All of these benefits are benefits of ebooks in general. None of the restrictions Amazon applies are needed to deliver any of these benefits. My point isn't that I don't read ebooks, it's that I don't buy them from Amazon.
A Kindle book is a rental that you pay buyer prices for. In many cases, Kindle books are more expensive than paper books, sometimes ridiculously so. Yet, you cannot do any of the things with a Kindle book than you can with a regular book: you cannot lend to as many people as you'd like; you cannot keep a personal backup copy; you cannot resell it; you cannot read it on anything other than a Kindle.
The story for Amazon MP3s is nearly as bad, with one saving grace: they give you a physical copy of the file, so you can back it up and play it on any device you want. The terms of use, however, legally forbid virtually all of the uses you would be entitled to if you bought the physical CD: you can't lend it, or sell it, or donate it.
These are bad deals for the consumer. They are charging us as much as they used to, yet not offering anything like the same terms. Personally, I am willing to purchase an MP3 through Amazon, but I refuse to buy a Kindle book until I have at least a downloadable copy I can play on any device I own.
IANA Mathematician, but all those big hairy equations just look like code to me. Doesn't "solve" just mean "to compute", i.e., you read the symbols, do what they tell you, wash, rinse, repeat? If I gave someone a function that executed some huge, gnarly block of code and then asked them to tell me what it would return, what would that really tell me? That they know how to read? Third graders know how to read.
And what kind of person, exactly, would such a test attract? Puzzle-solvers, people in love with unnecessarily complex, convoluted algorithms. The kind of people who would write unnecessarily complex, convoluted algorithms.
It's the very existence of copyright law that is going to win the day here and restore Happy Birthday to the public domain. The lawsuit rests precisely on proving that the music publisher doesn't in fact hold a valid copyright.
Also, may I point out that copyright law also underlays ALL open source licenses, and it's strength as a legal principle in both theory and practice is what has kept Linux and its kin rolling along, winning every court challenge it faces.
Now if someone could write a language that a non-programmer who understands why he needs code written to describe what needs to be done directly to the computer, that might fundamentally change my job description.
I am not a tax accountant, nor a tax lawyer, but I did have to read and convert into code a lot of tax law.
The tax law is written WITH THE ASSUMPTION that taxpayers will include all income, take all credits, use all deductions, and make all payments that the law requires. This is the only working definition of "fairness". When you're talking taxes, fairness has nothing to do with paying back society, it has to do with following the rules as written. Fairness is what happens when the IRS treats all taxpayers the same, and doesn't apply special rules and handling to some but not others. That's what is fair.
Which is what brings the latest scandal into such sharp focus. It is absolutely unfair for the IRS to target one group of taxpayers for special focus based just on their names. It is absolutely unfair for the IRS to ask these organizations to list the books they read, the content of the prayers they pray, the names and addresses of their major donors, and the content of their blog posts. Those things have nothing to do with following the tax rules fairly.
If anyone has a beef with Apple paying foreign taxes instead of US taxes, any fault would lie with Congress, either for too-lax laws that permit the tax to be legally avoided, for too-generous tax credits that reward major corporations for "investing" in the US, or for too-stupid economic policies that raise the cost of doing business in the US to astronomical heights, making almost any foreign country a cheaper place in which to do business.
Great post. Love this line: "...I really don't want to have to be responsible for all women ever, and I don't want to have to worry that my co-workers are continually holding me accountable or interpreting things I say or do as if I were somehow the same as the other women they had worked with."
My personal policy has always been to assume that everyone is smart, competent, and wants to work together, and then let experience prove otherwise.
If you are in a technical field that requires a lot of time, effort (and sometimes money) to become proficient, then personal attributes like gender are generally meaningless. Is there any doubt that a person who is sufficiently smart and dedicated enough to become a crack developer can do so, regardless of gender?
