At least 40% of my paycheck is going to the government in some way: income tax, social security, state income tax, state sales tax, excise taxes, property tax. If it's not mostly paying for civil serpents, then where is it going?
Not to pick on you in particular, but this illustrates a common misuse of the.com domain. You probably don't expect to do much business outside of a 100 mile radius. You probably aren't going to send a car to Los Angeles, and (as you've generously acknowledged) you wouldn't be concerned about a company of the same name in the same business in Ireland because no way is it in competition. So why isn't your url roblimo.co.md.us instead of tying up an international domain name for a localized business?
Gold does have value as plating on electronic contacts, pretty stuff for jewelry, etc. It would make better heatsinks than any other material, but it's priced too high for that use. It's worth $200/ounce or more only because some people think it's money, but it is always going to have more worth than pieces of paper with green ink... Admittedly, if people ever became rational, the supply/demand curve might drop the price to the point that other uses such as heatsinks became cost-effective (increasing the demand to match the supply), but there's not much danger of that.
If you look at payscales: I'm not sure about 1901, but in the 1880's a hard day's work (12 hours) would get an semiskilled laborer 1 dollar or less. A dollar was 1/16 ounce of gold. So 192 hours of work = 1 ounce of gold, then. Now 1 ounce of gold might pay for 30 to 50 hours of labor.
Of course, 30 hours of labor in a modern factory will produce much more than 192 hours would in 1901. 30 hours on a farm will produce more food than thousands of hours on a farm in 1901. So in food and mass-produced goods, an ounce of gold is worth much more than a hundred years ago. But when you need personal services or hand-made goods, it is worth less.
Forgot to mention: the value placed upon gold is almost as much of a social construct as the value placed upon pieces of paper printed by the US Mint. Gold is good stuff for plating electronic contacts and making pretty jewelry, but what runs it up to 200+ an ounce is that people think it's money. At least it's a social construct with a very long history -- but in a society of rational geniuses gold would probably be worth a tenth as much. Steel and aluminum would retain their value, but storage would be a real pain. However, I wouldn't worry about most people becoming rational or smart...
Not to mention that the US dollar has been backed by precisely nothing ever since 1935... So your bank account is essentially an electronically recorded promise to give you pieces of paper on demand, even though they have promised many more pieces of paper than they have in the vault. The pieces of paper have the intrinsic value of very rough toilet paper, but as long as the rest of the world doesn't realize that, you can swap them for things of real value.
E-gold is an electronically recorded promise to keep a certain amount of gold in storage and deliver it to you upon demand. If you trust them to actually do it, that's got to be a lot more secure than a bank balance in $. However, there are laws specifying how banks are to be audited, most accounts are also insured by the FDIC, and unless the federal gov't collapses together with the banking system you can be pretty sure the bank will be able to cough up your pieces of green paper eventually -- whether or not it is still worth anything. I don't see any way I can get an equivalent assurance the the e-gold people really do have enough gold in the vaults... I'm not accusing them of anything, but in the early 19th century before banking regulation, every bank in this country was printing paper money supposedly backed by gold in the vaults, and a fair number of them turned out to be frauds.
Note that with e-gold or any other money that is really backed 100% by gold in the vault, you've got to pay the expenses of the bank. They can't make money by renting your money out. So e-gold clips you for 1% up front, and then charges 1% a year storage fee. Actually, I'm surprised they can keep the costs so low.
I'm surprised the rental agency would do that (unless they did call your bank or something). If someone was planning to steal the car, they'd certainly provide themselves with a faked check that could not be traced back to them -- and if somehow they ever did catch up to the criminal, chances are the car would be in pieces, he would have received only about 10% of the value, and he'd have blown it already. With the credit card and similar cards, the agency can dial into a database to check that at least the name on the rental contract belongs to a person with a history of paying bills. (There is still some risk that the guy driving the car away isn't really that person, but it's fairly small. Most pickpockets and muggers aren't able to rush right over to the airport and use the card before it's been reported stolen.)
They've been flying manned space missions for forty years. They damned well should have figured out how to handle ONE passenger by now.
By comparison: 20 years after the Wright brothers first flight, you could get a brief joyride in an airplane for a few bucks at nearly any county fair. 30 years after the first airplane flight, Pan Am was running scheduled passenger service over much of the world, using airplanes designed for carrying passengers. NASA hasn't been advancing spaceflight, it's been holding it back by throwing obstacles in the way of free enterprise.
