Actually, Apple is the largest retailer of music. Also, they are doing their best to become the most important distributor for TV, Movies and eBooks. Apple sells about $5B per year in thru the iTunes Music/Apps/Movies/TV/Books Store and those sales are growing at about 25% per year. While that's only about 7% of their sales right now, it's growing steadily and likely to be about as profitable as the hardware businesses. It's also likely to equal or outstrip Mac sales within a year or two.
No, Apple is not primarily a distributor, but they are in line to become the biggest distributor. That scares the distribution competition because Apple can afford push down distribution margins to promote high-margin device sales. So, you're right they don't need the money from iTMS but iPhones and iPods and iPads aren't nearly as attractive without iTMS--that's part of what you buy when you buy the device.
And that's the difference. Intel doesn't NEED McAfee, whereas Apple can't really operate without iTMS. Intel might find a way to differentiate future processors by adding industrial-strength security to their chips by integrating AV and management suite facilities with specialized hardware, but Intel has always benefited from being the premiere supplier of open-platform technologies and they are forced to be that way both by the market and by regulation. If they change that significantly to increase margins, they may become vulnerable to attack on both fronts. To me, $8Bn is just too much for McAfee. I think they could have got the same capabilities for a lot less money. McAfee sells low-margin, crappy AV software. They earn a few hundred million a year. Intel earns 4x the return on investment in its existing business (relative to McAfee). Also, I believe the embarrassing products McAfee sells will dilute Intel's brand. In the words of Warren Buffett, as an INTC shareholder "I feel poorer".
I used to spend more time on digg than slashdot. Then I decided that I needed to stop wasting so much time on pointless web crap. Digg is a mob. The comments are a sewer and the stories are all too often unsubstantiated sensationalism or half-baked ad-grab sites. It stopped being useful or even interesting a while ago.
How about when the camera starts to do face recognition (like most point-and-shoot digicams do today) and also starts to recognize bar codes and the square patterns like the ones that the Android app store uses? How about voice recognition and commands built into the machine? The smarter you make these things, the more complex they become. At a certain level of complexity, you lose assurance that the security works properly. It takes exponentially more time to vet the system as the complexity increases.
iPhone owners pick themselves. They put up with the spotty AT&T network because
1) iPhones are pretty great. Maybe not *the* best, but there's no denying that they're very nice and while not hassle-free, it's simple to get a lot out of them. Those who want to do things Apple doesn't approve don't have a terribly hard time hacking the device. 2) iPhone users don't buy it primarily for the phone part. They use it mainly for the data part. AT&T does a much better job at keeping the data flowing than at keeping the calls from being dropped. Granted, that data service degrades more gracefully than voice, but you've got to admit that AT&T is, with the exception of a few very-hard-to-service markets, doing a decent job at delivering the data. I can't make calls at home, but when my wifi is out, i still can surf the web at reasonable speeds. 3) Yes, there is some illusion going on given the fact that most people can use their phones most of the time in range of WiFi and so crappy cellular service gets somewhat masked by the fact that it isn't as visible as often.
I recently bought an used 3G[S]. I hooked it up on the iPad data plan. No voice service, only data. Yes it takes a bit of special procedure to make this work and VOIP is not as good (Apple doesn't make it easy to answer VOIP calls and drop-outs are more common) as regular GSM, but it works and the price is right. Now that I've seen how nice it is to use these stupid things, I'm really getting a hankering for buying iPhone 4 and either paying the early termination fee or keeping the regular AT&T service. $80/mo. adds up fast, but part of me thinks it might be worth it. Yes, I hate some of the restrictions on the phone ($20 extra for tethering is asinine, as is blocking of certain apps including Google Voice) I thought about jailbreaking and unlocking to use the phone with T-Mobile. It's not worth it. Unlimited everything for $40/mo sounds nice but who wants slow data? (T-Mobile's 3G freq. aren't supported by iPhone hardware).
The fact is that Android just doesn't quite measure up (for me), yet. For some (perhaps most) people, it's fine. I admit that there's some big flaws in iOS that need fixing (notifications are badly done, backgrounding is a joke). But, overall the phone usually just works the way it should and the app store does serve to keep up the quality of apps. I can't agree with everything they've done, but there are many things they did right and no one else has yet matched them for what I want. To be honest, I wouldn't have bought an iPhone if I had to pay the full price for service, but using it every day for the past month has made me a believer (for now). If the battery life on the next gen EVO gets better, perhaps I'll try that.
I cannot stand staring at an image and having to decypher the difference between what the screen is attempting to produce and the reflection of the room around me. What a total waste. Vivid colors?!? Give me a break. I want to read what the text says, not see my face amid a corona of rainbows. It drives me crazy to use a glossy screen.
It's mildly interesting that they've solved this problem. But, the most important thing question is: can they make this thing where the need it or near where they need it? All these whiz-bang gizmos solve one technical problem. They don't solve the 1000 logistical and economic problems that remain getting the gizmos to where they're ostensibly useful.
