Your comments are complete hyperbole. How did this get moderated Insightful?
Japan is just as protectionist as the US. Take a look at the steel tariffs or sugar tariffs the US imposes on other countries to protect their own domestic markets for these or substitute products.
You cast your FUD in a light that suggests that genetically modified crops are obviously harmless. There is no evidence to support that notion. In fact, and you can look in the rest of thread for other examples, there are lots of reasons to believe that genetically modifying foods is a potentially very dangerous game. Some obvious reasons:
Making crops herbicide resistant, so that we can use stronger and more toxic herbicides on our crops
Breeding animal genes into crops makes the crop a problem for humans who are alergic to certain animal-specific proteins
Affecting the protein chains of staple crops to simplify post harvest processing, particularly for ethanol production, could make the crop inedible
These are just some very obvious and immediate problems with genetically engineered foods. You might think that these are not severe problems. But if antibiotic have taught us anything it's that human intervention can cause unforeseen problems over the long run. Problems with unclear answers. For example, what happens when cross fertilization causes other plant organisms to also gain herbicide resistance? Do you know the answer?
What if genetically engineered crops, either through cross-fertilization or by design, become non-digestible by humans or animals? Do you know the answer?
Such possibilities are worst-case scenarios and the risk might be unlikely, but is it worth it?
I can tell from your other responses that you're expecting to see charity but you're just subscribing to another false dichotomy: unless a corporation is giving to charity they're not being ethically responsible.
There are lots of companies who make moral and ethical decisions. Often it is part of their business strategy. In otherwords, this are companies that attract ethical inventors (and consumers). The easiest example is whole foods. They promote organic produce and natural (not heavily processed) foods.
Another example is Interface, a huge manufacturer of carpets. This company has invested billions of dollars into recycling programs. Partly because they think this will make their business more sustainable in the long term (which is the basis for most environmental issues).
There are lots of others too. These corporations have aligned moral and ethical choices with their business model. We can expect the same of lots of corporations. Expect more from Google. Stop pandering to money by shrugging off unethical corporate behavior as the inevitable consequence of capitalism or economics.
a foundation has the luxury of standing for a good cause without having to explain it to its shareholders
Please stop perpetuating the myth that corporations are inherently amoral because their shareholders demand nothing less. This is a cop-out that some corporations would like you to believe because it gives them cart blanche to do whatever they want. But it is a dichotomy with no basis in reality. I challenge you to provide an example where shareholders have sued a corporation because the corporation made a [positive] ethical choice.
The reality is that shareholders only sue corporations when managers do something egregiously bad or fraudulent. The managers of a corporation make decisions all the time, some of them good and some of them bad, if you're a shareholder and you don't like what the corporation is doing you can sell and invest in some other corporation -- that's the whole point of a public company! It would be trivial for Google to justify not providing filtered results in China as a show of good will that engenders brand loyalty among the rest of its users. Arguably this is very reasonable since, as I understand it, Google is not very popular in China anyway.
I have taken the liberty of copying a few salient points:
"The majority of environmental releases in the pulp and paper industry come from pulping. The environmental impacts of papermaking are much smaller, and it is impossible to distinguish between the impacts from virgin and recycled papermaking. In pulpmaking, however, the differences are large. Compared to virgin pulping, recycled pulping consumes much less energy and generates smaller releases to air, water, and solid and hazardous waste streams."
Not really related to what you said, but since I found it: here's something from Ohio State:
Making paper from recycled stock requires 64 percent less energy than using wood pulp
With a few exceptions there are no such things as "tree farms". There are forests. Some of them are managed and some of them are not.
The problem with your logic is that the tree you just "planted" by throwing out paper (wtf?), is not going to provide: shade or habitat or prevent erosion or breathe in a comparable amount of carbon dioxide. There are lots of other externalities you've neglected to account for, such as the chemical treatment it takes to produce paper pulp from wood (more so than recycled pulp). Nobody counts that because it gets dumped into the air, oceans and rivers.
According to some reports, many of North America's largest catalogs and tissue product manufacturers use virgin boreal pulp.
Often in managed forests, where, as you triumphantly declare: trees are "specifically grown to supply paper", the trees that have been planted are not indigenous to the region. This endangers native plant and animal species, such as in Chile.