Developing software is a huge enterprise, spanning hundreds of job categories and every human skill imaginable. No doubt if one were to include the full scope of work, then the balance of men to women would be the same as the working population as a whole; that is certainly the case where I work.
Sure, there are some disciplines where men are more concentrated, but also others where women are more concentrated, and still others where the split is more even. What does that matter? To deliver a great product, everyone must put their heart into pushing the wagon down the road, or it goes nowhere.
I don't find much comfort in your response. You take an example of individual successes in debt financing -- 1/10 of startups (the other 9/10ths fail) -- and leap to a general conclusion that debt is good. Isn't making generalizations about debt ("debt is bad") the very thing you faulted the OP for?
I think what you mean to say is that debt is a gamble that the value of the item/job/service being bought today will be greater in the future than the amount of the principle + interest needed to pay it off.
If you borrow the funds for a war and win control of a country, your gamble would have paid off. If you If you borrow and you
don't win anything tangible, and in fact lose what you formerly possessed -- I'm thinking Britain losing to the Americans in the Revolutionary War -- then your gamble was a massive failure.
And further, with regard to economy-scale borrowers such as sovereign nations, massive borrowing can't help but have a warping effect on everything else. The economy then becomes optimized around gaming the next government-funded bubble I'm thinking of the massive stock bubble forming as we speak -- instead of optimizing around normal, healthy economic activities.
So, in many ways, while it may not be true that debt is "bad" or "good", one thing we can all likely agree on is that massive debt is only good when it wins a country-sized prize.
I gather this is data being published by a government agency. As all agencies are funded by taxpayers, all records -- with exceptions for security and privacy -- should already be open to the public. Creative Commons seems inappropriate here; the correct notice should be "Public Domain", or is Aussie law different in this respect from US law?
From the article, "Collectively, such findings suggest that algorithms and analysis of "big data" can provide a powerful tool to help employers sift through job applications. They might also make things fairer, by taking the personal prejudices of recruiters out of the equation."
In other words, forget about applying individual judgment regarding the fitness of an applicant, let's use cookie-cutter search patterns instead. It'll be fine, you see, because it's done on "big" data, which everyone knows is way better than "little" data.
The idea that this somehow takes "personal prejudice" out of the process is just laughable, of course. Following this program would do just the opposite: set the one-size-fits-all personal prejudices of search pattern writers into concrete, and then amplify it 10,000 times over with the aid of a computer.
I am daily astounded by the tenacity of the idea that using a computer to do something somehow makes it less "personal".
Another histrionic headline about global warming. Here's the actual report, which documents the change in calcification of a variety of marine animals under increasing levels of CO2 dissolved in the water. Nothing in there at all about "giant crabs". Critters with hard shells -- crabs, lobsters, etc. -- will develop thicker shells as you increase the levels of CO2. News at 11.
Some immediate feedback along the lines of, "you have a 50% chance of being ignored because this is a me-too comment", or "you have a 80% chance of modded down because you are expressing an unpopular opinion".
The book of Genesis is a very complex work, with elements of poetry, prose, and history, all co-mingled together, and is a compendium of oral traditions, to boot . It is not an easy book to "pull" quotes from, because everything really needs to be understood in context.
One context is that the book is clearly not meant to be comprehensive. It includes only some details, but leaves most others out. You can clearly see this by the fact that some people mentioned only as individuals in an early part of the book are later mentioned as having a family, or even belonging to an entire nation of people previously unmentioned. It doesn't mean that the Bible is contradictory, it just means it doesn't include all details. Because of this, any hard arguments along the lines of "the sequence of chapter 1 is different from chapter 2" are impossible to resolve. Again, that doesn't mean it is automatically false. There's simply not enough information to reach a hard conclusion one way or another. Does the "day" mentioned in Genesis mean 24 hours, or a thousand 24 hours? The Bible doesn't say. It doesn't say because apparently, it's not important to what it is trying to say.