I hadn't been able to open the page with pictures when I wrote this, and I don't think I'll bother now. It does sound like Labview. I program in Labview. It's a good way to design a screen form, but a terrible way to code. I'd rather code in C (or better yet, some higher-level text-based language) with some tool to allow what-you-see-is-what-you-get screen designs, but our biggest customer made the choice of LabView... (I'm not prejudiced against graphic design in general -- when I'm doing circuit designs, I prefer drawing a schematic to coding in VHDL or Verilog. But if you are coding software, text does work better.)
Besides that, I wonder how well their software really works. From what I've heard about conventional FPGA design software, you code in a C-like language (Verilog or VHDL), then run a simulation to verify the code, then you try to compile it to a physical layout -- and try, and try, and try. If fast operation is needed, you've got to intervene manually to arrange the layout so connections on critcal paths are short. If you want to use even half the gates on the chip, you've got to intervene manually in the layout so it doesn't run out of connection paths in the densest areas. I don't think it likely that these people have found a magic way around that. More likely, their system will only work if you never try to use more than 1/4 of the possible gates or speed...
1) It pretty much renders irrelevant the limited protections we did have against reading other peoples' e-mail -- you can't "intercept" it, but you can read it from the hard drive after it has been sent on. And while this decision applies to a company reading e-mail sent from its own computers, I don't see what will keep ISP's from reading your mail...
2) The guy was basically fired for reporting his employer for possible violations of the law. If the court considered that at all, it's not in the news report -- but it should NEVER be legal to retaliate because someone called the cops...
Besides that, the publishers did NOT buy the articles originally. They just bought the right to print them, and to re-print without revisions. The authors still own the basic copyrights. The issue is, for contracts written before the publishers were aware of the possibilities on the internet, that the contracts don't define whether putting it on-line is "re-printing" or not.
Nah, I can't stand the food.;) Besides, they might shoot me. Seriously, what you really need here is statistics -- the reported murder rate, official executions, and other sudden deaths. I would love to see trustworthy statistics from China -- but I don't expect their government to compile them without bias, and I don't see how anyone else could... What I do know is the record of the Nazis part of the record of the Soviets, and an order of magnitude estimate of the deaths under Mao in China. And in each of those countries, at least ten million died by the actions of their own gov't in a few years. Far fewer Americans died violently in the whole 20th century.
If you don't like the contract, don't sign it. Take your work somewhere else. Bus tables to satisfy your addiction to food and shelter until you can get a better deal...
If you're wondering if that is sarcasm, I'm not too sure myself. It is a good point in theory, not so good in practice, when all the buyers of a particular product and service somehow coincidentally start demanding the same yellow-dog contract. And most people have far less negotiating room than writers. Maybe we need more anti-trust enforcement...
Magazines and newspapers are different in that generally their contracts gave them reprint rights without royalties owed to the authors (although the authors retained copyright), while with books there is a per-copy royalty. And it sounds like your standard contracts specify what you owe the authors for certain derivative works; the periodicals' contracts didn't cover anything they'd have to pay for later. (This is about freelancers who retain their copyright, not staff writers who generally came under "work for hire" rules and so never owned the copyrights.) As a book publisher, you have to keep track of authors or their agents and heirs as long as there is any chance of selling one more book -- you've got to know where to send the money. The periodicals probably deal with many more authors, pay them at time of publication, and have no reason to keep track of those who are no longer sending in publishable work. So if putting a periodical into an electronic database requires a new contract with all the authors, it's probably not going to happen -- they can't find all the authors, and probably couldn't afford the royalties demanded if they did find them.
In the past the standard freelance contract would give the publisher rights to reprint the article. This meant, for instance, that a magazine could publish back issues in bound books and microfilm for the convenience of libraries needing to store the magazines for researchers, but they didn't get movie rights. I'm not sure, but I think a "best of Life magazine" book would have been enough of a change in format from the original format to require getting author's permissions. But the old contracts didn't cover the internet or other electronic formats, leaving it an arguable area.
Newer articles are covered by contracts which do specify electronic forms, so this is just about the older articles. On the one hand, if it is required that someone putting old publications on the net for researchers obtain permission from every freelance writer and photographer, then we're going to lose a lot of our history until copyrights expire. (I've ranted and raved about how stupid and unconstitutional the present life + 75 year copyright term is elsewhere.) On the other hand, there are people building databases by assembling works from many sources, and charging access to them, without payment to the original authors and copyright holders, and that's not right either.
My opinion (and I'm not a lawyer) is that just posting the whole original publication on the net, with or without a good search function, is just reprinting. Same for CD's of course. (I really like my 100 years of National Geographic on CD.) But picking the publications apart into separate articles and building a database is something else.