Public corporations are obligated to file performance reports quarterly. The numbers in these reports are a large determinant of short-term stock prices. Therefore, management is usually given the incentive to make short-term gains. This inevitably leads to conflicts between long-term and short-term strategies. It limits investment that has long-term payoff and especially limits long-term research which may not ever pay off. But none of this even speaks to the fact that there is no substantial incentive for the majority of economic activity in the U.S. to be conducted with regard to the interests of the society. Corporations benefit from a good public image and from good branding, but there's a reason that we equate advertising with lying and theres a reason that our government and media are corrupt beyond measure. Companies pay to keep their images clean while doing whatever it takes to keep the bottom line growing.
It can't be legislated away. Part if it is simple human nature. But I think that if you establish the right rules and if you prove that there are better ways to conduct business, we will find the reforms or at least direct the revolutions that are necessary to build much more healthy, sustainable economies and societies. If you don't think that both spheres are utterly broken today, I suggest that you are ignorant or have a very dim view of what possibilities we are leaving unrealized in pursuit of the current brutalism.
It's absolutely correct that corporations are legally obligated to attempt to maximize the return for shareholders. However, abiding by the law isn't the same as being a good citizen. The legal obligation to maximize returns in conjunction with the demi-personhood of the corporation has led to the increasingly common comparison of corporations with sociopaths. They exist only to satisfy their own needs and desires and are not designed or operated to benefit society. Management can take the enlightened, modern, view that they can do well by doing good, but there's no requirement for this and competition does tend to breed ruthlessness over generosity.
The fact that there are no enormously rich and successful open-source software companies speaks to the fact that maximizing concentration of capital is an activity that is done more efficiently by predation than by symbiosis. Profit in itself is not an evil. We require profit to survive because it is both the measurement of how well we use our resources and how much wealth we are creating. Wealth is vitally important for every kind of progress.
Perhaps it's time to think very deeply about how we want to organize our economic activity so that the rewards of our hard work are more diffused and mutually beneficial than the model that we have created which encourages vice in pursuit of profit. The question shouldn't be, "Why are there no billion-dollar open-source companies?" but rather, "Are business models based on generosity more or less useful for creating and distributing wealth than those which place value only on scarcity?".
To that end, I have a proposal: develop a set of metrics that measure the wealth generated by open-source activities. I don't think we should be focusing on the dollar-equivalent of the developer hours. We need to look at the contribution to the standard-of-living. That is, after all, the real purpose of economic activity. Once we start measuring these things in a way that is not biased toward our current system, but gives us a good idea of how useful these various activities and organization really are, we can start thinking about how we're really going to increase our wealth instead of just how we're going to make profits.
And what is the problem with that? Google's internal OS is not something that a lot of outsiders are envious of. Google has open-sourced their internal protocols, their page and app-building tools, their filesystem, their database. The list goes on. They contribute to the Kernel and they most likely have some level of integration between their custom kernel and their core algorithm. It may be located in a Kernel module. Whatever their reason for not giving you a copy of their server OS on a platter, I think you have very little moral ground to stand on, demanding that they share anything more. Frankly, they're not required to share anything they've made for themselves. Too bad that companies like Apple, Cisco and Microsoft aren't as generous as Google.
Cost to drill well and get oil to coastal refinery: $1 Bn Daily cost to run the well and pump oil to refinery: $150 K Average value of oil over repayment period: $85 / barrel Prevailing Interest Rate (opportunity cost of using the cash to drill and run the well): 10% -- this roughly BP's return-on-assets for 2010 Years to repay: 3
We can figure that the well would have to produce around 16K to 17K barrels per day to pay for itself at the end of 3 years of operation. These numbers are still rough, but it gets us in the ballpark. 5 years takes you to 13K barrels per day. 2 years is about 20K barrels per day.
If you assume that the well could expel 2x to 3x per day than a controlled well, you get a range of 26k to 60k barrels per day being spewed into the gulf. That's 1.8M US gallons of oil per day.
Someone else needs to take over from here. How many gallons of water does a gallon of oil pollute in this scenario? 100 gallons of water plluted per gallon of oil? That means 180M gallons of water polluted per day. Or 18B gallons of water polluted by the end of 100 days when we expect the oil to stop flowing due to the new well being drilled.
If that is polluting the water to a depth of 100 feet and there are 7.5 gallons of water per cubic foot, you get almost 1 square mile of water polluted to a depth of 100 feet. But we already know that the slick is over 10,000 square miles on the surface. Either the depth of the pollution is far less than 100 feet or the gallons of oil being spewed is far greater than 10's of 1000's of gallons per day and is well into the 100's of thousands of gallons per day range.
In any case TFA's reasoning about the tar suspended in the water seems to be bourne out by the fact that there are many areas where the surface slick has not reached the shore but there are tall balls washing up on it.
I would guess that TFA is generally correct and that what we are facing is, in fact, a "volcano" of oil.
