That's a very specious line of reasoning. It's easy to say that you wouldn't have bought it anyways, but impossible to prove such a thing. The counterfactual world where you actually had to purchase all the software you're currently using unleashes an infinitude of alternative economic choices. What do you use Photoshop and Office for anyways? I doubt that's it's purely for kicks. Those are, by and large, business applications. So would the income you'd have to forgo by not using them outweigh the cost of the software itself? I know it wouldn't for me. Even if you are just using Photoshop to edit your personal photos, you might find a lot of disutility in having crappy, edited photos to showcase. Point being, you really can't say that you "wouldn't buy XX anyways", no matter how strongly you feel.
First, I note the delicious irony present in the sentence "The grammar in this letter is should not be coming from a respected legal firm in California."
Second, RTFA:
The authorized settlement offer expressed in the preceding paragraphs of this email (and confirmed in staff-proofed letter format to be sent by fax and US Mail tomorrow; sorry for typos that are an unfortunate part of any quick-response email) He appears to be saying he sat down and hammered this thing out before lunch, making it all the more impressive. That's a damn fine amount of case law to have memorized. In any case, I find the letter to be very well written. If you're put off by the lack of bloviating and douchey legalese that seems to dominate the genre, well that has a simple explanation: the guy's not a douche.
Let's talk about the larger picture here, viz. the death of IP as we know it. The writing is on the wall: in virtually every segment of the IP marketplace, distribution networks are springing up faster than anyone can police them. First it was software. Then came music. Movies within the last three years. Television within the last year and a half. Not only will these networks continue to grow, but the rate of their growth it set to increase as more people acquire broadband and as more people get online in general. Say what you will about the morality aspect, the fact is that information is going to become increasingly free over the next ten, twenty years, to the extreme detriment many mature, powerful industries that we became accustomed to dealing with over the course of the 20th century. No one under the age of ten today even remembers a time when a large portion of the media they consume wasn't available for free if you knew where to look--which, as we all know, 10-year olds have an uncanny knack for. A whole generation raised in that environment; man, that is really going to shake things up. It's going to be an interesting ride.
That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I worked on something very similar once, as a consultant for a big investment bank, where we had to analyze tick data. I can't believe anyone would do such a thing in Excel. Even if you have a big in-house library built up, Excel's data management capabilities are lacking. You should check out Stata or, god forbid, SAS (if you have a humongous dataset.) I've never understand the prevalence of the Office suite among MBA & finance types when there are so many better programs out there and y'all clearly have the money to spend on them:)
Most of the limitations you and parent poster refer to are not arbitrary but rather have a technical explanation. 4gb RAM is due to 32-bit hardware, FAT32 has an 8-tebibyte volume limit using 28 bits of a 32 bit pointer (the 32gb "limitation" is just a bug in Win XP setup), and I'm fairly confident the 65536 rows in Excel is due to the rows being addressed using a 16-bit unsigned integer. Sure they could bump it up but if you're using Excel to hold a spreadsheet and a single sheet needs more than 2^16 rows, you are doing something wrong. Workbooks ended the need for spreadsheets to be longer than about a screen long ago.
Now, if you want to store a database in Excel... buy Access:) That's what it's there for.
No, doof. Whatever benevolent alien race we finally make contact with should be more than happy to bootstrap us with their limitless free energy generation technology. All part of the master plan.
Curing cancer... pfft. Like that's gonna help anyone.
The smog laws in America are almost pointless when you consider it's GLOBAL warming and India/Mexico are basically shitting into the atmosphere. That is totally wrong. When you emit a quarter of the world's emissions, it's practically a mathematical identity that air quality laws aren't "pointless". I hesitate to invoke "An Inconvenient Truth" since that seems to just beg for immolation on the net forums, but having also seen it with my own two eyes.. the global impact of the Clean Air Act was real. The effects were felt worldwide in some fashion or another.
