Yep. That's the issue. If they were motivated independent contractors working efficiently on their own and paying their own benefits, that would be one thing. But in this case it's mostly dime a dozen subcontracted workers where most of the extra money goes to a huge company that got the contract through lobbyists or backroom deals anyway.
Not that different from Blackwater and how they charged like 3-4x per "contractor" for security services as what the highest paid US soldiers ever made in Iraq...
Actually, GIF wasn't an official "standard", just an image format created by Compuserve and adopted in a bunch of other places.
And JPEG was specifically designed/created to be patent royalty free:
"The JPEG committee has as one of its explicit goals that their standards (in particular their baseline methods) be implementable without payment of license fees, and they have secured appropriate license rights for their upcoming JPEG 2000 standard from over 20 large organizations."
There have been a few lawsuits over patents claimed to be infringed by JPEG, but they were from patent trolls who were ultimately unsuccessful.
But I agree that the way some standards like MPEG, JEDEC, etc. handle patent licensing is ridiculous (though I guess the JEDEC fiasco was mostly due to Rambus' douchy behavior...)
DISH Network has seized upon the uncertainty surrounding Netflix by taking the opportunity to roll out a Blockbuster-branded service for streaming movies and TV shows as well as renting media through the mail.
Why is it that people always feel the need to try to make correlations like this when they so obviously don't make any sense.
These decisions are not made and implemented in a few days. DISH bought Blockbuster's assets in April with the intent to do exactly what they are doing, and are launching the service in next week. Trying to claim it was a reaction to some decision Netflix made last week is absurd.
True, the difference is the retailers have a non-trivial overhead for stocking and selling a physical game, whereas the cost of a digital download is pennies.
One argument is that that increased margin could be shared with the developers... then, again, I guess they don't make any less.
What's *much* worse is when companies like Apple think that they can get the same margin from content distributors. The problem there is that the content distributors are already basically retailers - the content *owners* ie. studios are the wholesalers. If Apple, Microsoft, etc, decide to take a 30% cut from content distributors (for movies, music, books, magazines, etc) while also competing with them, there is no way anyone else can be competitive. It's an antitrust suit waiting to happen...
Not that I don't agree whatever tax reform happens shouldn't be more onerous on small businesses... but I'm not sure I agree entirely with your statement.
I'm pretty sure if an LLC/S-Corp, etc spends money on employees, that extra payroll would count against net profit, and so would not be taxed. It seems in that case the tax would actually encourage expansion and capital expenditures over taking extra profit.
A sole proprietorship can be at a disadvantage this way when trying to grow, etc, but that's why they incorporate when it becomes worthwhile. And besides, due to the preferential tax treatment for corporations and the horrible health insurance situation for sole proprietors, the US has one of the lowest rates of self-employed people of all Western countries. Republicans who claim more taxes will hurt that small segment of the US population need to get a clue, they have already managed to hurt it much worse in recent times with previous tax and benefit policies.
6 months of rain!? Do you live here and just never go outside, or are you just trolling? How many of these SF weather myths do I have to debunk in one day!?
Mean clear days by month + total below. And "clear" means days that are majority sunny. SF only averages 67 rainy days a year. And if you want to stand on the beach in the surf, maybe winter will seem cold, but I guarantee you an evening in January in downtown SF both feels and *is* warmer than an evening in January in downtown San Jose...
SAN FRANCISCO 9 8 10 11 14 16 21 19 18 16 11 9 160
These stats are all available with 30 seconds of searching, if you don't feel like going outside at least once a day...
SF may not be a mecca of *warmth* (in the summer - in winter it's warmer than most or the rest of the Bay Area), but it still WAY in the top percentage of US cities as far as sunny days goes. Not only blows away Seattle by 2x, it beats most major cities outside of CA and AZ...
Face it, the economy continues to build wealth during the hours that the stock market is closed. And on weekends.
Maybe 20 years ago stocks stopped trading at the closing bell (though not really, anyway) - but now they pretty much trade 24/7 with after hours trading. Though, again, not that it matters. Not sure why you think some aggregate statistic like the DOW has anything to do with actual growth - it's just an indicator. But one that over the long term is *an* indicator of that wealth being built.