One of the reasons no one has mentioned yet is that Google's core algorithms and trade secrets could be stolen. Google just can't afford to lose their competitive advantage to industrial espionage. Having engineers in China is a big risk, as they are exposed to coercion by the government. Maybe their core search wizards are all located in Mountain View, CA, but having Chinese guys who tweak the algorithm for the Chinese market probably means that at least a few of them know the core technologies pretty well. Google gives away a lot of technology, but there's no chance that you're going to see them publishing their core algorithms. Having datacenters and engineering in China might be too much of a security risk as well as a moral risk.
Do you know that, on average, iPhone users pay more per month and more per app for apps than any other smart-phone user. It may be true that there are just more useful apps for the iPhone than its competitors, but the fact remains that iPhone users pay more for similar functionality. Eventually, there will be mainstream smart phones and tablets that allow developers to use free tools on those devices. The average cost of apps on the non-Apple devices will be lower and, everything else being equal, most people will choose not to pay extra for the same thing.
Must be lovely to live in a country where the big man wrote an ass-wiping guidebook. Probably makes up for the secret police, torture-oriented prisons and all.
As one who lives in a country with secret police and torture-oriented prisons, I have no desire to see Obama teach me to wipe my own ass.
Merriam-Webster has 13 definitions for pad. None of them refer to feminine hygiene. While it's true that you have to know your customer, it's hopeless when your customer is so self-centered and fragile that such a common word is somehow offensive. As for the fight with Fujitsu, Apple has never been one to shy away from using whatever words it wants to use. Personally, I think the iPad is a good idea. However, I also think that while the app store is a useful evil on the iPhone, it's going to be death for the iPad. The device should at a minimum be allowed to run in general-purpose computing mode and walled-garden mode. Otherwise, general-purpose programmable competitors are eventually going to overtake it--especially if they don't require the investment of buying a Mac and a $100/yr license just to run dev. tools.
Want to stimulate the economy and bring jobs back? Announce that as of next month all imported goods and services are goods and services are required to be produced under the same regime of labor laws, environmental protection regulation, product safety standards, liability laws and accounting standards used by US companies. Any company that wants to sell to US markets must be accessible to US investors. Anything not meeting these standards will be subject to a tariff that will begin at 10% and escalate by 1% each month until the 200% tariff rate is reached. There's no reason why we should lose the quality of life that our parents, grandparents and the generations before them worked and fought for just because someone somewhere else can cut corners and externalize costs to make things cheaper. We are losing everything because we are compromising our standards for marginally cheaper products and service.
One major reason that health care is growing to such a huge percentage of our expenses is that it is a service that is not exportable and relies mainly on products and technologies that are highly developed and thus only come from the developed world where things are expensive. Everything is cheap in China: Goods, services and lives are all had for a pittance. If we fail to rely on our own industry in our own regime of regulation, we will ultimately reduce the value of what we own and who we are to the same level as the Chinese or the Cambodians or the Malaysians or whoever else pops up as the next country stable enough to build factories in to exploit wage slaves and ruin the local lands and seas. China has had a tremendous stimulus by sucking the money out of us for over 20 years. They will have the rest of the world to as their market and they will have most of our technology to use to continue their ascension. Without the tidal wave of money flowing from our coffers, they will have to figure out how to grow in organic, sustainable ways and how to do it without outlandishly rewarding their upper class while exploiting their lower classes. They may even decide that the one-party system isn't all it's cracked up to be. Whatever happens will be better for us and better for them. We wont have lead or cadmium infested toys and jewelry. We won't have toxic drywall, or deadly dried milk or malware-infected routers. If we don't wake up and start doing this, we're going to have to stop trying to live in a developed nation with all of the rules and regulations that we put upon ourselves because no one is going to be able to afford it. You're about to travel to the third world. Just sit back on your couch and watch the decent continue. When you go out the front door in 10 years. It will be your neighborhood. Thank you George, Bill, George and Barak.
The argument for free market capitalism relies on some assumptions: 1) That you have a well-functioning society where those who do wrong are punishable and punished and 2) that the market and regulations on it are not rigged by the most powerful players to their advantage. We have endemic corruption and we have a broken society. Free markets cannot function here.
The big food growers control the legislature and the courts to the extent that they write their own ticket when it comes to subsidies and regulation. There has been almost no meaningful regulation of food safety beyond a certain low threshold of liability that the food producers must not allow their product to be tainted with externally harmful agents such as bacteria or very high levels of pesticides or contaminants. Anything intrinsic to the food such as proteins, hormones or fats are basically unregulated and there is no liability on the part of the manufacturers for their products. Producers work very hard to seal off all information about their foods from the public.