Jolly good. Except that this poem is essentially state sanctioned propaganda used to remind citizens that they should behave lest they incur the wrath of the state.
Here are some relevant portions from the rest of the poem:
By God's providence he was catch'd,
With a dark lantern and burning match ..
A penny loaf* to feed ol'Pope,
A farthing cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down,
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar,'
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head,
Then we'll say: ol'Pope is dead.
*a penny loaf was the food of prisoners at that time
V, in V for Vendetta, recited the first verse in ironic contrast to the seditious plots he was carrying out.
It makes no sense to use the verse as an anthem of resistance.
The high expensive, and the intended use [...] suggests that the service wouldn't have been veto'd automatically [by] the DVD-CCA.
I hope this comes to pass. Then, as smellsofbikes(890263) noted above, the DCMA will be exposed as government mandated protection for Big Media's content racket. The sooner we get moneyed corporate lobbyists out of our capitols, the sooner the rights of consumers will play a bigger role in policy making.
Tell that to the journalism student who was arrested in 2005 for photographing the police harass squeegee kids in the streets of Vancouver. The police arrested the student "for her own protection". This got a little bit of play on the news at the time, but currently this is the best link I can find. Here is what one lawyer thought of the case.
There cannot be peace while Hezbollah and Hamas continue firing missiles into Israel, and neither of them seem willing to stop, ever. So they have to be stopped. That means that Israel is doing the right thing. But sometimes doing the right thing - or helping someone else to do the right thing - upsets people who are doing the wrong thing. We should help them do the right thing anyway.
So what you are saying is that we can exact any old injustice on anyone at all, and as long as their not willing to concede defeat then it is the right thing to stop them (where stop is a euphamism for kill). I'm glad you have such a clear view on what is right and wrong.
In the meantime maybe you should read about the Balfour declaration wherein Britian promised the Zionists a piece of land called Palastine. It was thoughtful of one nation to promise to another nation the country of a third. Rational peace-loving folks might bristle at such a notion, but not Britian. Afterall, Palastine was a useless territory of the Ottoman empire; and the Ottomon empire had to be defeated if England was to be victorious during World War I, which also happens to be the reason the Brits reached out to the Zionists in the first place! Then you can read about how Palastinian land was 94% arab before WWI but already 32% Jewish by the end of WWII.
You fail to take into account that inventors are generally rational agents and that they have a choice between the two investments. All other things being equal, nobody is going to tolerate getting 1% when another manager can get 10%. Your $10B CEO has an abysmal record of return that is going to turn investors away, therefore he should be paid significantly less.
Shareholders of public companies ultimately care about the stock price more than anything else, because they make money when the stock price goes up. A company's financial health is usually reflected in the price (but not always).
As an investor I am going to be much happier investing in your $100M guy because not only is his rate of return higher, but as other investors make the same realization as I have that ($10B guy is a dud) then the stock price of $10B guy is going to tank.
As an inventor you care about your percentage return, not your absolute return. Here's a little test to see for yourself, suppose you have $10,000. Now you have two options:
1) All $10,000 in one bank account that pays $100 interest at the end of the year. 2) Put $100 into 100 bank accounts that each pay $50 interest at the end of each year.
Although the absolute return of option 1 looks superior I think you'd still choose option 2.
Rational inventors want relative return, not absolute return.
What you say regarding bird size correlating to flapping endurance seems to make sense. However if you consider migratory birds your thesis starts to fall apart. There are many long-distance migratory birds that can fly all day and many of them are large, heavy birds such as geese, swans, and storks.
Generally the poor are too busy trying to just get by to take up arms.
In the entire history of violent revolt, who, pray tell, do you think did the revolting? The wealthy elite? It has always been the poor. Usually rallied by educated youth.
And you ARE depriving [artists] of something: the ability to sell and control their product, their creation, as they see fit.
Artists are free to release their product on a medium that facilitates control. Nobody is forcing you to release your music on CD or your movies on DVD. In fact, nobody is forcing artists to do anything. The problem is that artists both want to their cake (release their content as widely as possible) and eat it too (charge everyone who hears/sees said content).