This is still all going back to the zero sum gain claim, which continues to be untrue. And now that you are at least admitting wealth does build, does that mean you are coming around?;)
But that's irrelevant... the DOW is a measure of overall stock market health, not some chart of an unchanging particular set of companies over the history of the market.
Also, the DOW is irrelevant to your claim that the market is a zero sum game. If it was, and your examples were the way to think of things, than the actual US GDP would never change. Anecdotes about failed companies don't change that.
The fact is, GDP does go up and so does the aggregate value of all companies traded on the market. Here's an easy way to think of it - millions and millions of people every day do work. That work adds overall value to the economy in whatever way you want to measure it. One measure is the stock market, though it's not really the best one (GDP is a better one).
That may be true with shorts, futures, or other derivatives, but it's not true for normal stock transactions. It's entirely possible for every transaction on a stock to make the seller money as long as the company grows. And even once it stops growing, it's still possible for the current owner to make money off of a stable company with decent dividends. Stock is just an asset (limited ownership in a company) - it's really not much different in this respect from buying gold or other assets.
ultimately, the value of every stock goes to zero
You can even claim that eventually the world will end some day and the value of all assets will have no meaning, but then you might as well just call life or the universe zero sum games. But using the argument "nothing is permanent so nothing has any lasting value" doesn't really make for very interesting discussion...
You really should read the post you replied to again, he is completely correct. Most supercomputers today are relatively general purpose hardware with high speed interconnects.
To be blunt, it doesn't really matter what "supercomputer" is defined as in your mind, it matters how the majority of supercomputer developers and researches define it in their minds...
Yeah, but that's part of the point - why would they get a budget that would give them so much computing power that they didn't know what to do with the excess? And even sketchier, what academic project has ever looked for commercial uses for a big funded setup like this to "recoup some of the costs"?!?
Five years is a joke considering possible intelligence compromise from doctored gear.
Well, was the gear used to compromise intelligence or not? If it was, that's another (much more serious) crime. If it wasn't then that crime wasn't committed so you don't punish someone for it.
I can do all of that simultaneously just fine with my current cable connection. 50Mbps is plenty for everything you describe, doesn't come close to 1Gbps.
They started streaming 1080p with DD+ 5.1 on the PS3 a while ago. But the compression is still shit for HD, that's true. Try Vudu if you want good 1080p streaming movies.
1. Netflix 1080p streaming is max about 6Mbps. I can do 3-4 of those at once with my current cable ISP. 2. VoIP bitrate is so low as to be insignificant (we're talking in Kbps) 3. "Home servers" is not an app. And if you mean serve something *from* your home, that's upstream bandwidth, which is a different issue entirely (these connections are highly asymmetric). Don't expect gigabit upstream for $100/month. 4. "Downloading Linux blu-ray.isos" - I'm not even sure what that means. I have never seen a Linux distro mastered for BD-ROM, and even if there was that's insanely fringe. If you just mean downloading BD movies, that's a *possible* use, though good luck finding anyone who cares if you can only pirate your movies at 100Mbps.
I think what people fail to understand is that it's nearly impossible to get sustained downloads in the gigabit range from most Internet sources over a single TCP connection (say, one HTTP download). And even if you could, servers have limited bandwidth as well, and you share it with all of the other downloaders. If you want to get near 1 Gbps with things like ISO downloads you need P2P (like bittorrent) or some custom multi-connection protocol, and that's only if you have some serious quantity or quality of seeders. And even so, there just aren't enough legal uses for massive P2P downloads to make gigabit worthwhile for the masses. One Linux ISO every few months does not qualify - your world will not change if it takes you 1 minute or 10 minutes to download the latest Debian or Fedora distro.
Utilize gigabit *in* the home, sure. gigabit *to* the home - not as easily. In your example you'd still probably only be using 20-30Mbps over your Internet connection, unless your computer and PS3 are not in the same home:)
They aren't saying it's not needed for businesses, just most home users. And no need to argue that some home users still need it - those 0.1% might as well be qualified as businesses. Also, the article already mentions that off-site backups would be useful, but any decent backup system is incremental so the major benefit is only a one time thing.
