This suddenly brought to mind an old movie called Moon Zero Two, about a couple guys based on the moon, who fly around in a refurbished Apollo lunar lander to retrieve dead satellites for scrap. The story includes bad guys trying to illegally crash a small asteroid on the moon to salvage the minerals. Pretty cool movie, 1969 special effects and all.
About 6 or 7 years ago I was working on a high-pressure project involving an audit of a school district. The district had (unintentionally) been reporting inaccurate HR information to the state, and as a result had been receiving too much money for a number of years. There was a possibility that the state would withhold the excess all at once, and everybody was waiting in fear to find out how much it was going to be.
The person who knew the most about the way things were reported and were supposed to be reported was the HR director, who was about to retire after years of service. I think it meant a lot to him personally to get things straightened out so he could leave with a clean slate. He had a reputation for being short tempered, and was somewhat feared by his subordinates and generally disliked by the IT staff.
Over the course of working with him I began to appreciate his intelligence and came to think of his abruptness as sort of a geeky trait. Lots of programmers I've worked with have had far less social skills. He just took some getting used to. He had an math and accounting background and was a very logical thinker. As we unravelled the inner workings of the system together I actually started to enjoy working with him and even felt a sense of camaraderie.
That was when I made my big mistake. We were in the final stages of polishing up this massive algorithm that was embodied in a series of SQL procedures and temporary tables. I was tweaking code and producing reports, he was looking them over and spotting small problems, I was tweaking more. Things were almost right but not quite.
All during this time I had also been working on improving the overall processing. It was one of those old style jobs that had been set up to be run on a certain day of the year, or at least within a date range. Data entry was always frozen for a few days while they ran it. It was always a big scramble for the HR clerks to get the information entered on time. Data that was reported late or for whatever reason showed up after the annual run had to be accounted for separately in a different way.
The process itself had to be tweaked every year because the state's rules changed. They would run the job, fix problems and rerun it until the results looked right. It was a mess. My big improvement was to add date-checking to the SQL, so the job would produce a snapshot as of any specified date. Nothing would have to be frozen. If data was entered late or had to be corrected, the process could simply be rerun at any time. Plus, my version ran in about 10 minutes, compared to 2 or 3 hours for the old version. I was going to be a hero.
Then I made my big mistake. I forgot that this HR manager was a non-technical person. He was so sharp and so good at mental shorthand, I started treating him like a fellow programmer or analyst. We were two guys staying at work late, hacking this problem together. At some point I stopped checking the reports before showing them to him, and went into "Okay, try it now" mode.
BIG. FREAKIN. MISTAKE.
I made a trivial coding error. Some of the results we had already gone over were suddenly wrong. He looked at the report before I did, spotted the problem and went COMPLETELY ballistic. What the hell was I doing, he demanded, changing something that was already working? He had been under the impression that as we got each step of the process working, the results were locked in someway. This guy had an accounting background, and accountants tend to think like that. They "post" things.
Suddenly his confidence in me was completely shattered. He refused to take my word for anything, or to believe that the system was going to behave consistently from one run to the next as long as I was involved. A concept that to me was obvious -- that once a process is stable it will produce the same results every time, given the same data -- was just not part of his world or his way of thinking. With one typo I had ruined our professional relationship and become, in h
Record companies are the real pirates, having leeched off musicians for the past century. When you trade music on p2p systems it costs musicians nothing, and gives them the same valuable exposure they would get if you bought the CD, or just listened to the radio. Record companies have had a free ride for a long time. Now it's our turn.
Obviously you didn't bother to read the article. He talks in detail about designing for nuclear engines with an isp of more than 3000, compared to 250-450 for a space shuttle engine.
Maybe something should be done, but that doesn't make any one thing right. I don't think withholding grades unless students sign over rights to a third party is a suitable answer, especially since the students already paid to be graded. It's like a movie theater demanding that you write a paper and sign the rights over to them or they won't let you see the last 10 minutes of the film.
Keep in mind that the litigation campaign and stopping P2P activity are not ends in themselves. The real measure of success of anything record companies do is sales figures. Money is, after all, the only language they understand.