And there is a lot more we could, and should, be doing. The first step to solving this crisis will be to realize that coordinated global action is not going to happen until many years after it's too late. Kyoto is a non-starter. Rather than foisting up the India-China emissions cabal red herring, the United States needs to assume its leadership role in the world and take tough, unilateral action on emissions. I guarantee that that would open the floodgates for all other nations in the world to follow suit.
Funny how we're so happy to go-it-alone on some issues, yet perfectly content to bemoan the lack of international cooperation on others, no?
I feel the same way about Google as you: part fanboy, part creeped out. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. And don't forget that once upon a time, none other than Microsoft was also considered a dynamic up-and-comer which employed a lot of young, smart idealists with a radically different vision of how the world should work (or some I'm told, for I was nary a twinkle in my father's eye at the time.) Twenty years can make a lot of difference.
Anyways, I was just thinking the other day about what a potential Google competitor might look like. At this point, I think it's safe to say that no one is going to beat Google at its own game: free. Google is, and will always be, a damn good and free purveyor of information. It's a noble ideal, but in practice one which delves into some serious moral gray areas, as we're increasingly realizing. So that got me thinking: what if someone offered subscription-based search? Figure Google can't possibly be monetizing the search side for more than a buck or two per user per month. Charge that plus a little extra and it is still very nominal. What would you get in return for your $5 a month? First, no ads. Second, a pledge that your personal data would never be saved, analyzed or sold. I'd pay that in a heartbeat.
What on earth are you doing with it? I use OpenWRT in front of about 9 clients doing QoS and firewalling and the load is at 0.00. This includes if I fire up BitTorrent on multiple PCs.
Uh... you've never been to Russia, have you?
Actually, I am from Russia. Rarely has the entire essence of what this site stands for been summed up in so few lines.
We may or may not possess the science needed to accurately model the climate. But we definitely can model the whole outcome space using probability and economics. All indications are that the cost of the worst case scenario for climate change (+5 degrees C over next 100 years) would be an unmitigated catastrophe for the poor, the food supply, and for our own viability as a species. I confess to not having any concrete numbers here, but just for argument's sake let's say the VSL is $2 million and "business-as-usual" global warming will kill 500 million over the next hundred years, due to lower food supply, increased range of tropical diseases, lack of potable water, drought, heat, etc. etc. 5% of the projected population in 2100, not an implausible scenario. That's $1 x 10^15, or a quadrillion dollars. (I know this is really ad hoc, but I hope this demonstrates how the numbers could easily lie in this range.)
Now, what is the cost of action? Certainly a couple of orders of magnitude lower. You could spend a trillion dollars in R&D on something like fusion or some other miracle tech and probably make it work. Or you could simply encourage conservation and renewables--many are discovering it makes economic sense to do this anyways, with no external inducements. $1,000,000,000,000 buys a lot of solar panels, clean coal and energy efficient appliances.
My point is that the cost of inaction is much, much higher than the cost of action. In this example, the threshold probability that would make the expectation equal over the two states is.001. If you are so much as.1% certain that global warming exists and we are its cause (and solution), you'd be a fool not to act. Yet the IPCC says the number is more like 90%, and still we cavil. We are fools not to act.
For the record iTunes is not the only way to manage music on your iPod. On Windows, I find WinAmp to be a much better choice. The iPod support in the latest version works perfectly, fully supports all of the features like podcasts, smart playlists, etc., and is much faster than iTunes. The iTunes client on Windows is slow, bloated and sucky. (50mb for a browser and mp3 player? C'mon.)
I think even Apple's dominance might be a lot more fleeting than people think, at least as far as iTunes as concerned. (iPods are another story, those are far and away the best on the market, but almost all anti-trust prosecutions these days have to do with IP or services, not goods.) Despite being big, old and clunky, the Big 5 record companies still wield enormous power in the form of rights to nearly all recorded music in the 20th century, and a still significant portion of what is being produced today. All it would take is for one or two of those top execs to finally take the plunge and start selling DRM-free, high quality downloads with an easy-to-use UI. Cut out the middleman. If any of them did that, or if they all did it, iTunes would find itself in a pretty tight spot. The major record labels are wounded and bleeding, but I still think they have a chance to save themselves. It just requires some pretty radical thinking.