Not that I'm saying I completely agree with the article - you and I may be in those 0.1%:) It is kind of dumb to use a laptop getting 420Mbps sustained as an example of why gigabit isn't useful. There will always be overhead, of course, and 420Mbps is pretty damn good over a theoretical 1 Gbps broadband link! And it proves 100Mbps would not be enough to saturate, of course. Not to mention the fact that many people have more than 1 IP-connected device in the home. I'm sure I'm not typical, but between computers, smart phones, tablets, TVs, DVRs, BD players, game consoles, and security cameras, I'm probably pushing 20 devices. And it's not uncommon for 3-4 of those to be downloading or streaming HD video at the same time...
I think the issue is legally vs. morally/ethically.
Legally, well - it's almost never legal to download someone else's version of something you physically own. The "backup" exemption to copyright law only applies to a copy *you* make of the actual media that you own - the law is pretty crystal clear on this. An exception to this, of course, would be if you bought a license to do it (some software licenses specifically allow it).
Ethically - well, of course, it's not as clear because unlike the law morality and ethics are not codified:) Personally I'd have no problem ethically with acquiring a backup online (or a copy to, for example, burn a new ROM to fix a broken arcade PCB that you own - that's the whole idea of the backup exemption in the first place).
Basically, 99.9% of the emulator/MAME industry is technically illegal, but unlike downloading a bunch of music or movies you have never owned, it's a lot harder to argue that it's unethical...
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Yep. That's the issue. If they were motivated independent contractors working efficiently on their own and paying their own benefits, that would be one thing. But in this case it's mostly dime a dozen subcontracted workers where most of the extra money goes to a huge company that got the contract through lobbyists or backroom deals anyway.
Not that different from Blackwater and how they charged like 3-4x per "contractor" for security services as what the highest paid US soldiers ever made in Iraq...
Actually, GIF wasn't an official "standard", just an image format created by Compuserve and adopted in a bunch of other places.
And JPEG was specifically designed/created to be patent royalty free:
"The JPEG committee has as one of its explicit goals that their standards (in particular their baseline methods) be implementable without payment of license fees, and they have secured appropriate license rights for their upcoming JPEG 2000 standard from over 20 large organizations."
There have been a few lawsuits over patents claimed to be infringed by JPEG, but they were from patent trolls who were ultimately unsuccessful.
But I agree that the way some standards like MPEG, JEDEC, etc. handle patent licensing is ridiculous (though I guess the JEDEC fiasco was mostly due to Rambus' douchy behavior...)
DISH Network has seized upon the uncertainty surrounding Netflix by taking the opportunity to roll out a Blockbuster-branded service for streaming movies and TV shows as well as renting media through the mail.
Why is it that people always feel the need to try to make correlations like this when they so obviously don't make any sense.
These decisions are not made and implemented in a few days. DISH bought Blockbuster's assets in April with the intent to do exactly what they are doing, and are launching the service in next week. Trying to claim it was a reaction to some decision Netflix made last week is absurd.
True, the difference is the retailers have a non-trivial overhead for stocking and selling a physical game, whereas the cost of a digital download is pennies.
One argument is that that increased margin could be shared with the developers... then, again, I guess they don't make any less.
What's *much* worse is when companies like Apple think that they can get the same margin from content distributors. The problem there is that the content distributors are already basically retailers - the content *owners* ie. studios are the wholesalers. If Apple, Microsoft, etc, decide to take a 30% cut from content distributors (for movies, music, books, magazines, etc) while also competing with them, there is no way anyone else can be competitive. It's an antitrust suit waiting to happen...
That might be relevant if all capital gain was from dividends, but that's not always the case (it's not even the most common case!)
Not that I don't agree whatever tax reform happens shouldn't be more onerous on small businesses... but I'm not sure I agree entirely with your statement.
I'm pretty sure if an LLC/S-Corp, etc spends money on employees, that extra payroll would count against net profit, and so would not be taxed. It seems in that case the tax would actually encourage expansion and capital expenditures over taking extra profit.