I couldn't find any year-end figures, but here's a look at the RIAA's own sales figures (pdf) for the first half of 2003. Notice that CD sales were down 14% from the previous year. Apparently the wave of lawsuits launched in April had no immediate effect on CD sales. However, look at the sales of CD singles. Up 162% ! ! ! Unless I'm crazy, the fact that music sales in album form are down and in singles form are up might indicate that people want to decide which songs they pay for, instead of being forced to buy a few good songs along with a lot of filler.
People have been trying to tell the record industry this for quite a while. With hard evidence in the form of actual money, do you think they still have no clue why their profits in recent years have declined? It's because of their own outdated marketing rather than "piracy."
According to this article in the Register music sales overall for 2003 fell only 0.8% below 2002. They credit a big rise in music videos on DVD, but the RIAA will no doubt be singing the praises of their legal crusade. Reminds me of Caligula ordering his army to fight back the incoming tide.
IANAL, but to me this looks like a clear breach of contract. When students pay to take a class, the deal includes an evaluation by the teacher. Otherwise they are merely auditing the class, which they can usually do for free. Simply marking the work with a zero is not an evaluation, at least not by any competent definition. Students who have paid to take a class shouldn't additionally be required to forfeit something to an outside vendor in order to receive a grade.
Come to think of it, the anti-plagiarism service seems very parallel to what record companies have been doing for a century. Musicians don't don't make money from record sales because of the expenses that are routinely deducted from their royalties, leaving zero. They get a chance to achieve fame while the record company makes money from their work. Students get a chance to achieve a good grade, and the anti-plagiarism service makes money by adding the students' work to their database without having to pay for it.
Having grown up in the 50s and 60s, I have great love for the early days of the American space program. I still have a large collection of newspaper clippings from the Gemini and Apollo days, and a 3-inch reel-to-reel tape of the first moon landing, recorded off the tv speaker as I watched it live, holding my breath along with the mission controllers. However, a Saturn V rocket was built to go out in a blaze of glory, not to endure decades of weather. It's an impressive artifact, as anyone who has stood beside it will agree, but I don't think restoring a badly deteriorated example is worth millions of dollars. The only way to preserve it effectively would be to house it in a special building to prevent further weathering. And it's so damn big! I would rather see the original construction specs and a set of detailed photos preserved, in case some future generations want to make a life-size replica using more advanced materials.
If this sort of thing had happened 150 years ago, shots would have been fired. The fact that our system allows and even encourages this sort of utter stupidity is a very bad sign. What can and can't be done legally are getting farther and farther from making sense. I hope some inspired leadership appears soon (not bloody likely) to push for radical changes in the way the system works. Otherwise I fear some really ugly, drastic and unpredictable action on the part of some (understandably) frustrated group, which will probably only make things worse.
About the NASA budget. According to the figures in these articles, NASA's budget is currently 86 billion (not 17). The 12 billion proposed for the Mars program will consist of a 1 billion increase in NASA's budget and 11 billion that will be cut from existing NASA programs. So it's not a huge increase, in fact it's hardly an increase at all. Our social problems are not the result of too much money being spent on NASA. There are many less worthwhile federal programs that could be cut drastically to fund social programs.
Artists who created the 1.5 million song archive have already expressed some disquiet about royalties. TruSonic has a very limited pool for the 250,000 artists, based on the number of plays, but has said it may re-evaluate this.
How do artists benefit? The main benefit for artists whose music is used in this program is increased public exposure to listeners who might not otherwise hear that music. An additional benefit is the royalties earned should your song be included in one or more playlists.
It's been repeated many times here and elsewhere, musicians do not make money from royalties, they make money from gigs. Because of the way their contracts are written, all expenses of production, distribution, advertising etc are deducted, usually leaving Zero. The only benefit of signing a recording contract is exposure (fame). TruSonic acknowledges this (sort of) in their FAQ.
A lot of Internet activity involves interaction (email, IM, message boards, etc) with other people. Even if it's not face to face communication, or even realtime, any kind of outgoing behavior is probably more socializing than passively watching tv.
How would you prevent the UF4 mixing with the buffer gas, especially if the buffer gas is being swirled around?
The analogy of cooking a raw egg in a vortex of swirling water might be misleading. The egg is cohesive. But what would keep the UF4 gas similarly contained? I would think the buffer gas would have to be denser than UF4, or the UF4 would move outward because of centrifugal force. What buffer gas would work?
