I've been a programmer for 15 years now, and the absolute worst people to work with are the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge. I don't want to work with a bunch of people who are on top of Mt. Stupid, least of all some exec who thinks a tiny bit of coding knowledge will help you make estimates about how long a bit project will take.
Let programmers program. Be serious about it, or don't do it.
...to become a bit more ubiquitous before we start alarming politicians into making it illegal by using it to manufacture weapons?
We don't want 3D printing to become "isn't that how people make plastic guns?" to the lay public. It's too important of a technology, and given how potentially disruptive it is to the business models of a lot of large companies with a shit ton of money, you can bet that people are already talking about how to get rid of it.
So please, if you must design guns for 3D printers, keep the designs private until the public is familiar enough with the technology that they won't buy the alarmist "O NOES, GUNS" excuse that politicians will invariably use to keep people from buying 3D printers.
Interestingly, it's also good for women if men get equal paternity leave, because having to give more leave to women makes companies less likely to hire women and less likely to pay them equally.
So not only would equal leave be good for men who want to spend time with their newborns, it would be good for women who want to avoid being discriminated against when applying for jobs and getting raises.
Here's another question for you: How can we vote away from DRM with our wallets?
For example, say EA puts out some big SimNOUN game that everybody wants to play. However, it's encumbered with DRM and there are no viable alternatives. If enough consumers opt to vote with their wallets, the C-men of EA will chalk it up to lack of interest, which means no new SimNOUN in the future.
You kind of answered your own question, unfortunately. To vote with our wallets, we need to vote with our wallets, and that means giving up some of the entertainment that we like. I wanted to buy Mass Effect 3 and Sim City, but I haven't done so since I take issue with the DRM (I also, for the record, have not pirated either). It's unfortunate that EA ate Bioware and Maxis, but what you need to bear in mind is that the developers of those franchises are still around. Bioware and Maxis are just names that EA bought. The people who develop those games aren't the property of EA, and can form their own studios.
Well, in order to answer this question, you have to consider the fact that the DRM is broken on literally every big name movie in existence. Anyone who wants to pirate their movies already can. So in answer to your question, we compensate artists without DRM the same way we do right now -- we pay them. The lack of DRM doesn't make it legal to distribute copies, and it doesn't make it particularly easier (since DRM-free copies of movies already exist and are easily available).
DRM doesn't give the publisher any additional rights -- it only takes away the rights of paying customers, specifically:
The right to make backup copies
The right of first sale
Fair use
Those are the only rights truly being "managed" by DRM, and they're being "managed" away so that legitimate consumers have to pay for the same media multiple times, or (in some cases) pay more for existing media since they can't purchase it used.
That sounds like a highly unusual situation. Most public schools pay jack squat.
That being said, there are a couple of things to consider:
First off, you may live in an area with a high consumer price index. I'm sure people can get by just fine on $80k, but it may not be as much as it sounds like to someone from, say, the midwest (my understanding is that most of California is this way, but feel free to link your actual county if you want to prove me wrong about your specific situation). Most likely the teachers at your charter school are underpaid and not living particularly comfortably.
With respect to your charter schools getting slightly better results, it's important to consider the fact that it's generally more affluent families that can afford to pay extra to send their children to a non-public school. Affluent parents tend to have more free time to spend with their children, and can afford to be more involved in their kids' lives, which means they can push them to study, do their homework, etc. On average, kids at public schools have parents who make less money, and are more likely to be raised by single parents. Blaming the difference in performance between public and private schools on public school teachers is problematic unless you're also correcting for socioeconomic factors.
Unfortunately, this is one of those instances where capitalism is not the best solution for everyone. There's no incentive for drug companies to spend large amounts of money researching drugs that won't see a lot of use, such as new antibiotics for fighting superbugs, or ways of actually curing chronic conditions such as diabetes. On the other hand, there would be a massive amount of benefit to actually *having* these things.
Additionally, in a purely capitalist society, the people who bear the cost for drug research are people who are already sick, and thus less able to work. Paying for drug research is more like "insurance", because it protects you from illnesses in the future. Even if I'm not sick, drug research benefits me because (on average) it increases the quality and duration of my life. On the other hand, since there's no immediate benefit, people don't want to pay for that out of pocket. Massively expanding government drug research would be a very good thing in the long run, not to mention that it would create jobs right now.