I think a lot more accurate target is the "self esteem" movement, that is, education schools teaching the teachers to try to make the kids feel good about themselves by praising them for crappy work. Of course, the kids see right through that.
The second part of this is an often repeated untruth -- that low self esteem causes violence. Someone finally did some research on this. Actually, violent criminals think very highly of themselves, without any real accomplishments to support their self-esteem. So when they think their inflated self-opinion is challenged, they explode into violence.
Both people with low self-esteem and people with solidly-founded high self esteem are unlikely to resort to violence. (Makes sense: the first group suspects they'd lose the fight, and the second
know better ways to handle problems.)
A teacher could try to handle low self-esteem by teaching the kid to do work he or she could really be proud of. (I know my father did, many times. But that was in college, not at a public school.) But most of the so-called teachers can barely teach, so instead they praise crappy work. And some kids put enough belief in the praise that they are walking around thinking they are really great, but aware other people may not agree -- so they'll shoot if you look at them wrong...
No, most of the shootings aren't in the upper middle class schools -- those are just the ones that get all the media coverage. I guess the media don't think one poor black kid shooting another is worth reporting. Or maybe it's that if someone tried to pull a Columbine in a Detroit public school, half the teachers and students would be shooting back!
In China, it must be much easier to inform on someone and get the gov't to kill him than it is to kill him yourself. Authoritarian governments always have a low murder rate -- because they aren't counting the murders they commit.
Learning how to use and program FPGAs won't be that big of a problem, with or without years of programming experience behind us. Except that with FPGA's you aren't programming, you are doing logic design. It's not a case of mental flexibility, it's a case of one job being inherently much harder. I've worked on microprocessors so new there wasn't even an assembler, we had to hand-translate to hex -- and even that's easier than the logic design tools I've worked with.
Only if someone can parallelize the compiler. I expect compilers to be among the programs which are NOT run by a system like this as well as by a good CPU. And worse, judging from the FPGA design software I know of, the compiler for the HAL is bound to be much larger and many times slower than any normal compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
At least 40% of my paycheck is going to the government in some way: income tax, social security, state income tax, state sales tax, excise taxes, property tax. If it's not mostly paying for civil serpents, then where is it going?
Not to pick on you in particular, but this illustrates a common misuse of the .com domain. You probably don't expect to do much business outside of a 100 mile radius. You probably aren't going to send a car to Los Angeles, and (as you've generously acknowledged) you wouldn't be concerned about a company of the same name in the same business in Ireland because no way is it in competition. So why isn't your url roblimo.co.md.us instead of tying up an international domain name for a localized business?
Unless you are actually a resident of .tv (wherever that is), it sure looks like domain squatting to me.
Gold does have value as plating on electronic contacts, pretty stuff for jewelry, etc. It would make better heatsinks than any other material, but it's priced too high for that use. It's worth $200/ounce or more only because some people think it's money, but it is always going to have more worth than pieces of paper with green ink... Admittedly, if people ever became rational, the supply/demand curve might drop the price to the point that other uses such as heatsinks became cost-effective (increasing the demand to match the supply), but there's not much danger of that.
If you look at payscales: I'm not sure about 1901, but in the 1880's a hard day's work (12 hours) would get an semiskilled laborer 1 dollar or less. A dollar was 1/16 ounce of gold. So 192 hours of work = 1 ounce of gold, then. Now 1 ounce of gold might pay for 30 to 50 hours of labor.
Of course, 30 hours of labor in a modern factory will produce much more than 192 hours would in 1901. 30 hours on a farm will produce more food than thousands of hours on a farm in 1901. So in food and mass-produced goods, an ounce of gold is worth much more than a hundred years ago. But when you need personal services or hand-made goods, it is worth less.
Forgot to mention: the value placed upon gold is almost as much of a social construct as the value placed upon pieces of paper printed by the US Mint. Gold is good stuff for plating electronic contacts and making pretty jewelry, but what runs it up to 200+ an ounce is that people think it's money. At least it's a social construct with a very long history -- but in a society of rational geniuses gold would probably be worth a tenth as much. Steel and aluminum would retain their value, but storage would be a real pain. However, I wouldn't worry about most people becoming rational or smart...
Not to mention that the US dollar has been backed by precisely nothing ever since 1935... So your bank account is essentially an electronically recorded promise to give you pieces of paper on demand, even though they have promised many more pieces of paper than they have in the vault. The pieces of paper have the intrinsic value of very rough toilet paper, but as long as the rest of the world doesn't realize that, you can swap them for things of real value.