Another context is that the book makes claims that are literally extra-terrestrial, even extra-universe. The primary claim of Genesis is that God created both the heavens and the earth, and everything in it. This is a claim that science can never prove nor disprove, it is out of the reach of the scientific method altogether. That doesn't make it automatically false. There are entire branches of knowledge that lie outside the realm of the scientific method.
These are just two contextual reasons why having a mock trial to "disprove" Genesis would be doomed to failure. Some of the claims of Genesis are equally outside the realm of the legal method as they are of the scientific method. Is Genesis faulty? You can't prove it or disprove it using those mental tools. You need to reach further, into the area of human judgment. Does it make sense to believe Genesis when it says that God created everything, or not? Now, that is a very good question, but it's not one that science or law can help you answer completely, though they may help inform your decision.
Are you sure you've identified the right thing to worry about? A 100-year time scale is a couple of entire human generations. That's enough time for countries full of people to shift places, easily (in the US, about 75% of the population moved from farms to factories in a single generation.)
Within the next 100 years, robots will probably do ALL human manual labor. You want to talk about drastic changes to the human condition! The end of manual label is not only much more likely to disrupt, it will disrupt in ways that are completely unforeseen. Having to move to better digs -- that we've done before. Not even having a job for most of the world's people, now that's going to be disruptive.
All that you say makes a great deal of sense, but thinking about people as "corporate assets" always makes me cringe. I know that you mean "asset" in its generic sense of "something of value", and certainly people can have value. But in all other cases except people, tangible assets are things -- things to be owned and managed. Thinking of humans as "resources" objectifies people in a way that is not only uncomfortable to them, but what is worse, completely fails to capture the unique way in which a person has value, but never as an object. This matters because if you don't understand and think about something accurately, you can never treat it properly.
What the Administration wants to say is that the war on terror has no geographical boundary. In a war zone, the government is exempt from any due process requirements, because there are no courts operating in the zone, just soldiers.
Now apply this to the entire U.S. See how easy that was? So sure, Fonda can be targeted, if the military chain-of-command says she's a threat.
Mod parent up. In Washington-speak, a "catastrophic" budget cut means a cut to the rate of increase. The rollback of the $44B of planned increased spending in this year's budget is just slightly over 1% of the total. Heck, every wage-earner in the country just had their taxes increase by double that amount with the ending of the payroll tax holiday, so cry me a river. I have zero sympathy.
Excellent analysis. I would add to it that another long-term trend is a greatly expanding federal welfare/entitlement program, which goes hand-in-hand with the flattening in wages. As people have less ability and incentive to put money into savings and the local economy, they are more willing to have someone else take care of their long-term funding needs such as retirement. 54 million people on food stamps is a screaming indictment of the weakness of our position.
There is a way around this, but it isn't easy. 1) Never go into debt for anything that isn't appreciating in value, 2) Invest in your own business before you invest in someone else's, and 3) Keep your powder dry and buy on the downside of the inevitable bubbles.
The idea of mutating the hardware directly sounds akin to the regulation of gene expression in living cells. For example, the "software" of a virus takes control over the "hardware" of a cell's DNA production, and forces it to make copies of itself. That sounds pretty interesting. (And dangerous) In that kind of a system, you'd need an analogue of white blood cells to seek out and "destroy" (re-wire) captured logic gates.
Until they publish the fact database for everyone to see, how can we tell if it's just more editorializing disguised as fact-checking? The example they give on their demo page, "The Recovery Act saved or created millions of jobs and cut taxes for 95 of the American people" is not encouraging. The "saved or created" statistic was widely panned at the time it was first used because these terms were invented by the Administration, they are not standard employment terms that can be verified with empirical data. Later attempts to find the data behind this claim turned up many dubious sources.
Saying one has the "the" truth implies that the facts are undisputed. If we saw the actual fact database, my guess is that something like 10-15% of the statements would fall into that category.
If the signal fluctuations are truly unique and unpredictable over time, maybe a web service that returns a signature on request would be a good alternative to a random number generator which is sometimes not so random.
