I just meant our collective morality as a society. Values that are widely held, or viewed as widely held. (such as drug use, lots of people have no problem with it, but the anti-drug people have convinced most people of the "right" way to think). Those are the things that make up our collective morality. There is no need to search for a deeper "right or wrongness" in our morality. To do so is pretty impossible.
-----------------------------
Oh great, another supporter of computer/internet welfare.
-----------------------------
Moderators, mod this parent message up, its really true! Drives me crazy when corps are made out to be evil. They have no concept of morality, good or evil, only making money. We try to shape the system around them so that it is economically adventagous for them to act in a way that we consider moral, but oftentimes we create situations that are worse than what we had originally. The market provides an almost perfect system of fairness, it is only when people want special treatment do we break things. Morality is equality of fairness, don't forget that.
-----------------------------
Insist on bringing up free software in the middle of your classes.
GOD I hate those kind of people.
Rant on your spare time, but don't waste my time in class showing off, promoting your agenda, or whatever. Sit there and shut up unless you have a real question and are not trying to upstage the professor.
-----------------------------
Remember, unions are the organizations that gave us 40 hour work weeks, 2 day weekends, health benefits, and vacation time. I wouldn't knock them.
And they are part of the reason that a car was about $2500 in 1980 and is now about $25,000.
And yes, that even outpaces inflation, by leaps and bounds.
-----------------------------
If they have money to buy options it would be great for Sega to sell them the stocks (And thereby getting the revenue from the pirate copies)
Hehe, at the same time diluting their stock with new issues. Issuing stock is never considered revenue in the traditional sense.
-----------------------------
Well, Sorry if I came off as a troll.
Anyway, a price floor will create inefficiencies, iff it is above the current market price for a good. Workers are a market that is not excempt from this rule. If indeed min wage did not have much effect in the UK, it is most likely because not many people were paying below that rate to start with.
My point is that no one will work at a job they are unhappy with, if they can find a better job that pays more. (Pay may not always be money, but even something as intangible as personal satisfaction.) Efficient Market Theory rules in this case, workers are valued at what they are actually worth.
I don't like the government telling me that I can't work for less than $5.15 per hour, even if I want to. Thats BS.
-----------------------------
But Imagine, getting 200,000 consecutive life-time sentences for dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima or something.
Haha, you think laws apply to wars? I guess we should just lock up all the verterans, they are murdurers.
-----------------------------
Weren't minimum wage laws put into effect to protect workers who were recieving unfair pay? It seems to me that this is none of the government's business. The volunteers are getting paid, in their own way, and they don't have a problem with it. Why is this even an issue?
BR It is of course, none of the Governments business. No one is working at any particular place against their will, they can always leave and try to find a better paying job. Minimum wage laws create inefficiencies in any economy, and are only argued for by the selfish, lazy, or the economically ignorant.
-----------------------------
This isn't as much of a copyright (write? :) issue anymore.
:)
I think this falls more closly under trademark law, which is designed to prevent competitors from providing a competing product that is confusingly similar to an existing product.
As always, IANAL.
In fact, I'm real ANAL.
-----------------------------
There are some barriers with radio and physics. The reason for the dish is because of the frequencies used. Too see broadband in your car will be difficult, because:
1. You have to use an omnidirectional antenna, for mobile operation. This means you have to use more wattage and cause more interference to the band. 2. It would generally have to be below 1 Ghz, which would limit bandwidth, and also, a lot of frequencies are already allocated to Cell and Comsumer products in that band.
-----------------------------
Hmmm... perhaps there is a way to profit from this... advertising companies make ads so annoying that people will pay the free content carriers not to display those ads. The advertising agency then takes their cut of the "no ads" payment.
We already did this with premium channels on TV. I don't think it will be micropayments, but I do think it will be subscriber based like Premium Cable. Micropayments are too expensive, especially if the company is going to have to pay most of it to the credit card company in processing fees... Of course, some sort of "online currency" fixes that a little, but I still think it is a lot more overhead than subscription.
-----------------------------
You remember the C64 wedge? hehehe Once you loaded it, you didn't have enough ram to actually DO anything with it.
-----------------------------
doh, I forgot to mention, we didn't use the Promise hardware RAID, we used the linux software RAID to get RAID5 and to use the onboard controller.
-----------------------------
3ware seems to have a good product, but has anyone been able to get the Promise IDE RAID controllers to work on linux? put 2 of those and a slew of IBM's 10K rpm drives and you'll have a kickass box...
/., but we built a 390 Gigabyte (usable space) RAID5 server for around $3000, using eight 60 Gig Maxtor IDE drives (5400 RPM), and Red Hat 6.2.
I beat you to it.
I don't want to give everything away, since I am thinking about submitting a web page featuring it to
This was using the onboard IDE with a Promise IDE, both UDMA66. The performance is no so great, but it's big and cheap and that was our goal. The performance bottleneck is because we used two devices per IDE channel. It took about a day to fill it up with files over NFS. I think we got something like 2-3 megs per second.
It took a kernel upgrade via RPM, and some other tweaking to get it to work right, but it wasn't too hard. I hear the 2.4 kernel has full support, but we got it running on 2.2, with the patch.
-----------------------------