Just when you thought the IRS could get any stupider:
6. Why can't I e-file with this program?
Because of the lack of cooperation of the IRS and the API. When I wrote to the IRS regarding this, I received the following reply:
Thank you for your inquiry.
The government believes that private industry, given its established expertise and experience in the field of electronic tax preparation, has a proven track record in providing the best technology and services available. In addition, the government believes a partnership with private industry will: provide taxpayers with higher quality services by using the existing expertise of the private sector; maximize consumer choice; promote competition within the marketplace; and meet objectives in the least costly manner to taxpayers.
We hope the above information will prove helpful to you.
Sincerely, The IRS Website Support Team
I suspect that there will either need to be an outcry, or we will need to present this project as a corporation of sorts for cooperation from the IRS. For more info, see the previous FAQ entry. How... monolithic. I've never even heard of the government referring to itself as "the government" before.
No, you are right, the GP is just an idiot and seems to have no clue what theology actually is. Here is the course list from Harvard divinity school. Politics, sociology, history, philosophy, current events--it's all there. No one posting to this thread has actually stated their case from what separates theology apart from all the other humanities as making it especially worthless, and that's telling. I'd argue that it's in fact especially worthwhile. Certainly no other force shaped the course of human events than religion over the last 2000 years. Only until comparatively recently was it that religion stopped being the final arbiter of literally aspect of day to day existence, from sexual mores to music to styles of dress to economics.
I am responding to your own words: "somehow based in logic or reason". Are you now unsaying that, or what? And wtf does "effectively useless in any practical way" mean anyways? Please explain that using nothing but logic and reason, e.g. no value judgements, since you seem to despise that sort of thing.
Exactly. This whole thread needs to bone up on the modality theory of intelligence--which I am purposely not linking to on Wikipedia because the irony would just kill me. If you accept the basis premise that intelligence is anything but one dimensional which, duh, then you're admitting it makes almost no sense to go around talking about who is "smarter". Ordering, except in the strict sense, is lost in dimensions higher than one. Granted, a nobel laureate is probably more intelligent on all axes than, say, Bush, but in general if you pick two random people off the street, there's probably not even an answer to the question of who is smarter. I'm probably a much better student than Jimi Hendrix ever was. I don't care. That guy was a genius. I'm not:-)
Wow, you are really making a fool of yourself. It's one thing to call a field (or anything, for that matter) worthless when you actually understand what it is you are denouncing. To do so when you clearly have no idea what it even is--in a public forum, no less--just makes you look like an ass. Based on your attitude, you think theology study consists of, what? a couple airy seminars a week on topics like "The Collective Being" followed by, maybe, a meditation circle?
I realize getting your MCSE from DeVry in six might have left you with a warped impression what it is that academics do, but lemme assure you that your average PhD candidate or professor in any field at a decent university has forgotten more about "logic and reason" than it appears you will ever know. Ever hear of something called a thesis? Those aren't just 200 pages of babbling and random neural firings. These people, even the ones in the worthless field of theology, get paid to construct arguments. They gather evidence. They prove points. The really successful ones do it very well--a lot better than you have here.
I'll thank the FAA every time I take my shoes off or have to throw out a perfectly good bottle of water to board. To which they'll probably laugh in your face, considering the FAA has absolutely nothing to do with that. TSA is DHS, FAA is DOT.