Slashdot Mirror
All of these benefits are benefits of ebooks in general. None of the restrictions Amazon applies are needed to deliver any of these benefits. My point isn't that I don't read ebooks, it's that I don't buy them from Amazon.
A Kindle book is a rental that you pay buyer prices for. In many cases, Kindle books are more expensive than paper books, sometimes ridiculously so. Yet, you cannot do any of the things with a Kindle book than you can with a regular book: you cannot lend to as many people as you'd like; you cannot keep a personal backup copy; you cannot resell it; you cannot read it on anything other than a Kindle.
The story for Amazon MP3s is nearly as bad, with one saving grace: they give you a physical copy of the file, so you can back it up and play it on any device you want. The terms of use, however, legally forbid virtually all of the uses you would be entitled to if you bought the physical CD: you can't lend it, or sell it, or donate it.
These are bad deals for the consumer. They are charging us as much as they used to, yet not offering anything like the same terms. Personally, I am willing to purchase an MP3 through Amazon, but I refuse to buy a Kindle book until I have at least a downloadable copy I can play on any device I own.
IANA Mathematician, but all those big hairy equations just look like code to me. Doesn't "solve" just mean "to compute", i.e., you read the symbols, do what they tell you, wash, rinse, repeat? If I gave someone a function that executed some huge, gnarly block of code and then asked them to tell me what it would return, what would that really tell me? That they know how to read? Third graders know how to read.
And what kind of person, exactly, would such a test attract? Puzzle-solvers, people in love with unnecessarily complex, convoluted algorithms. The kind of people who would write unnecessarily complex, convoluted algorithms.
No thanks. Give me a Feynman any day.
It's the very existence of copyright law that is going to win the day here and restore Happy Birthday to the public domain. The lawsuit rests precisely on proving that the music publisher doesn't in fact hold a valid copyright.
Also, may I point out that copyright law also underlays ALL open source licenses, and it's strength as a legal principle in both theory and practice is what has kept Linux and its kin rolling along, winning every court challenge it faces.
Isn't that what COBOL claimed to be?
So how was the Washington Post able to get a copy of the Confidential report from the Defense Science Board? Probably leaked by a Chinese hacker ...
I am not a tax accountant, nor a tax lawyer, but I did have to read and convert into code a lot of tax law.
The tax law is written WITH THE ASSUMPTION that taxpayers will include all income, take all credits, use all deductions, and make all payments that the law requires. This is the only working definition of "fairness". When you're talking taxes, fairness has nothing to do with paying back society, it has to do with following the rules as written. Fairness is what happens when the IRS treats all taxpayers the same, and doesn't apply special rules and handling to some but not others. That's what is fair.
Which is what brings the latest scandal into such sharp focus. It is absolutely unfair for the IRS to target one group of taxpayers for special focus based just on their names. It is absolutely unfair for the IRS to ask these organizations to list the books they read, the content of the prayers they pray, the names and addresses of their major donors, and the content of their blog posts. Those things have nothing to do with following the tax rules fairly.
If anyone has a beef with Apple paying foreign taxes instead of US taxes, any fault would lie with Congress, either for too-lax laws that permit the tax to be legally avoided, for too-generous tax credits that reward major corporations for "investing" in the US, or for too-stupid economic policies that raise the cost of doing business in the US to astronomical heights, making almost any foreign country a cheaper place in which to do business.
Great post. Love this line: "...I really don't want to have to be responsible for all women ever, and I don't want to have to worry that my co-workers are continually holding me accountable or interpreting things I say or do as if I were somehow the same as the other women they had worked with."
My personal policy has always been to assume that everyone is smart, competent, and wants to work together, and then let experience prove otherwise.
If you are in a technical field that requires a lot of time, effort (and sometimes money) to become proficient, then personal attributes like gender are generally meaningless. Is there any doubt that a person who is sufficiently smart and dedicated enough to become a crack developer can do so, regardless of gender?
