NASA didn't drain the country of anything. NASA doesn't (for the most part) have their own engineers and scientific talent. They have contractors and research organizations they work with. And NASA did exactly what it was intended (and, in fact, designed and funded) to do -- pump money into those organizations precisely to keep those people employed where the skills were available for long-cycle defense contracts. If its going to take 15 years to go through the early contract work for the next generation of fighter plane, you need to have 15 years worth of small easy-to-fun contracts to keep the critical contractors in business and critical staff employed.
Those contractors are so critical (or seen as so critical) to national security, that if NASA wasn't the excuse to keep the funding taps open, something else would've. One interesting change that happened in the last ten years was the X-prize, and the realization that really top-notch work can be done via a prize-model, too. Now you see some real cutting edge stuff being done in the guise of things like DARPA prizes, etc. Short money for big results.
The shuttle's retirement is just as much about the fact that the technology in it is old, and keeping those kills funded is of little value, as much as anything else. And if I had to guess, emergency access to orbit by the military is probably seen as more viable internal to the DoD now, and funding manned access to space for the military is less of a priority. (Ten shuttle missions were either classified or partially classified!)
And if we're having an honest talk about pure-dollar ROI, you'd have to figure out how much technology came out of the military for that war.
A lot of the replies on here (almost all, in fact) are missing a key fact. NASA didn't bring these teams together -- for the most part all of these companies and teams existing *and were already working on most of the technology*. These were all defense contractors and sub-contractors. They were focusing all the tech and development on the moon shot, but we were still in the heat of the cold war. The teams would've been building the tech for the military *anyway*. (Hell, as an extension of the cold war, arguably Apollo was nothing but a military operation in civilian clothes, anyway -- as witnessed by the complete lack of any interest in science until the very end of the program!)
The vast majority of the technology people attribute to NASA are really attributable to miltary expendatures. GPS, miniaturized electronics, rugged electronics, cryptography, vast swaths of material science, engine efficiency developments, jet planes, computers, the Internet, the technology behind rocketry, pressure suits, velcro, even things like long-shelf life food, a huge swath of medical technology -- those are all *miltary* funded innovation.
I'm as against this mess we're in in Iraq and Afghanistan as anyone, but its intellectually dishonest to act like any given 15b spent on NASA will have greater ROI than that $15b spent on the military. Our economy is the size it is right now *precisely* because of the results of 50 years of military spending. Not because of NASA spending.
(And, I'll admit, I'm in the camp of "NASA is a giant waste of money"... not space flight, or space research, but just NASA... its one of the worst, most wasteful government organizations, and the Shuttle/ISS corporate-welfare program for the last 40 years has been the *real* problem. Not Congress' budgets. That was a third-of-a-trillion dollars that could've been massively better spent!) You need to remember that NASA has largely *never* been about science. Its been about sending money to congressional districts to keep critical defense contractors in business. Pure science is (and always has been) a small sliver of NASA's budget.
...when the American electorate decided to go with the pleasant movie fantasies of a has-been B actor in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease instead of the unpleasant energy and economic realities explained quite plainly by an engineer who happened to be president at the time. Yes, America broke with reality 30 years ago, which is more or less the definition of psychosis.
Any hope we had of energy independence and a stable economy died then. Arab oil and economic decay through debt spending were in. Whoopee! And hasn't that worked out well?
All physical inventions, too. The position of all their atoms can be boiled down to an equation as well. Which is why that argument doesn't work, and never will work.
Either society decides that protection of innovation has a net benefit or it decides it doesn't. Making stupid arguments like "oh, I can reduce that to a mathematical formula, so it can't be protected" misses the entire point, and starts the argument down a path you explicitly can't win.
And there's certainly a pretty solid correlation between society protecting innovations and allowing profit to be made by the innovator and the massive pace of innovation over the last 200 years. I don't think you can win the argument that patents hurt society in aggregate. They only hurt individuals.
And buying something from Amazon and not paying a use-tax on it is a straightforward violation of the law.
I'm not sure the complainers have an ethical leg to stand on here. If the consumers are following the law, its better for them for Amazon to take the taxes because otherwise they need to track and total up all their purchases to calculate their use tax.
But I bet all the whiners on here have never payed up their use tax.
I wouldn't assume that. There's definitely a patent thicket related to cell phone technology, but for the most part all of the companies involved have cross licensed all their patents with each other. You see battles like this come up when you get a company (Oracle) that isn't a cellphone company and thus not part of the cross-licensing that wants a piece of the action, or you see it when companies (like Apple vs Samsung) decide they can't effectively compete and try to find areas in their portfolio that are applicable and not cross-licensed already.