Monsanto is one of the most evil companies of our time in terms of profiting from directly poisoning the land and the people who ultimately consume its products, and bullying those who would stand up to it. However, the entire food production system is so flawed that you can't just look at regulating one aspect like GMOs to try to fix it. The larger and stronger the regulatory apparatus becomes, the more costly it is to operate, the more costly it is to operate under its regulation and the more incentive there is for those who are regulated to capture the regulators. Nearly all regulatory bodies of consequence have been captured by the industries that they regulate. This puts a bigger moat around the largest players and a higher barrier to entry for small business. It also raises the prices for everything and both allows and forces the big players to look for more ways to cut corners and reduce costs and fatten profits.
Why do you think we free market types rail against regulation? At this point regulation no longer means enforcing a set of rules to protect the public. It means enforcing a set of rules to protect the profits of the largest players (sometimes) in the guise of protecting the public. Regulation is not the way to win. Enforceable liability is the way to cause all parties to take responsibility for producing safe products, whether food, toys, cars, houses, or whatever. Simple, broad liabilities such as: your product must not do unnatural harm to those who would use or consume it. If someone eats too many sweet snacks its their own fault if they get diabetes but it's the producer's fault if the consumer is poisoned by carcinogenic chemicals in the cookies that are used as preservatives. This implies that companies cannot be given uber-citizenship status. They can't have the rights and privileges of a person and also the ability to hide in foreign countries or simply close up and die if they decide that future liabilities exceed future assets and income. Owners and management must be held accountable for their actions under the same timetables as statues of limitations, regardless of whether or not the company they worked for still exists or was based in the same country as its products or services were sold in. Why do you think free market types argue for tort reform? How can I operate a small business if I run the risk that someone is going to purposely slip on the wet floor in my store and break their knee and then sue me for all their lawyer can muster? We have to make sure that businesses are allowed to work in a sane and safe legal environment and that they are all held to the same standard of liability that any normal person would be. We have to make sure that the little guy (who, by the way, is responsible for the majority of the economic output in the developed world) is not hamstrung by regulation and artificial barriers to entry that are arranged by their bigger
I don't know about you, but some times I've come across porn that I think of as a little bit marginal. I also don't like the idea of someone digging up deleted files on my hard disk.
It seems like a good idea to have a tool that scrambles all the bits on the free space of your hard disk overnight and during idle periods. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?
To me, this seems like germ heaven. There's a reason we have evolved such sophisticated immune systems. The germs have co-evolved with us and their attacks are, by now, orders of magnitude more sophisticated than they were when multi-cellular organisms first appeared. One of the challenges of organizing many types of cells is making sure that the good ones are fed and the bad ones are killed or kept out. One strategy we naturally employ is mutation and randomization. Sexual reproduction implies that the fittest individuals are the ones which procreate and gives us many more chances to randomize bits of our genetic code which makes it harder for attackers to identify and successfully exploit its host/prey (an multi-cellular animal). Meat from a lab implies a monoculture of genetic material since this minimizes overhead in building and processing each batch. Then the meat must also be protected from germs and parasites which would have a field day munching on the same proteins and sugars that we (ostensibly) want to eat. However, the disembodied monoculture meat has no animal immune system to defend it and it requires a sterile environment in which to grow. We have to shoulder these burdens instead of the animals doing it themselves.
We already expose ourselves to too much danger by throwing literally tons of antibiotics at our poultry, pork and beef to keep them minimally alive while they are overfed on corn in disgusting, overcrowded industrial feed lots and bird houses. We know that almost all bacteria interested in attacking us will become immune to these standard antibiotics before the end of our lifetimes because waste the advantage we have with our current antibiotics by overexposing the bacteria to our countermeasures and thereby give the germs the long-term advantage by allowing many, many times more opportunity to develop mutations which defend against the antibiotics.
I disagree with PETA that killing animals for meat is immoral. We aren’t vegetarians, we’re omnivores. If you want to be morally trans-human, then don’t waste all your time emphasizing “food with a face” and making emotional appeals. I do agree that industrial meat production, as it stands, is immoral and completely unsafe. There are people dying right now because we have cranked the industrial efficiency of our food-production complex way past the red line. They are being killed by diabetes, MRSA, staph, E. Coli and diseases like mad cow. All of which are introduced by maximizing short-term efficiency and externalizing the costs of production.
One of the interesting things about life in a balanced system is that the millions of species that compete with each other for resources (energy in its various bio-chemical forms and the rarer kinds of elements that are sometimes required to process it) usually find a meta-stability that guarantees that each individual is cutting-edge efficient at using the resources it can get and that the environment as a whole is conducive to allowing more forms of life to fill in the gaps where inefficiency is exposed. Humans have put the system almost completely out of whack. We are using up all of the stored energy on the planet, using up all of the rare elements and we’re horrible at making use of renewable energy sources and recycling the rare and costly elements that we haven’t yet wasted. Not only that, but we’re steadily making less and less area available for our own and other species use with toxic sludge and waste products destroying more usable land and sea every day.
There is no point to growing meat for consumption in a lab. Meat for healing is another story, but honestly, we’ve got bigger issues.