In any case I would expect the UF4 to contaminate the buffer gas to some extent, simply because gases are not solid. Is the contaminated buffer gas the waste that he talks about ejecting into the sun? Unless I missed it, he doesn't mention carrying a stock of buffer gas.
As exciting as this idea is, the more I think about it the more magical this buffer gas seems to be.
This truly sounds like a great idea. The one thing that puzzles me is the passing reference to the buffer gas that keeps the 25000-degree UF4 from melting the silica "light bulb". This gas would have to be extremely transparent to ultraviolet. I wonder which gas would be suitable. Also, would the energy from the hot UF4 be all ultraviolet, or wouldn't it also radiate a hell of a lot of plain old heat, which the buffer gas would have to dissipate somehow? Hopefully these are not fatal flaws glossed over.
Or Joe Musician, or Joe Retailer, or Joe from the Other Label, or Joe the janitor, or Joe the coke dealer, or Joe the Ferrari mechanic, or just about anybody from whom they can manage to get something for nothing and pretend it's their god-given right to do it.
This would officially make record companies the world's largest distributors of "pirated" tracks. Boy would I love to see an enforcement team from the Recording Artists Coalition sweep down on RIAA headquarters wearing police-style jackets and baseball caps with "RAC" emplazoned on them, demanding that all member record companies cough up years of unpaid royalties for these pirated tracks.
The article mentions in passing that the monks achieve their great 90% discount prices through "canny negotiations" with manufacturers, but distinctly does not say which manufacturers. Could they be the original mfrs? Are HP and Lexmark welcoming these guys as competitors and cutting them a huge break? Or (more likely) are we talking about the same overseas child-employing sweatshops that supply all the other incredibly cheap goods we're used to? I'd kind of like to know.
Or any number of other tv shows featuring unrealistic and impractical lighting in pastel colors that real people would almost never want in their home/workplace. Bleah.
It might be kind of nice if musicians mde money on copies for a change. On the other hand, it really isn't necessary for ANYBODY to make money from copies of music. Enforcing any system of copy control opens the same cans of worms no matter who gets the money. We don't need this headache in our lives any more, and it just isn't necessary. Before and during the era of recorded music, musicians have always made money by playing gigs, not from the sales of the recordings. Only record companies make money from record sales, because of the way recording contracts are set up. Musicians lose nothing by the free flow of copies, and they gain fame and better gigs.
Let musicians continue to make money by actually playing, the way it's always been; they lose nothing. Let the public gain something -- the power to distribute copies freely and determine for themselves which musicians become popular, with no middleman raking off a huge profit. Let the concept of pay-for-copies and all the enforcement headaches and secondary effects on privacy and civil rights fade away into history. Please, please, please do not support this or any other pay-for-copy scheme.
80% of the federal wiretaps are to enforce drug laws? Sounds like reducing or eliminating the relevant drug laws would drastically reduce the need for wiretaps, helping to alleviate many of the other issues surrounding the liberal use of government eavesdropping.
It isn't always just perpetrators who cause the problems and impose costs on society. It's also the mere fact that our lawmakers have decided to make particular activities illegal. Not only do we spend billions enforcing a variety of behavior-restricting rules, we end up creating additional secondary rules that further restrict the rights of everybody and increase the power of the government. The copyright system is another good example. Reducing copyright protection would reduce the need to monitor and control every little electronic activity anybody performs, and to trend toward criminalizing any technology that might threaten the business activities of copyright holders.
If you suggest eliminating drug or copyright laws, people will immediately envision the streets littered with semi-conscious heroin addicts, or a world without music, literature, film or techical innovation because nobody has any incentive to create anything. Probably neither extreme would actually happen. On the other hand, a picture of a world where average people routinely curtail what they say and do for fear that they might look suspicious to the ubiquitous surveillance system is much more probable. There's already an empirical basis for it.
We should examine the root laws that spawn these secondary restrictions and determine which ones are really worth enforcing, not just in terms of the financial cost but in terms of the freedoms lost.
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The cell phone was also voted most likely to get shoved up someone's ass in arguments following minor traffic accidents.
Who would have imagined?
This suddenly brought to mind an old movie called Moon Zero Two , about a couple guys based on the moon, who fly around in a refurbished Apollo lunar lander to retrieve dead satellites for scrap. The story includes bad guys trying to illegally crash a small asteroid on the moon to salvage the minerals. Pretty cool movie, 1969 special effects and all.