Developing software is a huge enterprise, spanning hundreds of job categories and every human skill imaginable. No doubt if one were to include the full scope of work, then the balance of men to women would be the same as the working population as a whole; that is certainly the case where I work.
Sure, there are some disciplines where men are more concentrated, but also others where women are more concentrated, and still others where the split is more even. What does that matter? To deliver a great product, everyone must put their heart into pushing the wagon down the road, or it goes nowhere.
don't win anything tangible, and in fact lose what you formerly possessed -- I'm thinking Britain losing to the Americans in the Revolutionary War -- then your gamble was a massive failure.
And further, with regard to economy-scale borrowers such as sovereign nations, massive borrowing can't help but have a warping effect on everything else. The economy then becomes optimized around gaming the next government-funded bubble I'm thinking of the massive stock bubble forming as we speak -- instead of optimizing around normal, healthy economic activities.
So, in many ways, while it may not be true that debt is "bad" or "good", one thing we can all likely agree on is that massive debt is only good when it wins a country-sized prize.
I gather this is data being published by a government agency. As all agencies are funded by taxpayers, all records -- with exceptions for security and privacy -- should already be open to the public. Creative Commons seems inappropriate here; the correct notice should be "Public Domain", or is Aussie law different in this respect from US law?
From the article, "Collectively, such findings suggest that algorithms and analysis of "big data" can provide a powerful tool to help employers sift through job applications. They might also make things fairer, by taking the personal prejudices of recruiters out of the equation."
In other words, forget about applying individual judgment regarding the fitness of an applicant, let's use cookie-cutter search patterns instead. It'll be fine, you see, because it's done on "big" data, which everyone knows is way better than "little" data.
The idea that this somehow takes "personal prejudice" out of the process is just laughable, of course. Following this program would do just the opposite: set the one-size-fits-all personal prejudices of search pattern writers into concrete, and then amplify it 10,000 times over with the aid of a computer.
I am daily astounded by the tenacity of the idea that using a computer to do something somehow makes it less "personal".
Another histrionic headline about global warming. Here's the actual report, which documents the change in calcification of a variety of marine animals under increasing levels of CO2 dissolved in the water. Nothing in there at all about "giant crabs". Critters with hard shells -- crabs, lobsters, etc. -- will develop thicker shells as you increase the levels of CO2. News at 11.
Some immediate feedback along the lines of, "you have a 50% chance of being ignored because this is a me-too comment", or "you have a 80% chance of modded down because you are expressing an unpopular opinion".
The book of Genesis is a very complex work, with elements of poetry, prose, and history, all co-mingled together, and is a compendium of oral traditions, to boot . It is not an easy book to "pull" quotes from, because everything really needs to be understood in context.
One context is that the book is clearly not meant to be comprehensive. It includes only some details, but leaves most others out. You can clearly see this by the fact that some people mentioned only as individuals in an early part of the book are later mentioned as having a family, or even belonging to an entire nation of people previously unmentioned. It doesn't mean that the Bible is contradictory, it just means it doesn't include all details. Because of this, any hard arguments along the lines of "the sequence of chapter 1 is different from chapter 2" are impossible to resolve. Again, that doesn't mean it is automatically false. There's simply not enough information to reach a hard conclusion one way or another. Does the "day" mentioned in Genesis mean 24 hours, or a thousand 24 hours? The Bible doesn't say. It doesn't say because apparently, it's not important to what it is trying to say.
Another context is that the book makes claims that are literally extra-terrestrial, even extra-universe. The primary claim of Genesis is that God created both the heavens and the earth, and everything in it. This is a claim that science can never prove nor disprove, it is out of the reach of the scientific method altogether. That doesn't make it automatically false. There are entire branches of knowledge that lie outside the realm of the scientific method.