I didn't realize how many of you libertarian fucktards there are crawling around this web site until comparatively recently. Sadly, very few of you seem to have studied any economics. This is a shame since it underlies your whole system of beliefs. While I'm sure they don't teach this at DeVry, there in fact are cases where government intervention improves overall welfare. Lots of them. Any time a market is incomplete, a case can be made for some sort of coordinated intervention. You can quote me the Coase or fundamental welfare theorems ad nauseum (or not), but until you can demonstrate feasible plan for assigning property rights and assuring perfect, symmetric information, your misguided theories are simply hollow and deluded.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very specious line of reasoning. It's easy to say that you wouldn't have bought it anyways, but impossible to prove such a thing. The counterfactual world where you actually had to purchase all the software you're currently using unleashes an infinitude of alternative economic choices. What do you use Photoshop and Office for anyways? I doubt that's it's purely for kicks. Those are, by and large, business applications. So would the income you'd have to forgo by not using them outweigh the cost of the software itself? I know it wouldn't for me. Even if you are just using Photoshop to edit your personal photos, you might find a lot of disutility in having crappy, edited photos to showcase. Point being, you really can't say that you "wouldn't buy XX anyways", no matter how strongly you feel.
Second, RTFA: The authorized settlement offer expressed in the preceding paragraphs of this email (and confirmed in staff-proofed letter format to be sent by fax and US Mail tomorrow; sorry for typos that are an unfortunate part of any quick-response email) He appears to be saying he sat down and hammered this thing out before lunch, making it all the more impressive. That's a damn fine amount of case law to have memorized. In any case, I find the letter to be very well written. If you're put off by the lack of bloviating and douchey legalese that seems to dominate the genre, well that has a simple explanation: the guy's not a douche.
Let's talk about the larger picture here, viz. the death of IP as we know it. The writing is on the wall: in virtually every segment of the IP marketplace, distribution networks are springing up faster than anyone can police them. First it was software. Then came music. Movies within the last three years. Television within the last year and a half. Not only will these networks continue to grow, but the rate of their growth it set to increase as more people acquire broadband and as more people get online in general. Say what you will about the morality aspect, the fact is that information is going to become increasingly free over the next ten, twenty years, to the extreme detriment many mature, powerful industries that we became accustomed to dealing with over the course of the 20th century. No one under the age of ten today even remembers a time when a large portion of the media they consume wasn't available for free if you knew where to look--which, as we all know, 10-year olds have an uncanny knack for. A whole generation raised in that environment; man, that is really going to shake things up. It's going to be an interesting ride.
. <======= see that? That.
That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I worked on something very similar once, as a consultant for a big investment bank, where we had to analyze tick data. I can't believe anyone would do such a thing in Excel. Even if you have a big in-house library built up, Excel's data management capabilities are lacking. You should check out Stata or, god forbid, SAS (if you have a humongous dataset.) I've never understand the prevalence of the Office suite among MBA & finance types when there are so many better programs out there and y'all clearly have the money to spend on them :)
Most of the limitations you and parent poster refer to are not arbitrary but rather have a technical explanation. 4gb RAM is due to 32-bit hardware, FAT32 has an 8-tebibyte volume limit using 28 bits of a 32 bit pointer (the 32gb "limitation" is just a bug in Win XP setup), and I'm fairly confident the 65536 rows in Excel is due to the rows being addressed using a 16-bit unsigned integer. Sure they could bump it up but if you're using Excel to hold a spreadsheet and a single sheet needs more than 2^16 rows, you are doing something wrong. Workbooks ended the need for spreadsheets to be longer than about a screen long ago.
... buy Access :) That's what it's there for.
Now, if you want to store a database in Excel
No, doof. Whatever benevolent alien race we finally make contact with should be more than happy to bootstrap us with their limitless free energy generation technology. All part of the master plan.
Curing cancer... pfft. Like that's gonna help anyone.
Actually, I think it richens the language.
And there is a lot more we could, and should, be doing. The first step to solving this crisis will be to realize that coordinated global action is not going to happen until many years after it's too late. Kyoto is a non-starter. Rather than foisting up the India-China emissions cabal red herring, the United States needs to assume its leadership role in the world and take tough, unilateral action on emissions. I guarantee that that would open the floodgates for all other nations in the world to follow suit.