About 6 or 7 years ago I was working on a high-pressure project involving an audit of a school district. The district had (unintentionally) been reporting inaccurate HR information to the state, and as a result had been receiving too much money for a number of years. There was a possibility that the state would withhold the excess all at once, and everybody was waiting in fear to find out how much it was going to be.
The person who knew the most about the way things were reported and were supposed to be reported was the HR director, who was about to retire after years of service. I think it meant a lot to him personally to get things straightened out so he could leave with a clean slate. He had a reputation for being short tempered, and was somewhat feared by his subordinates and generally disliked by the IT staff.
Over the course of working with him I began to appreciate his intelligence and came to think of his abruptness as sort of a geeky trait. Lots of programmers I've worked with have had far less social skills. He just took some getting used to. He had an math and accounting background and was a very logical thinker. As we unravelled the inner workings of the system together I actually started to enjoy working with him and even felt a sense of camaraderie.
That was when I made my big mistake. We were in the final stages of polishing up this massive algorithm that was embodied in a series of SQL procedures and temporary tables. I was tweaking code and producing reports, he was looking them over and spotting small problems, I was tweaking more. Things were almost right but not quite.
All during this time I had also been working on improving the overall processing. It was one of those old style jobs that had been set up to be run on a certain day of the year, or at least within a date range. Data entry was always frozen for a few days while they ran it. It was always a big scramble for the HR clerks to get the information entered on time. Data that was reported late or for whatever reason showed up after the annual run had to be accounted for separately in a different way.
The process itself had to be tweaked every year because the state's rules changed. They would run the job, fix problems and rerun it until the results looked right. It was a mess. My big improvement was to add date-checking to the SQL, so the job would produce a snapshot as of any specified date. Nothing would have to be frozen. If data was entered late or had to be corrected, the process could simply be rerun at any time. Plus, my version ran in about 10 minutes, compared to 2 or 3 hours for the old version. I was going to be a hero.
Then I made my big mistake. I forgot that this HR manager was a non-technical person. He was so sharp and so good at mental shorthand, I started treating him like a fellow programmer or analyst. We were two guys staying at work late, hacking this problem together. At some point I stopped checking the reports before showing them to him, and went into "Okay, try it now" mode.
BIG.
FREAKIN.
MISTAKE.
I made a trivial coding error. Some of the results we had already gone over were suddenly wrong. He looked at the report before I did, spotted the problem and went COMPLETELY ballistic. What the hell was I doing, he demanded, changing something that was already working? He had been under the impression that as we got each step of the process working, the results were locked in someway. This guy had an accounting background, and accountants tend to think like that. They "post" things.
Suddenly his confidence in me was completely shattered. He refused to take my word for anything, or to believe that the system was going to behave consistently from one run to the next as long as I was involved. A concept that to me was obvious -- that once a process is stable it will produce the same results every time, given the same data -- was just not part of his world or his way of thinking. With one typo I had ruined our professional relationship and become, in h
Record companies are the real pirates, having leeched off musicians for the past century. When you trade music on p2p systems it costs musicians nothing, and gives them the same valuable exposure they would get if you bought the CD, or just listened to the radio. Record companies have had a free ride for a long time. Now it's our turn.
Obviously you didn't bother to read the article. He talks in detail about designing for nuclear engines with an isp of more than 3000, compared to 250-450 for a space shuttle engine.
Maybe something should be done, but that doesn't make any one thing right. I don't think withholding grades unless students sign over rights to a third party is a suitable answer, especially since the students already paid to be graded. It's like a movie theater demanding that you write a paper and sign the rights over to them or they won't let you see the last 10 minutes of the film.
Keep in mind that the litigation campaign and stopping P2P activity are not ends in themselves. The real measure of success of anything record companies do is sales figures. Money is, after all, the only language they understand.
I couldn't find any year-end figures, but here's a look at the RIAA's own sales figures (pdf) for the first half of 2003. Notice that CD sales were down 14% from the previous year. Apparently the wave of lawsuits launched in April had no immediate effect on CD sales. However, look at the sales of CD singles. Up 162% ! ! !