Absent some meaningful campaign finance reform, I don't expect state and federal politicians to stand up to the telcos any more than local ones do -- in fact, I'd honestly expect less. When municipalities try to set up their own (cheaper, faster, self-funded) broadband networks, the telcos go to the state government and try to get them shut down, because apparently the fact that they aren't trying to make a profit gives them a big advantage against for profit companies, which, interestingly, is the precise opposite of the usual argument given in favor of free market capitalism.
That being said, if Google manages to push this out into the news and people start exerting sufficient pressure on their state lawmakers, it's possible that something positive might come of it. It's amazing how much flooding congressional offices with calls and letters and accomplish.
The defendant points out that Google promised not to, essentially giving the defendant permission to use the patents. As a juror, how would YOU decide the case?
I suppose that depends on how smart I am and how well each side presented their case.:)
Me, personally, knowing what I know about this right now, I'd find against Google.
I guess my question is how much legal weight this "pledge" has. Microsoft's "community promise" not to sue over Mono was (if I recall) legally unconvincing. Is this any different?
Not saying it's bad, mind you. I'm just expressing skepticism until it's been analyzed by some people who understand this crap better than I do.
Can't we let the genie a bit further out of the bottle before we give the copyright lobby easy fodder for scaring people into making home 3D printing illegal?
It doesn't really give you both, though. The whole thing is built to make it inconvenient to use in desktop mode, because now you have to go back to a full screen menu every time you want to start another application. The purpose of Windows 8 is to throw Metro in your face, so as to push Windows developers to use Metro, and therefore be forced to go through Microsoft's app store (or whatever the fuck they're calling it since Apple apparently owns the phrase "app store"). Short of purchasing extra programs, there's no way to avoid fucking around with Metro when using Windows 8.
Paypal and Mastercard are both horrible companies. I suppose I should side with the company trying not to share my personal data, but Paypal is incredibly sleazy and dishonest in its own right.
I'm sure that's part of it, but it's possible to prevent used game sales with less nasty DRM (not that the prevention of used sales is in any way good or fair). Steam doesn't allow used game sales either, but it doesn't require always-online DRM for users to play their games (in fact, most of the games can be played in offline mode, without even needing an internet connection to start them).
Given EA's corporate culture, it's entirely possible that the CEO is just a fall guy. The investors want blood, and somebody has to get fired. Unless their next CEO is someone who loves gaming things are just going to stay the same. The trouble with media companies in general is that their upper management seems to think differently from normal people; that is, they think in terms of monetizing things as much as possible without regard to how their customers might feel about that in the long term.
EA's nasty DRM doesn't just prevent people from pirating their games, it also prevents customers from modding their games. Preventing mods allows them to make more money from "microtransactions", by selling silly little things that the player community could easily mod in if the game allowed it (and the value of these add-ons in terms of gameplay tends to be extremely poor). Conversely, you have companies like Bethesda who (while still copy protecting their games) allow people to create their own modifications, and then make money selling legitimate DLC with tens of hours of content each.
Point is, I highly doubt it's just the CEO who's thinking that the best way to maximize profits is to sell a game and then nickel and dime people with stupid, worthless addons that take no effort to create. I'm guessing this is the attitude of the board of directors and upper management as well, and just replacing one dude isn't going to fix that.
For the record, nowhere in my comment did I advocate taxing the wealthy at 100% of their income. That would be incredibly stupid, for exactly the reasons you stated. No one in their right mind would advocate a 100% income tax -- it's just that people tend to oversimplify their reasoning, like this:
"A 100% income tax is clearly worse than a 0% income tax, therefore a 0% income tax is optimal in all cases."
Just because no tax may be better than a 100% tax, it doesn't follow that the benefit of income tax decreases linearly as the income tax goes from 0 to 100 percent. There's a point somewhere between 0 and 100 percent that's optimal for the economy, and economic performance data over the last half century or so would seem to indicate that we're below that point at the moment.
The article claims that there's absolutely no connection between a higher marginal tax rate and GDP growth. A closer look at that graph reveals that the article in question doesn't even go far enough -- If you draw a regression line in the GDP growth data (so as to smooth out the bumps of a typical economic cycle) you'll notice that overall GDP growth has actually *decreased* slightly as marginal tax rates have decreased.
If the data is any indication (and it probably is), raising taxes on the wealthy would have little or no effect on our economic growth, *and* it would be a big step toward eliminating the deficit.
Slashdot Mirror
[citation needed]
I've been a programmer for 15 years now, and the absolute worst people to work with are the ones who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge. I don't want to work with a bunch of people who are on top of Mt. Stupid, least of all some exec who thinks a tiny bit of coding knowledge will help you make estimates about how long a bit project will take.
Let programmers program. Be serious about it, or don't do it.