Funny how we're so happy to go-it-alone on some issues, yet perfectly content to bemoan the lack of international cooperation on others, no?
I feel the same way about Google as you: part fanboy, part creeped out. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. And don't forget that once upon a time, none other than Microsoft was also considered a dynamic up-and-comer which employed a lot of young, smart idealists with a radically different vision of how the world should work (or some I'm told, for I was nary a twinkle in my father's eye at the time.) Twenty years can make a lot of difference.
Anyways, I was just thinking the other day about what a potential Google competitor might look like. At this point, I think it's safe to say that no one is going to beat Google at its own game: free. Google is, and will always be, a damn good and free purveyor of information. It's a noble ideal, but in practice one which delves into some serious moral gray areas, as we're increasingly realizing. So that got me thinking: what if someone offered subscription-based search? Figure Google can't possibly be monetizing the search side for more than a buck or two per user per month. Charge that plus a little extra and it is still very nominal. What would you get in return for your $5 a month? First, no ads. Second, a pledge that your personal data would never be saved, analyzed or sold. I'd pay that in a heartbeat.
What on earth are you doing with it? I use OpenWRT in front of about 9 clients doing QoS and firewalling and the load is at 0.00. This includes if I fire up BitTorrent on multiple PCs.
We may or may not possess the science needed to accurately model the climate. But we definitely can model the whole outcome space using probability and economics. All indications are that the cost of the worst case scenario for climate change (+5 degrees C over next 100 years) would be an unmitigated catastrophe for the poor, the food supply, and for our own viability as a species. I confess to not having any concrete numbers here, but just for argument's sake let's say the VSL is $2 million and "business-as-usual" global warming will kill 500 million over the next hundred years, due to lower food supply, increased range of tropical diseases, lack of potable water, drought, heat, etc. etc. 5% of the projected population in 2100, not an implausible scenario. That's $1 x 10^15, or a quadrillion dollars. (I know this is really ad hoc, but I hope this demonstrates how the numbers could easily lie in this range.)
.001. If you are so much as .1% certain that global warming exists and we are its cause (and solution), you'd be a fool not to act. Yet the IPCC says the number is more like 90%, and still we cavil. We are fools not to act.
Now, what is the cost of action? Certainly a couple of orders of magnitude lower. You could spend a trillion dollars in R&D on something like fusion or some other miracle tech and probably make it work. Or you could simply encourage conservation and renewables--many are discovering it makes economic sense to do this anyways, with no external inducements. $1,000,000,000,000 buys a lot of solar panels, clean coal and energy efficient appliances.
My point is that the cost of inaction is much, much higher than the cost of action. In this example, the threshold probability that would make the expectation equal over the two states is
For the record iTunes is not the only way to manage music on your iPod. On Windows, I find WinAmp to be a much better choice. The iPod support in the latest version works perfectly, fully supports all of the features like podcasts, smart playlists, etc., and is much faster than iTunes. The iTunes client on Windows is slow, bloated and sucky. (50mb for a browser and mp3 player? C'mon.)
I think even Apple's dominance might be a lot more fleeting than people think, at least as far as iTunes as concerned. (iPods are another story, those are far and away the best on the market, but almost all anti-trust prosecutions these days have to do with IP or services, not goods.) Despite being big, old and clunky, the Big 5 record companies still wield enormous power in the form of rights to nearly all recorded music in the 20th century, and a still significant portion of what is being produced today. All it would take is for one or two of those top execs to finally take the plunge and start selling DRM-free, high quality downloads with an easy-to-use UI. Cut out the middleman. If any of them did that, or if they all did it, iTunes would find itself in a pretty tight spot. The major record labels are wounded and bleeding, but I still think they have a chance to save themselves. It just requires some pretty radical thinking.