I have no problem with DRM. Go head artists, use it all you want.
What I do have a problem with is spending millions of my tax dollars legistlating and policing the public so that you can maintain your income. If you want to secure your content, that's your problem -- you can engineer an unbreakable content player. But you can go straight to hell once you start advocating the errosion of my *freedom* and *privacy* so that you (or tax funded government) can make sure that I am not hearing/seeing your content without your permission.
Well, because the distrubution cost is very low. Much lower than the cable companies distrubution costs (i.e. maintaining their networks).
How exactly are you receiving the content? Via broadband internet perhaps? Unless you're among the lucky miniscule who receive your internet via wireless, the distribution cost of this model is exactly the same as regular cable -- its going over the exact same infrastructure! In fact, google's distribution cost is probably higher because, despite google's brilliance, cable companies can probably deliver content over its networks for much cheaper. Cable companies have lower costs because they've had a long time to optimize their delivery and generally aren't offering their content on demand.
If google's service succeeds it will succeed because creates a more accessible market to content suppliers (not because its any cheaper). This model threatens to cut our the middle man, namely the publishers of content who negotiate their contracts with cable networks on behalf of content suppliers. If the cable companies had the balls they could probably provide a similiar service (and market) at lower costs.
The country would be a lot scarier if the law was up to the wims of normal folks on the street. Juries evaluate evidence. Jurors are the 'finders of fact'. Juries do not interpret the law; that is the judge's job and the reason why most judges have decades of experience practicing law. This is also the reason why instruction of the jury by the judge is so important and why many dismissals and appeals have hinged on improper jury instruction.
Please do yourself and your country a favior by educating yourself on your own judicial system, it is in your own democratic self-interest.
I felt the same way. I recommend you install the Stylish firefox extension and specify the following CSS modifications (also removes left hand nav bar):
@-moz-document domain(slashdot.org) { body {
font: 82%/150% Times !important; }
Dedicated cards? Probably. Dedicated computers? Definitely, especially if you consider that the very first computer was built to essentially perform physics calculations (artillery trajectories).
If I am a software developer and if there is a demand for my software, I might also choose to charge for it. It has atleast two advantages.
One: It reduces support demands from those who expect it for free, as only those who are serious about using the software will pay up. The others who get the software just for kicks will stay away.
Two: It helps the software a little bit. Especially if I can afford to eat and thus continue to develop software.
Anyway, charging $500 for software and support or $200 for just the software is much better than charging millions of dollars for an airplane.
Letsee... $5 per 30 second signature == $120 / hr... yeah, I could make a nice living on that.
Slashdot Mirror
Japan is just as protectionist as the US. Take a look at the steel tariffs or sugar tariffs the US imposes on other countries to protect their own domestic markets for these or substitute products.
You cast your FUD in a light that suggests that genetically modified crops are obviously harmless. There is no evidence to support that notion. In fact, and you can look in the rest of thread for other examples, there are lots of reasons to believe that genetically modifying foods is a potentially very dangerous game. Some obvious reasons:
These are just some very obvious and immediate problems with genetically engineered foods. You might think that these are not severe problems. But if antibiotic have taught us anything it's that human intervention can cause unforeseen problems over the long run. Problems with unclear answers. For example, what happens when cross fertilization causes other plant organisms to also gain herbicide resistance? Do you know the answer?
What if genetically engineered crops, either through cross-fertilization or by design, become non-digestible by humans or animals? Do you know the answer?
Such possibilities are worst-case scenarios and the risk might be unlikely, but is it worth it?
I can tell from your other responses that you're expecting to see charity but you're just subscribing to another false dichotomy: unless a corporation is giving to charity they're not being ethically responsible.
There are lots of companies who make moral and ethical decisions. Often it is part of their business strategy. In otherwords, this are companies that attract ethical inventors (and consumers). The easiest example is whole foods. They promote organic produce and natural (not heavily processed) foods.
Another example is Interface, a huge manufacturer of carpets. This company has invested billions of dollars into recycling programs. Partly because they think this will make their business more sustainable in the long term (which is the basis for most environmental issues).
There are lots of others too. These corporations have aligned moral and ethical choices with their business model. We can expect the same of lots of corporations. Expect more from Google. Stop pandering to money by shrugging off unethical corporate behavior as the inevitable consequence of capitalism or economics.