Am I the only one who had to choke back tears watching this? Porn doesn't usually do that for me. Though I was thinking "Oh my god! I want to do that!" Which also happens when I... nevermind. This is awesome stuff!
I am not surprised by your experience. I have recently found that I was unable to make spelling and grammar changes to several pages that were locked. Lots of the pages that I was interested in contributing to were in some kind of locked state. It seems strange that someone could justify locking a page and controlling it without satisfying the basic requirements that he or she be fluent in the language in which the page is written. I found myself hoping that some other group with less anti-social tendencies would fork from wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Apple is the largest retailer of music. Also, they are doing their best to become the most important distributor for TV, Movies and eBooks. Apple sells about $5B per year in thru the iTunes Music/Apps/Movies/TV/Books Store and those sales are growing at about 25% per year. While that's only about 7% of their sales right now, it's growing steadily and likely to be about as profitable as the hardware businesses. It's also likely to equal or outstrip Mac sales within a year or two.
No, Apple is not primarily a distributor, but they are in line to become the biggest distributor. That scares the distribution competition because Apple can afford push down distribution margins to promote high-margin device sales. So, you're right they don't need the money from iTMS but iPhones and iPods and iPads aren't nearly as attractive without iTMS--that's part of what you buy when you buy the device.
And that's the difference. Intel doesn't NEED McAfee, whereas Apple can't really operate without iTMS. Intel might find a way to differentiate future processors by adding industrial-strength security to their chips by integrating AV and management suite facilities with specialized hardware, but Intel has always benefited from being the premiere supplier of open-platform technologies and they are forced to be that way both by the market and by regulation. If they change that significantly to increase margins, they may become vulnerable to attack on both fronts. To me, $8Bn is just too much for McAfee. I think they could have got the same capabilities for a lot less money. McAfee sells low-margin, crappy AV software. They earn a few hundred million a year. Intel earns 4x the return on investment in its existing business (relative to McAfee). Also, I believe the embarrassing products McAfee sells will dilute Intel's brand. In the words of Warren Buffett, as an INTC shareholder "I feel poorer".
I used to spend more time on digg than slashdot. Then I decided that I needed to stop wasting so much time on pointless web crap. Digg is a mob. The comments are a sewer and the stories are all too often unsubstantiated sensationalism or half-baked ad-grab sites. It stopped being useful or even interesting a while ago.
How about when the camera starts to do face recognition (like most point-and-shoot digicams do today) and also starts to recognize bar codes and the square patterns like the ones that the Android app store uses? How about voice recognition and commands built into the machine? The smarter you make these things, the more complex they become. At a certain level of complexity, you lose assurance that the security works properly. It takes exponentially more time to vet the system as the complexity increases.
Excellent point.
iPhone owners pick themselves. They put up with the spotty AT&T network because
1) iPhones are pretty great. Maybe not *the* best, but there's no denying that they're very nice and while not hassle-free, it's simple to get a lot out of them. Those who want to do things Apple doesn't approve don't have a terribly hard time hacking the device.
2) iPhone users don't buy it primarily for the phone part. They use it mainly for the data part. AT&T does a much better job at keeping the data flowing than at keeping the calls from being dropped. Granted, that data service degrades more gracefully than voice, but you've got to admit that AT&T is, with the exception of a few very-hard-to-service markets, doing a decent job at delivering the data. I can't make calls at home, but when my wifi is out, i still can surf the web at reasonable speeds.
3) Yes, there is some illusion going on given the fact that most people can use their phones most of the time in range of WiFi and so crappy cellular service gets somewhat masked by the fact that it isn't as visible as often.
I recently bought an used 3G[S]. I hooked it up on the iPad data plan. No voice service, only data. Yes it takes a bit of special procedure to make this work and VOIP is not as good (Apple doesn't make it easy to answer VOIP calls and drop-outs are more common) as regular GSM, but it works and the price is right. Now that I've seen how nice it is to use these stupid things, I'm really getting a hankering for buying iPhone 4 and either paying the early termination fee or keeping the regular AT&T service. $80/mo. adds up fast, but part of me thinks it might be worth it. Yes, I hate some of the restrictions on the phone ($20 extra for tethering is asinine, as is blocking of certain apps including Google Voice) I thought about jailbreaking and unlocking to use the phone with T-Mobile. It's not worth it. Unlimited everything for $40/mo sounds nice but who wants slow data? (T-Mobile's 3G freq. aren't supported by iPhone hardware).
The fact is that Android just doesn't quite measure up (for me), yet. For some (perhaps most) people, it's fine. I admit that there's some big flaws in iOS that need fixing (notifications are badly done, backgrounding is a joke). But, overall the phone usually just works the way it should and the app store does serve to keep up the quality of apps. I can't agree with everything they've done, but there are many things they did right and no one else has yet matched them for what I want. To be honest, I wouldn't have bought an iPhone if I had to pay the full price for service, but using it every day for the past month has made me a believer (for now). If the battery life on the next gen EVO gets better, perhaps I'll try that.