...to become a bit more ubiquitous before we start alarming politicians into making it illegal by using it to manufacture weapons?
We don't want 3D printing to become "isn't that how people make plastic guns?" to the lay public. It's too important of a technology, and given how potentially disruptive it is to the business models of a lot of large companies with a shit ton of money, you can bet that people are already talking about how to get rid of it.
So please, if you must design guns for 3D printers, keep the designs private until the public is familiar enough with the technology that they won't buy the alarmist "O NOES, GUNS" excuse that politicians will invariably use to keep people from buying 3D printers.
Interestingly, it's also good for women if men get equal paternity leave, because having to give more leave to women makes companies less likely to hire women and less likely to pay them equally.
So not only would equal leave be good for men who want to spend time with their newborns, it would be good for women who want to avoid being discriminated against when applying for jobs and getting raises.
Here's another question for you: How can we vote away from DRM with our wallets?
For example, say EA puts out some big SimNOUN game that everybody wants to play. However, it's encumbered with DRM and there are no viable alternatives. If enough consumers opt to vote with their wallets, the C-men of EA will chalk it up to lack of interest, which means no new SimNOUN in the future.
You kind of answered your own question, unfortunately. To vote with our wallets, we need to vote with our wallets, and that means giving up some of the entertainment that we like. I wanted to buy Mass Effect 3 and Sim City, but I haven't done so since I take issue with the DRM (I also, for the record, have not pirated either). It's unfortunate that EA ate Bioware and Maxis, but what you need to bear in mind is that the developers of those franchises are still around. Bioware and Maxis are just names that EA bought. The people who develop those games aren't the property of EA, and can form their own studios.
Apparently I had the wrong idea about what a charter school is. I retract what I said earlier.
So, how do we compensate artist without DRM?
Well, in order to answer this question, you have to consider the fact that the DRM is broken on literally every big name movie in existence. Anyone who wants to pirate their movies already can. So in answer to your question, we compensate artists without DRM the same way we do right now -- we pay them. The lack of DRM doesn't make it legal to distribute copies, and it doesn't make it particularly easier (since DRM-free copies of movies already exist and are easily available).
DRM doesn't give the publisher any additional rights -- it only takes away the rights of paying customers, specifically:
Those are the only rights truly being "managed" by DRM, and they're being "managed" away so that legitimate consumers have to pay for the same media multiple times, or (in some cases) pay more for existing media since they can't purchase it used.
That sounds like a highly unusual situation. Most public schools pay jack squat.
That being said, there are a couple of things to consider:
First off, you may live in an area with a high consumer price index. I'm sure people can get by just fine on $80k, but it may not be as much as it sounds like to someone from, say, the midwest (my understanding is that most of California is this way, but feel free to link your actual county if you want to prove me wrong about your specific situation). Most likely the teachers at your charter school are underpaid and not living particularly comfortably.
With respect to your charter schools getting slightly better results, it's important to consider the fact that it's generally more affluent families that can afford to pay extra to send their children to a non-public school. Affluent parents tend to have more free time to spend with their children, and can afford to be more involved in their kids' lives, which means they can push them to study, do their homework, etc. On average, kids at public schools have parents who make less money, and are more likely to be raised by single parents. Blaming the difference in performance between public and private schools on public school teachers is problematic unless you're also correcting for socioeconomic factors.
Sounds like someone's view of teachers is being heavily colored by their political beliefs.
Unfortunately, this is one of those instances where capitalism is not the best solution for everyone. There's no incentive for drug companies to spend large amounts of money researching drugs that won't see a lot of use, such as new antibiotics for fighting superbugs, or ways of actually curing chronic conditions such as diabetes. On the other hand, there would be a massive amount of benefit to actually *having* these things.
Additionally, in a purely capitalist society, the people who bear the cost for drug research are people who are already sick, and thus less able to work. Paying for drug research is more like "insurance", because it protects you from illnesses in the future. Even if I'm not sick, drug research benefits me because (on average) it increases the quality and duration of my life. On the other hand, since there's no immediate benefit, people don't want to pay for that out of pocket. Massively expanding government drug research would be a very good thing in the long run, not to mention that it would create jobs right now.
Absent some meaningful campaign finance reform, I don't expect state and federal politicians to stand up to the telcos any more than local ones do -- in fact, I'd honestly expect less. When municipalities try to set up their own (cheaper, faster, self-funded) broadband networks, the telcos go to the state government and try to get them shut down, because apparently the fact that they aren't trying to make a profit gives them a big advantage against for profit companies, which, interestingly, is the precise opposite of the usual argument given in favor of free market capitalism.