E-gold is an electronically recorded promise to keep a certain amount of gold in storage and deliver it to you upon demand. If you trust them to actually do it, that's got to be a lot more secure than a bank balance in $. However, there are laws specifying how banks are to be audited, most accounts are also insured by the FDIC, and unless the federal gov't collapses together with the banking system you can be pretty sure the bank will be able to cough up your pieces of green paper eventually -- whether or not it is still worth anything. I don't see any way I can get an equivalent assurance the the e-gold people really do have enough gold in the vaults... I'm not accusing them of anything, but in the early 19th century before banking regulation, every bank in this country was printing paper money supposedly backed by gold in the vaults, and a fair number of them turned out to be frauds.
Note that with e-gold or any other money that is really backed 100% by gold in the vault, you've got to pay the expenses of the bank. They can't make money by renting your money out. So e-gold clips you for 1% up front, and then charges 1% a year storage fee. Actually, I'm surprised they can keep the costs so low.
I'm surprised the rental agency would do that (unless they did call your bank or something). If someone was planning to steal the car, they'd certainly provide themselves with a faked check that could not be traced back to them -- and if somehow they ever did catch up to the criminal, chances are the car would be in pieces, he would have received only about 10% of the value, and he'd have blown it already. With the credit card and similar cards, the agency can dial into a database to check that at least the name on the rental contract belongs to a person with a history of paying bills. (There is still some risk that the guy driving the car away isn't really that person, but it's fairly small. Most pickpockets and muggers aren't able to rush right over to the airport and use the card before it's been reported stolen.)
They've been flying manned space missions for forty years. They damned well should have figured out how to handle ONE passenger by now.
By comparison: 20 years after the Wright brothers first flight, you could get a brief joyride in an airplane for a few bucks at nearly any county fair. 30 years after the first airplane flight, Pan Am was running scheduled passenger service over much of the world, using airplanes designed for carrying passengers. NASA hasn't been advancing spaceflight, it's been holding it back by throwing obstacles in the way of free enterprise.
NASA is willing to train him??? He showed up for training a while back and was refused admittance.
And what's the ratio of manned missions? I'm guessing 5 or 10 to 1?
No, no, no -- you've got to take Dubya, and Detroit too... ;)
Sell him tickets to Venus!
I hadn't been able to open the page with pictures when I wrote this, and I don't think I'll bother now. It does sound like Labview. I program in Labview. It's a good way to design a screen form, but a terrible way to code. I'd rather code in C (or better yet, some higher-level text-based language) with some tool to allow what-you-see-is-what-you-get screen designs, but our biggest customer made the choice of LabView... (I'm not prejudiced against graphic design in general -- when I'm doing circuit designs, I prefer drawing a schematic to coding in VHDL or Verilog. But if you are coding software, text does work better.)
Besides that, I wonder how well their software really works. From what I've heard about conventional FPGA design software, you code in a C-like language (Verilog or VHDL), then run a simulation to verify the code, then you try to compile it to a physical layout -- and try, and try, and try. If fast operation is needed, you've got to intervene manually to arrange the layout so connections on critcal paths are short. If you want to use even half the gates on the chip, you've got to intervene manually in the layout so it doesn't run out of connection paths in the densest areas. I don't think it likely that these people have found a magic way around that. More likely, their system will only work if you never try to use more than 1/4 of the possible gates or speed...
There are two scary aspects to this decision:
1) It pretty much renders irrelevant the limited protections we did have against reading other peoples' e-mail -- you can't "intercept" it, but you can read it from the hard drive after it has been sent on. And while this decision applies to a company reading e-mail sent from its own computers, I don't see what will keep ISP's from reading your mail...
2) The guy was basically fired for reporting his employer for possible violations of the law. If the court considered that at all, it's not in the news report -- but it should NEVER be legal to retaliate because someone called the cops...
Besides that, the publishers did NOT buy the articles originally. They just bought the right to print them, and to re-print without revisions. The authors still own the basic copyrights. The issue is, for contracts written before the publishers were aware of the possibilities on the internet, that the contracts don't define whether putting it on-line is "re-printing" or not.
Nah, I can't stand the food. ;) Besides, they might shoot me. Seriously, what you really need here is statistics -- the reported murder rate, official executions, and other sudden deaths. I would love to see trustworthy statistics from China -- but I don't expect their government to compile them without bias, and I don't see how anyone else could... What I do know is the record of the Nazis part of the record of the Soviets, and an order of magnitude estimate of the deaths under Mao in China. And in each of those countries, at least ten million died by the actions of their own gov't in a few years. Far fewer Americans died violently in the whole 20th century.