A sole proprietorship can be at a disadvantage this way when trying to grow, etc, but that's why they incorporate when it becomes worthwhile. And besides, due to the preferential tax treatment for corporations and the horrible health insurance situation for sole proprietors, the US has one of the lowest rates of self-employed people of all Western countries. Republicans who claim more taxes will hurt that small segment of the US population need to get a clue, they have already managed to hurt it much worse in recent times with previous tax and benefit policies.
6 months of rain!? Do you live here and just never go outside, or are you just trolling? How many of these SF weather myths do I have to debunk in one day!?
Mean clear days by month + total below. And "clear" means days that are majority sunny. SF only averages 67 rainy days a year. And if you want to stand on the beach in the surf, maybe winter will seem cold, but I guarantee you an evening in January in downtown SF both feels and *is* warmer than an evening in January in downtown San Jose...
SAN FRANCISCO 9 8 10 11 14 16 21 19 18 16 11 9 160
These stats are all available with 30 seconds of searching, if you don't feel like going outside at least once a day...
SF may not be a mecca of *warmth* (in the summer - in winter it's warmer than most or the rest of the Bay Area), but it still WAY in the top percentage of US cities as far as sunny days goes. Not only blows away Seattle by 2x, it beats most major cities outside of CA and AZ...
http://www.worldfactsandfigures.com/weatherfacts/numbersunny_city_desc.php
Caveat - this does not apply if you live in the Sunset, in that case the rest of SF pities you :)
Face it, the economy continues to build wealth during the hours that the stock market is closed. And on weekends.
Maybe 20 years ago stocks stopped trading at the closing bell (though not really, anyway) - but now they pretty much trade 24/7 with after hours trading. Though, again, not that it matters. Not sure why you think some aggregate statistic like the DOW has anything to do with actual growth - it's just an indicator. But one that over the long term is *an* indicator of that wealth being built.
This is still all going back to the zero sum gain claim, which continues to be untrue. And now that you are at least admitting wealth does build, does that mean you are coming around? ;)
But that's irrelevant... the DOW is a measure of overall stock market health, not some chart of an unchanging particular set of companies over the history of the market.
Also, the DOW is irrelevant to your claim that the market is a zero sum game. If it was, and your examples were the way to think of things, than the actual US GDP would never change. Anecdotes about failed companies don't change that.
The fact is, GDP does go up and so does the aggregate value of all companies traded on the market. Here's an easy way to think of it - millions and millions of people every day do work. That work adds overall value to the economy in whatever way you want to measure it. One measure is the stock market, though it's not really the best one (GDP is a better one).
Exactly. If this "rogue trader" made $2B for UBS with risky trades, he'd be promoted and given an 8 figure bonus.
ultimately, every trade has a winner and a loser
That may be true with shorts, futures, or other derivatives, but it's not true for normal stock transactions. It's entirely possible for every transaction on a stock to make the seller money as long as the company grows. And even once it stops growing, it's still possible for the current owner to make money off of a stable company with decent dividends. Stock is just an asset (limited ownership in a company) - it's really not much different in this respect from buying gold or other assets.
ultimately, the value of every stock goes to zero
You can even claim that eventually the world will end some day and the value of all assets will have no meaning, but then you might as well just call life or the universe zero sum games. But using the argument "nothing is permanent so nothing has any lasting value" doesn't really make for very interesting discussion...
Mostly useless, though. None of the image links work...
You really should read the post you replied to again, he is completely correct. Most supercomputers today are relatively general purpose hardware with high speed interconnects.
To be blunt, it doesn't really matter what "supercomputer" is defined as in your mind, it matters how the majority of supercomputer developers and researches define it in their minds...
Yeah, but that's part of the point - why would they get a budget that would give them so much computing power that they didn't know what to do with the excess? And even sketchier, what academic project has ever looked for commercial uses for a big funded setup like this to "recoup some of the costs"?!?
If can be invalidated if fraud was committed on the citizenship application.