Hear Him!
I cannot stand staring at an image and having to decypher the difference between what the screen is attempting to produce and the reflection of the room around me. What a total waste. Vivid colors?!? Give me a break. I want to read what the text says, not see my face amid a corona of rainbows. It drives me crazy to use a glossy screen.
It's mildly interesting that they've solved this problem. But, the most important thing question is: can they make this thing where the need it or near where they need it? All these whiz-bang gizmos solve one technical problem. They don't solve the 1000 logistical and economic problems that remain getting the gizmos to where they're ostensibly useful.
Public corporations are obligated to file performance reports quarterly. The numbers in these reports are a large determinant of short-term stock prices. Therefore, management is usually given the incentive to make short-term gains. This inevitably leads to conflicts between long-term and short-term strategies. It limits investment that has long-term payoff and especially limits long-term research which may not ever pay off. But none of this even speaks to the fact that there is no substantial incentive for the majority of economic activity in the U.S. to be conducted with regard to the interests of the society. Corporations benefit from a good public image and from good branding, but there's a reason that we equate advertising with lying and theres a reason that our government and media are corrupt beyond measure. Companies pay to keep their images clean while doing whatever it takes to keep the bottom line growing.
It can't be legislated away. Part if it is simple human nature. But I think that if you establish the right rules and if you prove that there are better ways to conduct business, we will find the reforms or at least direct the revolutions that are necessary to build much more healthy, sustainable economies and societies. If you don't think that both spheres are utterly broken today, I suggest that you are ignorant or have a very dim view of what possibilities we are leaving unrealized in pursuit of the current brutalism.
It's absolutely correct that corporations are legally obligated to attempt to maximize the return for shareholders. However, abiding by the law isn't the same as being a good citizen. The legal obligation to maximize returns in conjunction with the demi-personhood of the corporation has led to the increasingly common comparison of corporations with sociopaths. They exist only to satisfy their own needs and desires and are not designed or operated to benefit society. Management can take the enlightened, modern, view that they can do well by doing good, but there's no requirement for this and competition does tend to breed ruthlessness over generosity.
The fact that there are no enormously rich and successful open-source software companies speaks to the fact that maximizing concentration of capital is an activity that is done more efficiently by predation than by symbiosis. Profit in itself is not an evil. We require profit to survive because it is both the measurement of how well we use our resources and how much wealth we are creating. Wealth is vitally important for every kind of progress.
Perhaps it's time to think very deeply about how we want to organize our economic activity so that the rewards of our hard work are more diffused and mutually beneficial than the model that we have created which encourages vice in pursuit of profit. The question shouldn't be, "Why are there no billion-dollar open-source companies?" but rather, "Are business models based on generosity more or less useful for creating and distributing wealth than those which place value only on scarcity?".
To that end, I have a proposal: develop a set of metrics that measure the wealth generated by open-source activities. I don't think we should be focusing on the dollar-equivalent of the developer hours. We need to look at the contribution to the standard-of-living. That is, after all, the real purpose of economic activity. Once we start measuring these things in a way that is not biased toward our current system, but gives us a good idea of how useful these various activities and organization really are, we can start thinking about how we're really going to increase our wealth instead of just how we're going to make profits.
And what is the problem with that? Google's internal OS is not something that a lot of outsiders are envious of. Google has open-sourced their internal protocols, their page and app-building tools, their filesystem, their database. The list goes on. They contribute to the Kernel and they most likely have some level of integration between their custom kernel and their core algorithm. It may be located in a Kernel module. Whatever their reason for not giving you a copy of their server OS on a platter, I think you have very little moral ground to stand on, demanding that they share anything more. Frankly, they're not required to share anything they've made for themselves. Too bad that companies like Apple, Cisco and Microsoft aren't as generous as Google.
Assuming the following:
Cost to drill well and get oil to coastal refinery: $1 Bn
Daily cost to run the well and pump oil to refinery: $150 K
Average value of oil over repayment period: $85 / barrel
Prevailing Interest Rate (opportunity cost of using the cash to drill and run the well): 10% -- this roughly BP's return-on-assets for 2010
Years to repay: 3
We can figure that the well would have to produce around 16K to 17K barrels per day to pay for itself at the end of 3 years of operation.
These numbers are still rough, but it gets us in the ballpark. 5 years takes you to 13K barrels per day. 2 years is about 20K barrels per day.
If you assume that the well could expel 2x to 3x per day than a controlled well, you get a range of 26k to 60k barrels per day being spewed into the gulf.
That's 1.8M US gallons of oil per day.
Someone else needs to take over from here. How many gallons of water does a gallon of oil pollute in this scenario? 100 gallons of water plluted per gallon of oil?
That means 180M gallons of water polluted per day. Or 18B gallons of water polluted by the end of 100 days when we expect the oil to stop flowing due to the new well being drilled.