Because of the lack of cooperation of the IRS and the API. When I wrote to the IRS regarding this, I received the following reply:
Thank you for your inquiry.
The government believes that private industry, given its established expertise and experience in the field of electronic tax preparation, has a proven track record in providing the best technology and services available. In addition, the government believes a partnership with private industry will: provide taxpayers with higher quality services by using the existing expertise of the private sector; maximize consumer choice; promote competition within the marketplace; and meet objectives in the least costly manner to taxpayers.
We hope the above information will prove helpful to you.
Sincerely,
The IRS Website Support Team
I suspect that there will either need to be an outcry, or we will need to present this project as a corporation of sorts for cooperation from the IRS. For more info, see the previous FAQ entry. How
No, you are right, the GP is just an idiot and seems to have no clue what theology actually is. Here is the course list from Harvard divinity school. Politics, sociology, history, philosophy, current events--it's all there. No one posting to this thread has actually stated their case from what separates theology apart from all the other humanities as making it especially worthless, and that's telling. I'd argue that it's in fact especially worthwhile. Certainly no other force shaped the course of human events than religion over the last 2000 years. Only until comparatively recently was it that religion stopped being the final arbiter of literally aspect of day to day existence, from sexual mores to music to styles of dress to economics.
I am responding to your own words: "somehow based in logic or reason". Are you now unsaying that, or what? And wtf does "effectively useless in any practical way" mean anyways? Please explain that using nothing but logic and reason, e.g. no value judgements, since you seem to despise that sort of thing.
Exactly. This whole thread needs to bone up on the modality theory of intelligence--which I am purposely not linking to on Wikipedia because the irony would just kill me. If you accept the basis premise that intelligence is anything but one dimensional which, duh, then you're admitting it makes almost no sense to go around talking about who is "smarter". Ordering, except in the strict sense, is lost in dimensions higher than one. Granted, a nobel laureate is probably more intelligent on all axes than, say, Bush, but in general if you pick two random people off the street, there's probably not even an answer to the question of who is smarter. I'm probably a much better student than Jimi Hendrix ever was. I don't care. That guy was a genius. I'm not :-)
Wow, you are really making a fool of yourself. It's one thing to call a field (or anything, for that matter) worthless when you actually understand what it is you are denouncing. To do so when you clearly have no idea what it even is--in a public forum, no less--just makes you look like an ass. Based on your attitude, you think theology study consists of, what? a couple airy seminars a week on topics like "The Collective Being" followed by, maybe, a meditation circle?
I realize getting your MCSE from DeVry in six might have left you with a warped impression what it is that academics do, but lemme assure you that your average PhD candidate or professor in any field at a decent university has forgotten more about "logic and reason" than it appears you will ever know. Ever hear of something called a thesis? Those aren't just 200 pages of babbling and random neural firings. These people, even the ones in the worthless field of theology, get paid to construct arguments. They gather evidence. They prove points. The really successful ones do it very well--a lot better than you have here.
Add to that list:
- Goes by "Jimbo"
As a long time member of this web site, I can attest that you are full of shit :-)
... essjay!! I see you've found a new career.
Either that, or
I didn't realize how many of you libertarian fucktards there are crawling around this web site until comparatively recently. Sadly, very few of you seem to have studied any economics. This is a shame since it underlies your whole system of beliefs. While I'm sure they don't teach this at DeVry, there in fact are cases where government intervention improves overall welfare. Lots of them. Any time a market is incomplete, a case can be made for some sort of coordinated intervention. You can quote me the Coase or fundamental welfare theorems ad nauseum (or not), but until you can demonstrate feasible plan for assigning property rights and assuring perfect, symmetric information, your misguided theories are simply hollow and deluded.
Dude, /everything/ phones home. Is this even news anymore? I just take it for granted and use a good firewall.
Wireshark does waaaaay more than 25 protocols.