The wealthiest 5% of households hold nearly 60% of all the wealth.
They also pay 35% of the total federal tax revenue.
Wealth disparity has increased over the last 20 years.
The overall standard of living has increased. The average american can afford to buy more goods and services with the same income now than he could 20 years ago and they curse Walmart for offering them what they want at a low price...you just cant win with some people. The equality of distribution is less important than the overall standard of living. If you want equality combined with high unemployment and overpriced goods and services then try France.
The bottom 60% of households hold 4.2% of the wealth despite earning 26.8% of the income.
Because they spend too much of their disposable income rather than saving what they can and taking advantage of opportunities to purchase assets instead of taking on more debt to finance depreciating liabilities like that Disney vacation or that new flat panel television.
For something like a DVD the intrinsic value is the the cost of making and transporting that DVD.
This was a popular economic theory in the first half of the nineteenth century, although now mostly discredited, called the Labor Theory of Value. The basic idea was that a good or service was worth as much as the factors which were consumed in its production. This theory was promoted especially by early communist thinkers such as Karl Marx in their explanation of the relationships between workers as the owners of their labor and those who controlled the other factors of production (i.e. the bourgeoisie). The main problem with this theory is that it does not explain the relative value that people place upon one good or service in preference to another given that:
A: There is a limited amount of resources available to produce all of the good and services that are demanded by the economy.
B: The price that people are WILLING to pay is not always equal to or more than the cost of PRODUCING the good or service in which case people will either make/do it themselves, find a substitute, or do without.
The DVD may actually cost $50 dollars to produce (it doesn't but assume for the sake of argument that it does), but I would rather have the $50 bucks in my pocket to spend on something else so I will choose not to buy it. If enough other people feel the same way then the product will either be sold in the black market for less or not sold at all because nobody wants to buy it at the price that it costs to produce it. Adam Smith said it best when he said, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it."
Or "you must have cookies enabled" when all it does is track you at their website. Do I really need javascript or cookies to get a price or product review?
Perhaps not javascript, but cookies are commonly used to maintain state between requests or to keep track of the login status of the current session. There are only so many ways to maintain state in a browser session, for all the hype over browser based applications, and with URLs limited to 256 characters or less than what are you going to do? It never ceases to amaze me how people are always trying to work around the browser to badly emulate things that GUI client applications have been doing well for 20+ years. So the answer to your question is that cookies are needed to maintain state because http was originally designed to be stateless and they need some way to get around that so that they can present you with a pseudo application via a browser which was originally designed to link html pages in a stateless fashion. They opted to attach rockets and gyroscopes to a clothes dryer in an attempt to create a flying machine instead of simply designing a plane.
I am one of those young people. I'm finishing up a stint in the Army, and going back to finish my final year of my BS in Computer Information Systems. ( I was mobilized during my senior year of college.) I firmly believe that there is plenty out there for me -- but not in something like programming, rather I believe my talent lies in being a Systems Analyst for a business, or something both technical and managerial in nature.
You said that you were deployed during your senior year of college? I am just curious but have you considered working for one of the private military contractors? You may end up in the same situations that you were in on deployment with the Army but this time you would be earning many times the salary...of course you have to survive to spend it, but nothing is perfect. Seriously though, I doubt that there are very many higher paying jobs, at least in the short run, for a young person with military and especially combat experience. Take it for what you will but is it not worth at least considering?
Imagine, back in Nazi Germany, if the people had taken a stand against their Nazi oppressors early on, World War II could have been averted and tens of millions of people would not have died.
Heh...you obviously didn't live in the fading days of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich or you would realize how utterly ridiculous that statement is. The people of Germany had been crushed for a decade under the punishing war reparations demanded by the allies at Versailles following the conclusion of the first world war. There was simply no way to squeeze that much blood from a turnip and after years of starving and suffering among the masses the people were willing to listen to just about anyone who claimed that they could make things better and especially to a skillful rabble rouser, which Hitler undoubtedly was, who played on their desires and fears. If the allies had not been so vengeful and greedy at the end of the first war the second would not have happened, but the German people were not going to take a stand against the one person who promised to put food on their tables and end their years of unemployment and suffering. Actually John Maynard Keynes, the famed British economist, predicted World War II as far back as 1919 in his book "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" from which the following excerpt was taken:
"If we take the view that for at least a generation to come Germany cannot be trusted with even a modicum of prosperity, that while all our recent allies are angels of light, all our recent enemies, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and the rest, are children of the devil, that year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled, and that she must be ringed round by enemies; Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of reaction and the despairing convulsions of revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation"
The electronica genre does not have to involve simply pushing play on a laptop. The DJ may choose to dynamically alter the streams as they are playing either with software or with turntables as they did in earlier performances. If the DJ was able to manually manipulate a vast console of controls to dynamically and spontaneously mix complex tracks on demand then he or she would surely be recognized and appreciated by the crowds for this additional level of spontaneity and skill. If I am not much mistaken this is exactly what occurs in the clubbing scenes even today.
An extremely substantial percentage of people who listen to music do NOT go to live venues. I'm going to go way out on a limb and throw a completely fictitious guess out. I'll bet that less than 10 percent of the people who listen to music regularly will attend a concert or see a live band this year.