Where the relavent patent portfolios are deemed by the two companies to be of equivalent value, no money changes hands. If there's an imbalance, money changes hands. But I wouldn't assume that all smart phones are infringing, and you absolutely better believe they don't know it -- for patents they consider valid and relavent (because knowing substantially increases the penalties as a result of a court case!).
Actually Win7 on all but a reformat and re-install will preserve the data just fine. Unlike XP, user data is all under the User folder, unless you went out of your way to put it elsewhere. (And filesystem virtualization will ensure even older buggy apps write their files under your account.)
And, in either case, a system restore doesn't do what virtually everyone on this thread seems to think it does. Restore != reinstall.
No, system restore does NOT work that way. You revert back to a restore point, which is a snapshot of all the protected OS files, assuming you didn't do something stupid like turn off restore points.
Its basically like Time Machine on OSX -- NTFS supports copy-on-write, so the deltas from the snapshots can be tossed. (I don't think its widely known that NTFS can do that because there's no swooshy UI for doing it like on the Mac, but you can do it.)
Thats normal -- you owe taxes between what the strike price is of an option and what the FMV for that option is at the time of granting. Options tend to have strike prices less than the fair market value of that share.
Were you not around in the.com boom in the late 90's? That was extremely common -- people owing $200k in taxes on shares that dropped to zero, bankrupting people.
Microsoft already had the most logical use for it (OCS/Lync/TellMe) for an environment (corporate) where its not already illegal, and where there may be compliance and legal reasons for *doing* the recording.
The article is FUD. Skype wasn't a blip on their radar when the patent was filed. Imagining it has anything to do with Skype is just ignorance. Skype wasn't (and isn't) a Microsoft property, and its absolutely normal in the disclosure part of a patent to call out examples of technology that the examiner would know. The whole reason that text exists is to help the examiner understand the claims.
But anti-MS articles (no matter how stupid) get ad impressions, so you'll keep seeing them a few times a week on/.
I'd say at least half the companies I've received options from had clauses just like this. It may not be par for the course with private venture-funded companies, but it sure is close.
You should always assume that options or common shares of private companies are going to be worthless to you. Never include them in your compensation evaluation. Even if you are in a company that lets you keep options without buyback if you leave, you still have common stock and they can play games and absorb the equity event's value entirely or almost entirely in the preferred shares. Or they can recapitalize the company prior to acquisition, re-issue stock to existing employees and investors and cut the rest out.
Making money off an equity event in a private company is like winning the lottery. Pretty nice if it happens, but you're not being rational about it if you think you're going to win just because you played.
That raises an interesting question. If I rip a song using a particular program from a particular pressing of a CD, and you rip it using the same program from the same pressing of a CD, will the two end up with identical hashes? I've always been under the impression that ripping audio data wasn't entirely deterministic from a CD (no error correction), and thus two rips even with identical software and settings won't necessarily byte-for-byte match.
If thats the case, hashes of a given song can be compared to known hashes of songs from file sharing services.
A good security person would be 3-4x that, once you include all the non-salary costs of having one full-time.
(I know it doesn't really matter to your point, but people have a really screwy sense of what an FTE costs a company... with salary, benefits, payroll taxes, unemployment taxes, cost for space, cost for hardware, etc)
I get that there is massive FUD now that Microsoft has bought out Skype, but that doesn't mean every single bit of normal behavior (like locking out and forcing updates on old versions of clients) is somehow a malicious news-worthy event in some grand conspiracy.
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That means its not a helicopter car.
Derp.
You realize it's hundreds of billions, right? And over short term, bailout loans of several trillion dollars were made as well.
You realize virtually all of it was payed back, with interest, right?
NASA didn't drain the country of anything. NASA doesn't (for the most part) have their own engineers and scientific talent. They have contractors and research organizations they work with. And NASA did exactly what it was intended (and, in fact, designed and funded) to do -- pump money into those organizations precisely to keep those people employed where the skills were available for long-cycle defense contracts. If its going to take 15 years to go through the early contract work for the next generation of fighter plane, you need to have 15 years worth of small easy-to-fun contracts to keep the critical contractors in business and critical staff employed.