These are just two contextual reasons why having a mock trial to "disprove" Genesis would be doomed to failure. Some of the claims of Genesis are equally outside the realm of the legal method as they are of the scientific method. Is Genesis faulty? You can't prove it or disprove it using those mental tools. You need to reach further, into the area of human judgment. Does it make sense to believe Genesis when it says that God created everything, or not? Now, that is a very good question, but it's not one that science or law can help you answer completely, though they may help inform your decision.
Are you sure you've identified the right thing to worry about? A 100-year time scale is a couple of entire human generations. That's enough time for countries full of people to shift places, easily (in the US, about 75% of the population moved from farms to factories in a single generation.)
Within the next 100 years, robots will probably do ALL human manual labor. You want to talk about drastic changes to the human condition! The end of manual label is not only much more likely to disrupt, it will disrupt in ways that are completely unforeseen. Having to move to better digs -- that we've done before. Not even having a job for most of the world's people, now that's going to be disruptive.
All that you say makes a great deal of sense, but thinking about people as "corporate assets" always makes me cringe. I know that you mean "asset" in its generic sense of "something of value", and certainly people can have value. But in all other cases except people, tangible assets are things -- things to be owned and managed. Thinking of humans as "resources" objectifies people in a way that is not only uncomfortable to them, but what is worse, completely fails to capture the unique way in which a person has value, but never as an object. This matters because if you don't understand and think about something accurately, you can never treat it properly.
Insurrection is an uprising that incapacitates the local authorities. Getting drone-bombed while sitting in a cafe is not a use case for insurrection.
What the Administration wants to say is that the war on terror has no geographical boundary. In a war zone, the government is exempt from any due process requirements, because there are no courts operating in the zone, just soldiers.
Now apply this to the entire U.S. See how easy that was? So sure, Fonda can be targeted, if the military chain-of-command says she's a threat.
"How could I be overdrawn? I still have checks in my checkbook!"
"How could we still be in a recession? We're still stimulating it!"
Mod parent up. In Washington-speak, a "catastrophic" budget cut means a cut to the rate of increase. The rollback of the $44B of planned increased spending in this year's budget is just slightly over 1% of the total. Heck, every wage-earner in the country just had their taxes increase by double that amount with the ending of the payroll tax holiday, so cry me a river. I have zero sympathy.
Excellent analysis. I would add to it that another long-term trend is a greatly expanding federal welfare/entitlement program, which goes hand-in-hand with the flattening in wages. As people have less ability and incentive to put money into savings and the local economy, they are more willing to have someone else take care of their long-term funding needs such as retirement. 54 million people on food stamps is a screaming indictment of the weakness of our position.
There is a way around this, but it isn't easy. 1) Never go into debt for anything that isn't appreciating in value, 2) Invest in your own business before you invest in someone else's, and 3) Keep your powder dry and buy on the downside of the inevitable bubbles.
The idea of mutating the hardware directly sounds akin to the regulation of gene expression in living cells. For example, the "software" of a virus takes control over the "hardware" of a cell's DNA production, and forces it to make copies of itself. That sounds pretty interesting. (And dangerous) In that kind of a system, you'd need an analogue of white blood cells to seek out and "destroy" (re-wire) captured logic gates.
Until they publish the fact database for everyone to see, how can we tell if it's just more editorializing disguised as fact-checking? The example they give on their demo page, "The Recovery Act saved or created millions of jobs and cut taxes for 95 of the American people" is not encouraging. The "saved or created" statistic was widely panned at the time it was first used because these terms were invented by the Administration, they are not standard employment terms that can be verified with empirical data. Later attempts to find the data behind this claim turned up many dubious sources.
Saying one has the "the" truth implies that the facts are undisputed. If we saw the actual fact database, my guess is that something like 10-15% of the statements would fall into that category.
If the signal fluctuations are truly unique and unpredictable over time, maybe a web service that returns a signature on request would be a good alternative to a random number generator which is sometimes not so random.