Unless I'm crazy, the fact that music sales in album form are down and in singles form are up might indicate that people want to decide which songs they pay for, instead of being forced to buy a few good songs along with a lot of filler.
People have been trying to tell the record industry this for quite a while. With hard evidence in the form of actual money, do you think they still have no clue why their profits in recent years have declined? It's because of their own outdated marketing rather than "piracy."
According to this article in the Register music sales overall for 2003 fell only 0.8% below 2002. They credit a big rise in music videos on DVD, but the RIAA will no doubt be singing the praises of their legal crusade. Reminds me of Caligula ordering his army to fight back the incoming tide.
IANAL, but to me this looks like a clear breach of contract. When students pay to take a class, the deal includes an evaluation by the teacher. Otherwise they are merely auditing the class, which they can usually do for free. Simply marking the work with a zero is not an evaluation, at least not by any competent definition. Students who have paid to take a class shouldn't additionally be required to forfeit something to an outside vendor in order to receive a grade.
Come to think of it, the anti-plagiarism service seems very parallel to what record companies have been doing for a century. Musicians don't don't make money from record sales because of the expenses that are routinely deducted from their royalties, leaving zero. They get a chance to achieve fame while the record company makes money from their work. Students get a chance to achieve a good grade, and the anti-plagiarism service makes money by adding the students' work to their database without having to pay for it.
Having grown up in the 50s and 60s, I have great love for the early days of the American space program. I still have a large collection of newspaper clippings from the Gemini and Apollo days, and a 3-inch reel-to-reel tape of the first moon landing, recorded off the tv speaker as I watched it live, holding my breath along with the mission controllers.
However, a Saturn V rocket was built to go out in a blaze of glory, not to endure decades of weather. It's an impressive artifact, as anyone who has stood beside it will agree, but I don't think restoring a badly deteriorated example is worth millions of dollars. The only way to preserve it effectively would be to house it in a special building to prevent further weathering. And it's so damn big! I would rather see the original construction specs and a set of detailed photos preserved, in case some future generations want to make a life-size replica using more advanced materials.
If this sort of thing had happened 150 years ago, shots would have been fired. The fact that our system allows and even encourages this sort of utter stupidity is a very bad sign. What can and can't be done legally are getting farther and farther from making sense. I hope some inspired leadership appears soon (not bloody likely) to push for radical changes in the way the system works. Otherwise I fear some really ugly, drastic and unpredictable action on the part of some (understandably) frustrated group, which will probably only make things worse.
About the NASA budget. According to the figures in these articles, NASA's budget is currently 86 billion (not 17). The 12 billion proposed for the Mars program will consist of a 1 billion increase in NASA's budget and 11 billion that will be cut from existing NASA programs. So it's not a huge increase, in fact it's hardly an increase at all. Our social problems are not the result of too much money being spent on NASA. There are many less worthwhile federal programs that could be cut drastically to fund social programs.
...sell them as piped music to hotels, restaurants and other businesses, passing on royalties along the way.
Passing on royalties? All the The Register article says about royalties is:
Artists who created the 1.5 million song archive have already expressed some disquiet about royalties. TruSonic has a very limited pool for the 250,000 artists, based on the number of plays, but has said it may re-evaluate this.
The TruSonic FAQ says:
How do artists benefit?
The main benefit for artists whose music is used in this program is increased public exposure to listeners who might not otherwise hear that music. An additional benefit is the royalties earned should your song be included in one or more playlists.
It's been repeated many times here and elsewhere, musicians do not make money from royalties, they make money from gigs. Because of the way their contracts are written, all expenses of production, distribution, advertising etc are deducted, usually leaving Zero. The only benefit of signing a recording contract is exposure (fame). TruSonic acknowledges this (sort of) in their FAQ.
A lot of Internet activity involves interaction (email, IM, message boards, etc) with other people. Even if it's not face to face communication, or even realtime, any kind of outgoing behavior is probably more socializing than passively watching tv.
Plus, SCO uses a reeeeeeally teensy font.
How would you prevent the UF4 mixing with the buffer gas, especially if the buffer gas is being swirled around?
The analogy of cooking a raw egg in a vortex of swirling water might be misleading. The egg is cohesive. But what would keep the UF4 gas similarly contained? I would think the buffer gas would have to be denser than UF4, or the UF4 would move outward because of centrifugal force. What buffer gas would work?