FTA: "Zhao also fraudulently obtained U.S. citizenship based on lies on her citizenship application, the agency said."
Five years is a joke considering possible intelligence compromise from doctored gear.
Well, was the gear used to compromise intelligence or not? If it was, that's another (much more serious) crime. If it wasn't then that crime wasn't committed so you don't punish someone for it.
b) Not of a criminal state of mind
c) Not in need of rehabilitation
d) truly remorseful
And I think the *27* prior convictions for various other offenses more or less covers the rest...
I can do all of that simultaneously just fine with my current cable connection. 50Mbps is plenty for everything you describe, doesn't come close to 1Gbps.
They started streaming 1080p with DD+ 5.1 on the PS3 a while ago. But the compression is still shit for HD, that's true. Try Vudu if you want good 1080p streaming movies.
That's how AT&T U-verse and Verizon FIOS basically work already...
Ok...
1. Netflix 1080p streaming is max about 6Mbps. I can do 3-4 of those at once with my current cable ISP. .isos" - I'm not even sure what that means. I have never seen a Linux distro mastered for BD-ROM, and even if there was that's insanely fringe. If you just mean downloading BD movies, that's a *possible* use, though good luck finding anyone who cares if you can only pirate your movies at 100Mbps.
2. VoIP bitrate is so low as to be insignificant (we're talking in Kbps)
3. "Home servers" is not an app. And if you mean serve something *from* your home, that's upstream bandwidth, which is a different issue entirely (these connections are highly asymmetric). Don't expect gigabit upstream for $100/month.
4. "Downloading Linux blu-ray
I think what people fail to understand is that it's nearly impossible to get sustained downloads in the gigabit range from most Internet sources over a single TCP connection (say, one HTTP download). And even if you could, servers have limited bandwidth as well, and you share it with all of the other downloaders. If you want to get near 1 Gbps with things like ISO downloads you need P2P (like bittorrent) or some custom multi-connection protocol, and that's only if you have some serious quantity or quality of seeders. And even so, there just aren't enough legal uses for massive P2P downloads to make gigabit worthwhile for the masses. One Linux ISO every few months does not qualify - your world will not change if it takes you 1 minute or 10 minutes to download the latest Debian or Fedora distro.
Utilize gigabit *in* the home, sure. gigabit *to* the home - not as easily. In your example you'd still probably only be using 20-30Mbps over your Internet connection, unless your computer and PS3 are not in the same home :)
They aren't saying it's not needed for businesses, just most home users. And no need to argue that some home users still need it - those 0.1% might as well be qualified as businesses. Also, the article already mentions that off-site backups would be useful, but any decent backup system is incremental so the major benefit is only a one time thing.
Not that I'm saying I completely agree with the article - you and I may be in those 0.1% :) It is kind of dumb to use a laptop getting 420Mbps sustained as an example of why gigabit isn't useful. There will always be overhead, of course, and 420Mbps is pretty damn good over a theoretical 1 Gbps broadband link! And it proves 100Mbps would not be enough to saturate, of course. Not to mention the fact that many people have more than 1 IP-connected device in the home. I'm sure I'm not typical, but between computers, smart phones, tablets, TVs, DVRs, BD players, game consoles, and security cameras, I'm probably pushing 20 devices. And it's not uncommon for 3-4 of those to be downloading or streaming HD video at the same time...
I think the issue is legally vs. morally/ethically.
Legally, well - it's almost never legal to download someone else's version of something you physically own. The "backup" exemption to copyright law only applies to a copy *you* make of the actual media that you own - the law is pretty crystal clear on this. An exception to this, of course, would be if you bought a license to do it (some software licenses specifically allow it).
Ethically - well, of course, it's not as clear because unlike the law morality and ethics are not codified :) Personally I'd have no problem ethically with acquiring a backup online (or a copy to, for example, burn a new ROM to fix a broken arcade PCB that you own - that's the whole idea of the backup exemption in the first place).
Basically, 99.9% of the emulator/MAME industry is technically illegal, but unlike downloading a bunch of music or movies you have never owned, it's a lot harder to argue that it's unethical...