That being said, if Google manages to push this out into the news and people start exerting sufficient pressure on their state lawmakers, it's possible that something positive might come of it. It's amazing how much flooding congressional offices with calls and letters and accomplish.
No one. But then, you don't exactly have to be a model citizen to be a better one than Apple.
The defendant points out that Google promised not to, essentially giving the defendant permission to use the patents. As a juror, how would YOU decide the case?
I suppose that depends on how smart I am and how well each side presented their case. :)
Me, personally, knowing what I know about this right now, I'd find against Google.
I guess my question is how much legal weight this "pledge" has. Microsoft's "community promise" not to sue over Mono was (if I recall) legally unconvincing. Is this any different?
Not saying it's bad, mind you. I'm just expressing skepticism until it's been analyzed by some people who understand this crap better than I do.
> Has it stopped being an overly-verbose, memory-hogging, slow, insecure pain the ass?
FTFY
Can't we let the genie a bit further out of the bottle before we give the copyright lobby easy fodder for scaring people into making home 3D printing illegal?
It doesn't really give you both, though. The whole thing is built to make it inconvenient to use in desktop mode, because now you have to go back to a full screen menu every time you want to start another application. The purpose of Windows 8 is to throw Metro in your face, so as to push Windows developers to use Metro, and therefore be forced to go through Microsoft's app store (or whatever the fuck they're calling it since Apple apparently owns the phrase "app store"). Short of purchasing extra programs, there's no way to avoid fucking around with Metro when using Windows 8.
...would be political suicide.
Paypal and Mastercard are both horrible companies. I suppose I should side with the company trying not to share my personal data, but Paypal is incredibly sleazy and dishonest in its own right.
I'm sure that's part of it, but it's possible to prevent used game sales with less nasty DRM (not that the prevention of used sales is in any way good or fair). Steam doesn't allow used game sales either, but it doesn't require always-online DRM for users to play their games (in fact, most of the games can be played in offline mode, without even needing an internet connection to start them).
Given EA's corporate culture, it's entirely possible that the CEO is just a fall guy. The investors want blood, and somebody has to get fired. Unless their next CEO is someone who loves gaming things are just going to stay the same. The trouble with media companies in general is that their upper management seems to think differently from normal people; that is, they think in terms of monetizing things as much as possible without regard to how their customers might feel about that in the long term.
EA's nasty DRM doesn't just prevent people from pirating their games, it also prevents customers from modding their games. Preventing mods allows them to make more money from "microtransactions", by selling silly little things that the player community could easily mod in if the game allowed it (and the value of these add-ons in terms of gameplay tends to be extremely poor). Conversely, you have companies like Bethesda who (while still copy protecting their games) allow people to create their own modifications, and then make money selling legitimate DLC with tens of hours of content each.
Point is, I highly doubt it's just the CEO who's thinking that the best way to maximize profits is to sell a game and then nickel and dime people with stupid, worthless addons that take no effort to create. I'm guessing this is the attitude of the board of directors and upper management as well, and just replacing one dude isn't going to fix that.
...or is it more like mixing Star Wars and Star Trek?
For the record, nowhere in my comment did I advocate taxing the wealthy at 100% of their income. That would be incredibly stupid, for exactly the reasons you stated. No one in their right mind would advocate a 100% income tax -- it's just that people tend to oversimplify their reasoning, like this:
"A 100% income tax is clearly worse than a 0% income tax, therefore a 0% income tax is optimal in all cases."
Just because no tax may be better than a 100% tax, it doesn't follow that the benefit of income tax decreases linearly as the income tax goes from 0 to 100 percent. There's a point somewhere between 0 and 100 percent that's optimal for the economy, and economic performance data over the last half century or so would seem to indicate that we're below that point at the moment.
Here:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/signal/does-28-top-marginal-tax-rate-mean-175706337.html#3INcoOV
The article claims that there's absolutely no connection between a higher marginal tax rate and GDP growth. A closer look at that graph reveals that the article in question doesn't even go far enough -- If you draw a regression line in the GDP growth data (so as to smooth out the bumps of a typical economic cycle) you'll notice that overall GDP growth has actually *decreased* slightly as marginal tax rates have decreased.
If the data is any indication (and it probably is), raising taxes on the wealthy would have little or no effect on our economic growth, *and* it would be a big step toward eliminating the deficit.
That's a good point, given that last year's deficit was 1.1 trillion. Even using that as a predictor, though, my overall point stands.
wat