The reality is that shareholders only sue corporations when managers do something egregiously bad or fraudulent. The managers of a corporation make decisions all the time, some of them good and some of them bad, if you're a shareholder and you don't like what the corporation is doing you can sell and invest in some other corporation -- that's the whole point of a public company! It would be trivial for Google to justify not providing filtered results in China as a show of good will that engenders brand loyalty among the rest of its users. Arguably this is very reasonable since, as I understand it, Google is not very popular in China anyway.
You can read more here: a report from NH Dept of Environmental Services.
I have taken the liberty of copying a few salient points:
Not really related to what you said, but since I found it: here's something from Ohio State:
The problem with your logic is that the tree you just "planted" by throwing out paper (wtf?), is not going to provide: shade or habitat or prevent erosion or breathe in a comparable amount of carbon dioxide. There are lots of other externalities you've neglected to account for, such as the chemical treatment it takes to produce paper pulp from wood (more so than recycled pulp). Nobody counts that because it gets dumped into the air, oceans and rivers.
According to some reports, many of North America's largest catalogs and tissue product manufacturers use virgin boreal pulp.
Often in managed forests, where, as you triumphantly declare: trees are "specifically grown to supply paper", the trees that have been planted are not indigenous to the region. This endangers native plant and animal species, such as in Chile.
Here are some relevant portions from the rest of the poem:
V, in V for Vendetta, recited the first verse in ironic contrast to the seditious plots he was carrying out.
It makes no sense to use the verse as an anthem of resistance.
I hope this comes to pass. Then, as smellsofbikes(890263) noted above, the DCMA will be exposed as government mandated protection for Big Media's content racket. The sooner we get moneyed corporate lobbyists out of our capitols, the sooner the rights of consumers will play a bigger role in policy making.
Tell that to the journalism student who was arrested in 2005 for photographing the police harass squeegee kids in the streets of Vancouver. The police arrested the student "for her own protection". This got a little bit of play on the news at the time, but currently this is the best link I can find. Here is what one lawyer thought of the case.
There cannot be peace while Hezbollah and Hamas continue firing missiles into Israel, and neither of them seem willing to stop, ever. So they have to be stopped. That means that Israel is doing the right thing. But sometimes doing the right thing - or helping someone else to do the right thing - upsets people who are doing the wrong thing. We should help them do the right thing anyway.
So what you are saying is that we can exact any old injustice on anyone at all, and as long as their not willing to concede defeat then it is the right thing to stop them (where stop is a euphamism for kill). I'm glad you have such a clear view on what is right and wrong.
In the meantime maybe you should read about the Balfour declaration wherein Britian promised the Zionists a piece of land called Palastine. It was thoughtful of one nation to promise to another nation the country of a third. Rational peace-loving folks might bristle at such a notion, but not Britian. Afterall, Palastine was a useless territory of the Ottoman empire; and the Ottomon empire had to be defeated if England was to be victorious during World War I, which also happens to be the reason the Brits reached out to the Zionists in the first place! Then you can read about how Palastinian land was 94% arab before WWI but already 32% Jewish by the end of WWII.
You fail to take into account that inventors are generally rational agents and that they have a choice between the two investments. All other things being equal, nobody is going to tolerate getting 1% when another manager can get 10%. Your $10B CEO has an abysmal record of return that is going to turn investors away, therefore he should be paid significantly less.
Shareholders of public companies ultimately care about the stock price more than anything else, because they make money when the stock price goes up. A company's financial health is usually reflected in the price (but not always).
As an investor I am going to be much happier investing in your $100M guy because not only is his rate of return higher, but as other investors make the same realization as I have that ($10B guy is a dud) then the stock price of $10B guy is going to tank.
As an inventor you care about your percentage return, not your absolute return. Here's a little test to see for yourself, suppose you have $10,000. Now you have two options:
1) All $10,000 in one bank account that pays $100 interest at the end of the year.
2) Put $100 into 100 bank accounts that each pay $50 interest at the end of each year.
Although the absolute return of option 1 looks superior I think you'd still choose option 2.