Those contractors are so critical (or seen as so critical) to national security, that if NASA wasn't the excuse to keep the funding taps open, something else would've. One interesting change that happened in the last ten years was the X-prize, and the realization that really top-notch work can be done via a prize-model, too. Now you see some real cutting edge stuff being done in the guise of things like DARPA prizes, etc. Short money for big results.
The shuttle's retirement is just as much about the fact that the technology in it is old, and keeping those kills funded is of little value, as much as anything else. And if I had to guess, emergency access to orbit by the military is probably seen as more viable internal to the DoD now, and funding manned access to space for the military is less of a priority. (Ten shuttle missions were either classified or partially classified!)
And if we're having an honest talk about pure-dollar ROI, you'd have to figure out how much technology came out of the military for that war.
A lot of the replies on here (almost all, in fact) are missing a key fact. NASA didn't bring these teams together -- for the most part all of these companies and teams existing *and were already working on most of the technology*. These were all defense contractors and sub-contractors. They were focusing all the tech and development on the moon shot, but we were still in the heat of the cold war. The teams would've been building the tech for the military *anyway*. (Hell, as an extension of the cold war, arguably Apollo was nothing but a military operation in civilian clothes, anyway -- as witnessed by the complete lack of any interest in science until the very end of the program!)
The vast majority of the technology people attribute to NASA are really attributable to miltary expendatures. GPS, miniaturized electronics, rugged electronics, cryptography, vast swaths of material science, engine efficiency developments, jet planes, computers, the Internet, the technology behind rocketry, pressure suits, velcro, even things like long-shelf life food, a huge swath of medical technology -- those are all *miltary* funded innovation.
I'm as against this mess we're in in Iraq and Afghanistan as anyone, but its intellectually dishonest to act like any given 15b spent on NASA will have greater ROI than that $15b spent on the military. Our economy is the size it is right now *precisely* because of the results of 50 years of military spending. Not because of NASA spending.
(And, I'll admit, I'm in the camp of "NASA is a giant waste of money"... not space flight, or space research, but just NASA... its one of the worst, most wasteful government organizations, and the Shuttle/ISS corporate-welfare program for the last 40 years has been the *real* problem. Not Congress' budgets. That was a third-of-a-trillion dollars that could've been massively better spent!) You need to remember that NASA has largely *never* been about science. Its been about sending money to congressional districts to keep critical defense contractors in business. Pure science is (and always has been) a small sliver of NASA's budget.
...when the American electorate decided to go with the pleasant movie fantasies of a has-been B actor in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease instead of the unpleasant energy and economic realities explained quite plainly by an engineer who happened to be president at the time. Yes, America broke with reality 30 years ago, which is more or less the definition of psychosis.
Any hope we had of energy independence and a stable economy died then. Arab oil and economic decay through debt spending were in. Whoopee! And hasn't that worked out well?
Sounds like someone didn't take his pills today.
Easy there, fireball.
This story is no place for actual facts.
All physical inventions, too. The position of all their atoms can be boiled down to an equation as well.
Which is why that argument doesn't work, and never will work.
Either society decides that protection of innovation has a net benefit or it decides it doesn't. Making stupid arguments like "oh, I can reduce that to a mathematical formula, so it can't be protected" misses the entire point, and starts the argument down a path you explicitly can't win.
And there's certainly a pretty solid correlation between society protecting innovations and allowing profit to be made by the innovator and the massive pace of innovation over the last 200 years. I don't think you can win the argument that patents hurt society in aggregate. They only hurt individuals.
The bombings of Tokyo damaged more and killed more than both nukes combined.
The two nuclear bombs ended the war, not because we vaporized two cities, but because they had no idea how many more we had.
Use tax is a straightforward violation of the Constitution.
Ah, good to know we've got a Supreme Court justice on here. That'll make all these discussions on legal stories a lot more productive!
The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900.
First of all they're dirt poor and not going to pay for broadband or own a computer.
The 2003 Median Income of US households was $45,018 per annum. [1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
So the average American is dirt poor and can't afford internet or a computer?
Are you one of those people who thinks the median households in the US are still middle class?
In what way? How a state chooses to tax its residents is up to the state.
And buying something from Amazon and not paying a use-tax on it is a straightforward violation of the law.
I'm not sure the complainers have an ethical leg to stand on here. If the consumers are following the law, its better for them for Amazon to take the taxes because otherwise they need to track and total up all their purchases to calculate their use tax.
But I bet all the whiners on here have never payed up their use tax.
p>Sometimes I think the US is the only nation actively aspiring and working to achieve thrid-world status.