In any case I would expect the UF4 to contaminate the buffer gas to some extent, simply because gases are not solid. Is the contaminated buffer gas the waste that he talks about ejecting into the sun? Unless I missed it, he doesn't mention carrying a stock of buffer gas.
As exciting as this idea is, the more I think about it the more magical this buffer gas seems to be.
This truly sounds like a great idea. The one thing that puzzles me is the passing reference to the buffer gas that keeps the 25000-degree UF4 from melting the silica "light bulb". This gas would have to be extremely transparent to ultraviolet. I wonder which gas would be suitable. Also, would the energy from the hot UF4 be all ultraviolet, or wouldn't it also radiate a hell of a lot of plain old heat, which the buffer gas would have to dissipate somehow? Hopefully these are not fatal flaws glossed over.
Or Joe Musician, or Joe Retailer, or Joe from the Other Label, or Joe the janitor, or Joe the coke dealer, or Joe the Ferrari mechanic, or just about anybody from whom they can manage to get something for nothing and pretend it's their god-given right to do it.
This would officially make record companies the world's largest distributors of "pirated" tracks. Boy would I love to see an enforcement team from the Recording Artists Coalition sweep down on RIAA headquarters wearing police-style jackets and baseball caps with "RAC" emplazoned on them, demanding that all member record companies cough up years of unpaid royalties for these pirated tracks.
The article mentions in passing that the monks achieve their great 90% discount prices through "canny negotiations" with manufacturers, but distinctly does not say which manufacturers. Could they be the original mfrs? Are HP and Lexmark welcoming these guys as competitors and cutting them a huge break? Or (more likely) are we talking about the same overseas child-employing sweatshops that supply all the other incredibly cheap goods we're used to? I'd kind of like to know.
Wow, this guy's site is great. He even blows the lid off the hidden Star Wars/Mars connection!
You would have to look carefully to find traces of water left by comets. Finding evidence of bodies of water is a whole different concept.
IBM and Intel lawyers win $10 Million.
Or any number of other tv shows featuring unrealistic and impractical lighting in pastel colors that real people would almost never want in their home/workplace. Bleah.
It might be kind of nice if musicians mde money on copies for a change. On the other hand, it really isn't necessary for ANYBODY to make money from copies of music. Enforcing any system of copy control opens the same cans of worms no matter who gets the money. We don't need this headache in our lives any more, and it just isn't necessary. Before and during the era of recorded music, musicians have always made money by playing gigs, not from the sales of the recordings. Only record companies make money from record sales, because of the way recording contracts are set up. Musicians lose nothing by the free flow of copies, and they gain fame and better gigs.
Let musicians continue to make money by actually playing, the way it's always been; they lose nothing. Let the public gain something -- the power to distribute copies freely and determine for themselves which musicians become popular, with no middleman raking off a huge profit. Let the concept of pay-for-copies and all the enforcement headaches and secondary effects on privacy and civil rights fade away into history. Please, please, please do not support this or any other pay-for-copy scheme.
80% of the federal wiretaps are to enforce drug laws? Sounds like reducing or eliminating the relevant drug laws would drastically reduce the need for wiretaps, helping to alleviate many of the other issues surrounding the liberal use of government eavesdropping.
It isn't always just perpetrators who cause the problems and impose costs on society. It's also the mere fact that our lawmakers have decided to make particular activities illegal. Not only do we spend billions enforcing a variety of behavior-restricting rules, we end up creating additional secondary rules that further restrict the rights of everybody and increase the power of the government. The copyright system is another good example. Reducing copyright protection would reduce the need to monitor and control every little electronic activity anybody performs, and to trend toward criminalizing any technology that might threaten the business activities of copyright holders.
If you suggest eliminating drug or copyright laws, people will immediately envision the streets littered with semi-conscious heroin addicts, or a world without music, literature, film or techical innovation because nobody has any incentive to create anything. Probably neither extreme would actually happen. On the other hand, a picture of a world where average people routinely curtail what they say and do for fear that they might look suspicious to the ubiquitous surveillance system is much more probable. There's already an empirical basis for it.
We should examine the root laws that spawn these secondary restrictions and determine which ones are really worth enforcing, not just in terms of the financial cost but in terms of the freedoms lost.