Rational inventors want relative return, not absolute return.
What you say regarding bird size correlating to flapping endurance seems to make sense. However if you consider migratory birds your thesis starts to fall apart. There are many long-distance migratory birds that can fly all day and many of them are large, heavy birds such as geese, swans, and storks.
Generally the poor are too busy trying to just get by to take up arms.
In the entire history of violent revolt, who, pray tell, do you think did the revolting? The wealthy elite? It has always been the poor. Usually rallied by educated youth.
And you ARE depriving [artists] of something: the ability to sell and control their product, their creation, as they see fit.
Artists are free to release their product on a medium that facilitates control. Nobody is forcing you to release your music on CD or your movies on DVD. In fact, nobody is forcing artists to do anything. The problem is that artists both want to their cake (release their content as widely as possible) and eat it too (charge everyone who hears/sees said content).
I have no problem with DRM. Go head artists, use it all you want.
What I do have a problem with is spending millions of my tax dollars legistlating and policing the public so that you can maintain your income. If you want to secure your content, that's your problem -- you can engineer an unbreakable content player. But you can go straight to hell once you start advocating the errosion of my *freedom* and *privacy* so that you (or tax funded government) can make sure that I am not hearing/seeing your content without your permission.
You overstate the universality of recording audio. In fact, far more states require only one party to consent to being recorded.
r ica.htm
http://www.callcorder.com/phone-recording-law-ame
How exactly are you receiving the content? Via broadband internet perhaps? Unless you're among the lucky miniscule who receive your internet via wireless, the distribution cost of this model is exactly the same as regular cable -- its going over the exact same infrastructure! In fact, google's distribution cost is probably higher because, despite google's brilliance, cable companies can probably deliver content over its networks for much cheaper. Cable companies have lower costs because they've had a long time to optimize their delivery and generally aren't offering their content on demand.
If google's service succeeds it will succeed because creates a more accessible market to content suppliers (not because its any cheaper). This model threatens to cut our the middle man, namely the publishers of content who negotiate their contracts with cable networks on behalf of content suppliers. If the cable companies had the balls they could probably provide a similiar service (and market) at lower costs.
The country would be a lot scarier if the law was up to the wims of normal folks on the street. Juries evaluate evidence. Jurors are the 'finders of fact'. Juries do not interpret the law; that is the judge's job and the reason why most judges have decades of experience practicing law. This is also the reason why instruction of the jury by the judge is so important and why many dismissals and appeals have hinged on improper jury instruction.
Please do yourself and your country a favior by educating yourself on your own judicial system, it is in your own democratic self-interest.
Of course it doesn't hurt that chasing the long tail also means implementing a minimal set of the simplest of spreadsheet features.
You attribute genius to what amounts to an immature product. I think the real genius is the Google brand for engendering this kind of attitude.
I felt the same way. I recommend you install the Stylish firefox extension and specify the following CSS modifications (also removes left hand nav bar):
@-moz-document domain(slashdot.org) {
body {
font: 82%/150% Times !important;
}
#contents { margin-left: 0em !important;}
div#links{display:none !important;}
}
Instead of 17 years from issuance, it is now 20 years from first application. So the bigger question is, "When was the application filed?"
It's pretty safe to say it was filed less than 17 years ago.
it's been a busy few days for the UK courts
Yes, I'm sure they had nothing to do before these guys came along.
While dedicated cards for physics haven't existed
Dedicated cards? Probably. Dedicated computers? Definitely, especially if you consider that the very first computer was built to essentially perform physics calculations (artillery trajectories).
Hardly revolutionary.
It is true that stone doesn't burn. But that doesn't change the fact that the white house was burned down.
If I am a software developer and if there is a demand for my software, I might also choose to charge for it. It has atleast two advantages.
One: It reduces support demands from those who expect it for free, as only those who are serious about using the software will pay up. The others who get the software just for kicks will stay away.
Two: It helps the software a little bit. Especially if I can afford to eat and thus continue to develop software.
Anyway, charging $500 for software and support or $200 for just the software is much better than charging millions of dollars for an airplane.
Letsee... $5 per 30 second signature == $120 / hr... yeah, I could make a nice living on that.
All the bureaucratic red-tape?