If that is polluting the water to a depth of 100 feet and there are 7.5 gallons of water per cubic foot, you get almost 1 square mile of water polluted to a depth of 100 feet. But we already know that the slick is over 10,000 square miles on the surface. Either the depth of the pollution is far less than 100 feet or the gallons of oil being spewed is far greater than 10's of 1000's of gallons per day and is well into the 100's of thousands of gallons per day range.
In any case TFA's reasoning about the tar suspended in the water seems to be bourne out by the fact that there are many areas where the surface slick has not reached the shore but there are tall balls washing up on it.
I would guess that TFA is generally correct and that what we are facing is, in fact, a "volcano" of oil.
I thought this was going to be a story about my pregnant wife.
One of the reasons no one has mentioned yet is that Google's core algorithms and trade secrets could be stolen. Google just can't afford to lose their competitive advantage to industrial espionage. Having engineers in China is a big risk, as they are exposed to coercion by the government. Maybe their core search wizards are all located in Mountain View, CA, but having Chinese guys who tweak the algorithm for the Chinese market probably means that at least a few of them know the core technologies pretty well. Google gives away a lot of technology, but there's no chance that you're going to see them publishing their core algorithms. Having datacenters and engineering in China might be too much of a security risk as well as a moral risk.
Do you know that, on average, iPhone users pay more per month and more per app for apps than any other smart-phone user. It may be true that there are just more useful apps for the iPhone than its competitors, but the fact remains that iPhone users pay more for similar functionality. Eventually, there will be mainstream smart phones and tablets that allow developers to use free tools on those devices. The average cost of apps on the non-Apple devices will be lower and, everything else being equal, most people will choose not to pay extra for the same thing.
Must be lovely to live in a country where the big man wrote an ass-wiping guidebook.
Probably makes up for the secret police, torture-oriented prisons and all.
As one who lives in a country with secret police and torture-oriented prisons, I have no desire to see Obama teach me to wipe my own ass.
They have courts in Canada? I thought everyone was too polite to sue.
Merriam-Webster has 13 definitions for pad. None of them refer to feminine hygiene. While it's true that you have to know your customer, it's hopeless when your customer is so self-centered and fragile that such a common word is somehow offensive. As for the fight with Fujitsu, Apple has never been one to shy away from using whatever words it wants to use. Personally, I think the iPad is a good idea. However, I also think that while the app store is a useful evil on the iPhone, it's going to be death for the iPad. The device should at a minimum be allowed to run in general-purpose computing mode and walled-garden mode. Otherwise, general-purpose programmable competitors are eventually going to overtake it--especially if they don't require the investment of buying a Mac and a $100/yr license just to run dev. tools.
I assume you mean Increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Did you mean reduce the noise floor?
One major reason that health care is growing to such a huge percentage of our expenses is that it is a service that is not exportable and relies mainly on products and technologies that are highly developed and thus only come from the developed world where things are expensive. Everything is cheap in China: Goods, services and lives are all had for a pittance. If we fail to rely on our own industry in our own regime of regulation, we will ultimately reduce the value of what we own and who we are to the same level as the Chinese or the Cambodians or the Malaysians or whoever else pops up as the next country stable enough to build factories in to exploit wage slaves and ruin the local lands and seas. China has had a tremendous stimulus by sucking the money out of us for over 20 years. They will have the rest of the world to as their market and they will have most of our technology to use to continue their ascension. Without the tidal wave of money flowing from our coffers, they will have to figure out how to grow in organic, sustainable ways and how to do it without outlandishly rewarding their upper class while exploiting their lower classes. They may even decide that the one-party system isn't all it's cracked up to be. Whatever happens will be better for us and better for them. We wont have lead or cadmium infested toys and jewelry. We won't have toxic drywall, or deadly dried milk or malware-infected routers. If we don't wake up and start doing this, we're going to have to stop trying to live in a developed nation with all of the rules and regulations that we put upon ourselves because no one is going to be able to afford it. You're about to travel to the third world. Just sit back on your couch and watch the decent continue. When you go out the front door in 10 years. It will be your neighborhood. Thank you George, Bill, George and Barak.
Monsanto is one of the most evil companies of our time in terms of profiting from directly poisoning the land and the people who ultimately consume its products, and bullying those who would stand up to it. However, the entire food production system is so flawed that you can't just look at regulating one aspect like GMOs to try to fix it. The larger and stronger the regulatory apparatus becomes, the more costly it is to operate, the more costly it is to operate under its regulation and the more incentive there is for those who are regulated to capture the regulators. Nearly all regulatory bodies of consequence have been captured by the industries that they regulate. This puts a bigger moat around the largest players and a higher barrier to entry for small business. It also raises the prices for everything and both allows and forces the big players to look for more ways to cut corners and reduce costs and fatten profits.