If you don't like the contract, don't sign it. Take your work somewhere else. Bus tables to satisfy your addiction to food and shelter until you can get a better deal...
If you're wondering if that is sarcasm, I'm not too sure myself. It is a good point in theory, not so good in practice, when all the buyers of a particular product and service somehow coincidentally start demanding the same yellow-dog contract. And most people have far less negotiating room than writers. Maybe we need more anti-trust enforcement...
Magazines and newspapers are different in that generally their contracts gave them reprint rights without royalties owed to the authors (although the authors retained copyright), while with books there is a per-copy royalty. And it sounds like your standard contracts specify what you owe the authors for certain derivative works; the periodicals' contracts didn't cover anything they'd have to pay for later. (This is about freelancers who retain their copyright, not staff writers who generally came under "work for hire" rules and so never owned the copyrights.) As a book publisher, you have to keep track of authors or their agents and heirs as long as there is any chance of selling one more book -- you've got to know where to send the money. The periodicals probably deal with many more authors, pay them at time of publication, and have no reason to keep track of those who are no longer sending in publishable work. So if putting a periodical into an electronic database requires a new contract with all the authors, it's probably not going to happen -- they can't find all the authors, and probably couldn't afford the royalties demanded if they did find them.
In the past the standard freelance contract would give the publisher rights to reprint the article. This meant, for instance, that a magazine could publish back issues in bound books and microfilm for the convenience of libraries needing to store the magazines for researchers, but they didn't get movie rights. I'm not sure, but I think a "best of Life magazine" book would have been enough of a change in format from the original format to require getting author's permissions. But the old contracts didn't cover the internet or other electronic formats, leaving it an arguable area.
Newer articles are covered by contracts which do specify electronic forms, so this is just about the older articles. On the one hand, if it is required that someone putting old publications on the net for researchers obtain permission from every freelance writer and photographer, then we're going to lose a lot of our history until copyrights expire. (I've ranted and raved about how stupid and unconstitutional the present life + 75 year copyright term is elsewhere.) On the other hand, there are people building databases by assembling works from many sources, and charging access to them, without payment to the original authors and copyright holders, and that's not right either.
My opinion (and I'm not a lawyer) is that just posting the whole original publication on the net, with or without a good search function, is just reprinting. Same for CD's of course. (I really like my 100 years of National Geographic on CD.) But picking the publications apart into separate articles and building a database is something else.
I think a lot more accurate target is the "self esteem" movement, that is, education schools teaching the teachers to try to make the kids feel good about themselves by praising them for crappy work. Of course, the kids see right through that.
The second part of this is an often repeated untruth -- that low self esteem causes violence. Someone finally did some research on this. Actually, violent criminals think very highly of themselves, without any real accomplishments to support their self-esteem. So when they think their inflated self-opinion is challenged, they explode into violence.
Both people with low self-esteem and people with solidly-founded high self esteem are unlikely to resort to violence. (Makes sense: the first group suspects they'd lose the fight, and the second know better ways to handle problems.)
A teacher could try to handle low self-esteem by teaching the kid to do work he or she could really be proud of. (I know my father did, many times. But that was in college, not at a public school.) But most of the so-called teachers can barely teach, so instead they praise crappy work. And some kids put enough belief in the praise that they are walking around thinking they are really great, but aware other people may not agree -- so they'll shoot if you look at them wrong...
No, most of the shootings aren't in the upper middle class schools -- those are just the ones that get all the media coverage. I guess the media don't think one poor black kid shooting another is worth reporting. Or maybe it's that if someone tried to pull a Columbine in a Detroit public school, half the teachers and students would be shooting back!
In China, it must be much easier to inform on someone and get the gov't to kill him than it is to kill him yourself. Authoritarian governments always have a low murder rate -- because they aren't counting the murders they commit.
Learning how to use and program FPGAs won't be that big of a problem, with or without years of programming experience behind us. Except that with FPGA's you aren't programming, you are doing logic design. It's not a case of mental flexibility, it's a case of one job being inherently much harder. I've worked on microprocessors so new there wasn't even an assembler, we had to hand-translate to hex -- and even that's easier than the logic design tools I've worked with.
Only if someone can parallelize the compiler. I expect compilers to be among the programs which are NOT run by a system like this as well as by a good CPU. And worse, judging from the FPGA design software I know of, the compiler for the HAL is bound to be much larger and many times slower than any normal compiler.