That's not fair. Half the EU is trying harder than we are!
So you double tax all the local stores?
Because you do realize Walmart doesn't have a secret basement full of slave laborers making the products in the store, right?
They ship them from China where they have a secret basement full of slave laborers.
I wouldn't assume that. There's definitely a patent thicket related to cell phone technology, but for the most part all of the companies involved have cross licensed all their patents with each other. You see battles like this come up when you get a company (Oracle) that isn't a cellphone company and thus not part of the cross-licensing that wants a piece of the action, or you see it when companies (like Apple vs Samsung) decide they can't effectively compete and try to find areas in their portfolio that are applicable and not cross-licensed already.
Where the relavent patent portfolios are deemed by the two companies to be of equivalent value, no money changes hands. If there's an imbalance, money changes hands. But I wouldn't assume that all smart phones are infringing, and you absolutely better believe they don't know it -- for patents they consider valid and relavent (because knowing substantially increases the penalties as a result of a court case!).
Tell your friends to stop talking about your penis and talking in MiX3d c4SE l33t 5p34k.
Or get a new spam filter? I may have one false positive a month on my GMail account.
Does LegalZoom have a template for filing class action lawsuits?
Actually Win7 on all but a reformat and re-install will preserve the data just fine. Unlike XP, user data is all under the User folder, unless you went out of your way to put it elsewhere. (And filesystem virtualization will ensure even older buggy apps write their files under your account.)
And, in either case, a system restore doesn't do what virtually everyone on this thread seems to think it does. Restore != reinstall.
No, system restore does NOT work that way. You revert back to a restore point, which is a snapshot of all the protected OS files, assuming you didn't do something stupid like turn off restore points.
Its basically like Time Machine on OSX -- NTFS supports copy-on-write, so the deltas from the snapshots can be tossed. (I don't think its widely known that NTFS can do that because there's no swooshy UI for doing it like on the Mac, but you can do it.)
Thats normal -- you owe taxes between what the strike price is of an option and what the FMV for that option is at the time of granting. Options tend to have strike prices less than the fair market value of that share.
Were you not around in the .com boom in the late 90's? That was extremely common -- people owing $200k in taxes on shares that dropped to zero, bankrupting people.
Microsoft already had the most logical use for it (OCS/Lync/TellMe) for an environment (corporate) where its not already illegal, and where there may be compliance and legal reasons for *doing* the recording.
The article is FUD. Skype wasn't a blip on their radar when the patent was filed. Imagining it has anything to do with Skype is just ignorance. Skype wasn't (and isn't) a Microsoft property, and its absolutely normal in the disclosure part of a patent to call out examples of technology that the examiner would know. The whole reason that text exists is to help the examiner understand the claims.
But anti-MS articles (no matter how stupid) get ad impressions, so you'll keep seeing them a few times a week on /.
I'd say at least half the companies I've received options from had clauses just like this. It may not be par for the course with private venture-funded companies, but it sure is close.
You should always assume that options or common shares of private companies are going to be worthless to you. Never include them in your compensation evaluation. Even if you are in a company that lets you keep options without buyback if you leave, you still have common stock and they can play games and absorb the equity event's value entirely or almost entirely in the preferred shares. Or they can recapitalize the company prior to acquisition, re-issue stock to existing employees and investors and cut the rest out.
Making money off an equity event in a private company is like winning the lottery. Pretty nice if it happens, but you're not being rational about it if you think you're going to win just because you played.
That raises an interesting question. If I rip a song using a particular program from a particular pressing of a CD, and you rip it using the same program from the same pressing of a CD, will the two end up with identical hashes? I've always been under the impression that ripping audio data wasn't entirely deterministic from a CD (no error correction), and thus two rips even with identical software and settings won't necessarily byte-for-byte match.
If thats the case, hashes of a given song can be compared to known hashes of songs from file sharing services.
$100k, fully loaded, barely pays for an intern.
A good security person would be 3-4x that, once you include all the non-salary costs of having one full-time.
(I know it doesn't really matter to your point, but people have a really screwy sense of what an FTE costs a company... with salary, benefits, payroll taxes, unemployment taxes, cost for space, cost for hardware, etc)
I get that there is massive FUD now that Microsoft has bought out Skype, but that doesn't mean every single bit of normal behavior (like locking out and forcing updates on old versions of clients) is somehow a malicious news-worthy event in some grand conspiracy.
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