Why do you think we free market types rail against regulation? At this point regulation no longer means enforcing a set of rules to protect the public. It means enforcing a set of rules to protect the profits of the largest players (sometimes) in the guise of protecting the public. Regulation is not the way to win. Enforceable liability is the way to cause all parties to take responsibility for producing safe products, whether food, toys, cars, houses, or whatever. Simple, broad liabilities such as: your product must not do unnatural harm to those who would use or consume it. If someone eats too many sweet snacks its their own fault if they get diabetes but it's the producer's fault if the consumer is poisoned by carcinogenic chemicals in the cookies that are used as preservatives. This implies that companies cannot be given uber-citizenship status. They can't have the rights and privileges of a person and also the ability to hide in foreign countries or simply close up and die if they decide that future liabilities exceed future assets and income. Owners and management must be held accountable for their actions under the same timetables as statues of limitations, regardless of whether or not the company they worked for still exists or was based in the same country as its products or services were sold in. Why do you think free market types argue for tort reform? How can I operate a small business if I run the risk that someone is going to purposely slip on the wet floor in my store and break their knee and then sue me for all their lawyer can muster? We have to make sure that businesses are allowed to work in a sane and safe legal environment and that they are all held to the same standard of liability that any normal person would be. We have to make sure that the little guy (who, by the way, is responsible for the majority of the economic output in the developed world) is not hamstrung by regulation and artificial barriers to entry that are arranged by their bigger
How do we know your tinyurl sig link doesn't contain child porn?
I don't know about you, but some times I've come across porn that I think of as a little bit marginal. I also don't like the idea of someone digging up deleted files on my hard disk. It seems like a good idea to have a tool that scrambles all the bits on the free space of your hard disk overnight and during idle periods. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?
To me, this seems like germ heaven. There's a reason we have evolved such sophisticated immune systems. The germs have co-evolved with us and their attacks are, by now, orders of magnitude more sophisticated than they were when multi-cellular organisms first appeared. One of the challenges of organizing many types of cells is making sure that the good ones are fed and the bad ones are killed or kept out. One strategy we naturally employ is mutation and randomization. Sexual reproduction implies that the fittest individuals are the ones which procreate and gives us many more chances to randomize bits of our genetic code which makes it harder for attackers to identify and successfully exploit its host/prey (an multi-cellular animal). Meat from a lab implies a monoculture of genetic material since this minimizes overhead in building and processing each batch. Then the meat must also be protected from germs and parasites which would have a field day munching on the same proteins and sugars that we (ostensibly) want to eat. However, the disembodied monoculture meat has no animal immune system to defend it and it requires a sterile environment in which to grow. We have to shoulder these burdens instead of the animals doing it themselves.
We already expose ourselves to too much danger by throwing literally tons of antibiotics at our poultry, pork and beef to keep them minimally alive while they are overfed on corn in disgusting, overcrowded industrial feed lots and bird houses. We know that almost all bacteria interested in attacking us will become immune to these standard antibiotics before the end of our lifetimes because waste the advantage we have with our current antibiotics by overexposing the bacteria to our countermeasures and thereby give the germs the long-term advantage by allowing many, many times more opportunity to develop mutations which defend against the antibiotics.
I disagree with PETA that killing animals for meat is immoral. We aren’t vegetarians, we’re omnivores. If you want to be morally trans-human, then don’t waste all your time emphasizing “food with a face” and making emotional appeals. I do agree that industrial meat production, as it stands, is immoral and completely unsafe. There are people dying right now because we have cranked the industrial efficiency of our food-production complex way past the red line. They are being killed by diabetes, MRSA, staph, E. Coli and diseases like mad cow. All of which are introduced by maximizing short-term efficiency and externalizing the costs of production.
One of the interesting things about life in a balanced system is that the millions of species that compete with each other for resources (energy in its various bio-chemical forms and the rarer kinds of elements that are sometimes required to process it) usually find a meta-stability that guarantees that each individual is cutting-edge efficient at using the resources it can get and that the environment as a whole is conducive to allowing more forms of life to fill in the gaps where inefficiency is exposed. Humans have put the system almost completely out of whack. We are using up all of the stored energy on the planet, using up all of the rare elements and we’re horrible at making use of renewable energy sources and recycling the rare and costly elements that we haven’t yet wasted. Not only that, but we’re steadily making less and less area available for our own and other species use with toxic sludge and waste products destroying more usable land and sea every day.
There is no point to growing meat for consumption in a lab. Meat for healing is another story, but honestly, we’ve got bigger issues.
Am I the only one who had to choke back tears watching this? Porn doesn't usually do that for me. Though I was thinking "Oh my god! I want to do that!" Which also happens when I... nevermind. This is awesome stuff!
I am not surprised by your experience. I have recently found that I was unable to make spelling and grammar changes to several pages that were locked. Lots of the pages that I was interested in contributing to were in some kind of locked state. It seems strange that someone could justify locking a page and controlling it without satisfying the basic requirements that he or she be fluent in the language in which the page is written. I found myself hoping that some other group with less anti-social tendencies would fork from wikipedia.