I agree with you that it is difficult to say exactly what percentage of listeners attend a live concert during a given period of time. However, how many of these people who would NOT attend a billed concert WOULD attend a sporting event, festival, or other live venue where music may be a part of the event even if it is not the primary focus?
Most bands will never make it as a profitable venture. I'd like to know exactly how all of this digital music advertising is going to get the bands enough scratch to pay the bills generated by the rental of larger venues.
These costs could be fronted by a wealthy sponsor or promoter, whose primary business is not necessarily music promotion like the recording industry of today, in return for paying the band members a salary and/or percentages of the total event profits. For example, when I was attending university, a friend of mine had a band that was sponsored by Budweiser and played at various outdoor festivals and other events where Budweiser was already a sponsor.
Really, the only way most bands will ever play a stadium or concert hall is by having financial backing from some wealthy third party. And if all you ever do is play bars, well... the life and scope of your band is limited.
The band does not need to play in stadium sized venues to make a decent amount of profit, especially if the higher costs of these larger venues force higher ticket prices or less profit per ticket sale despite the larger (hopefully) attendance.
I hate to say it, but the media companies do serve some good. For all their draconian actions, their structure allows bands with potential to try big and fail, funded by financially successful acts. Most music never makes a profit.
This is true, but the terms are sometimes a bit onerus otherwise every band would be falling over themselves to get a recording contract despite the large promotional and studio debts they receive in return.
Most bands can't even afford the cost of professional recording. And despite what some guys with a $500 card and Cubase would have you believe, you need really good equipment and a talented recording engineer to make a really good demo. I've got $2500 in microphones in my little home studio.
I cannot speak to this since I have neither recorded a demo nor assisted another in that endeavor. However, would it not stand to reason that if the demand was high enough smaller independent studios would compete to rent time to all of the aspiring bands out there? Suppose that the price is high then why is it high? If the high prices reflect higher profits on the part of the studios and not just their actuall costs then competitor studios would surely enter the market to get their share of a "hot" industry thereby driving down rental prices. Perhaps I am way off base here but if so then what makes the music industry a special case against the prevailing theory of market forces?
I don't want to see music become free, unless the artists who made it choose it to be.
I agree with you here entirely. The music is your creation and is owned by you, or if you signed the recording contract, perhaps jointly with the record label. The owner of the work has the right to dictate the terms as long as the copyright lasts, absolutely. However, this right to control your distribution cannot extend to blanket bans on technology that has many other significant non-infringing uses besides potentially making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works (i.e. the Betamax precedent).
I remember downloading the Microsoft Virtual PC product from the company MSDN subscription a few months back to try it out and the performance really tanked on my dev workstation. It was just not fast enough to do any serious development tasks inside the virtual instance. Perhaps if the software were installed on a more powerful machine and then configured to accept terminal server connections, but I never bothered to go that far. I already have three decent older servers retired from production for my testing purposes, none of which are substantially more powerful than my current workstation, and the chances of purchasing allocating funds for a shiny new Virtual PC test server are slim right now so I will just make do with my machines and switcher box for the time being. Has anyone else had a similar experience with virtualization or am I missing something?
One of the questions was "what can I do to be a better employee?" "You know, I'm being asked that all the time..." I nearly vomited.
I myself have often wondered why management feels the need to insult the intelligence of their employees, especially when those employees have engineering degrees or other advanced forms of education. Surely they know that running a fortune 1000 software company is not the same as running the local fast food franchise and yet they continually try to equate the two with their bumbling and inept leadership styles. If they want to motivate their employees and reward outstanding achievements then why not offer cash bonuses and stock options just as they do for themselves? Are the contributions by the engineers and others to the ultimate success of their enterprise any less important than their own? Would they be satisfied with meaningless platitudes, tired clichés, and a free t-shirt with the logo of the company emblazoned across the front instead of their cash bonus? Certainly not, so why should we be expected to believe that the bear shit is better than the buckwheat when anyone can see that the emperor has no clothes? If there are managers reading this then please remember that your engineers are intelligent people and will not be placated by reverse physiology, worthless trinkets, or motivational speeches. If you want to get the most out of your engineers then treat them with the same respect that you would extend to your management colleagues and offer real rewards for real work because in the end, if it were you, would you expect anything less?
Speaking as a software engineer I can honestly say that I despise writing these things as much as most users do reading them. However, they are unfortunately very necessary in the often litigious society in which we live if for no other reason than to protect the author from frivolous litigation. Even if you give your software away for free you still have to include those clauses disclaiming liabilities for "loss of business" (on a free product no less, but some people really do have that much nerve), "merchantability", and/or "fitness for a particular purpose", and all the rest of that crap. If there were fewer asshat attorneys that sue anyone at the drop of hat then these types of verbose agreements would not be as necessary. You say "just use the GPL" but that is not always an option because of certain clauses in the GPL that limit ones ability to restrict access to trade secrets. I am not knocking the GPL, if you want to license your work under those terms then go ahead, but it is not always possible from a business standpoint. The excessive legalese in our society is an antibody to the excessive amount of litigation, in fact I have read, cannot remember the source, that the United States spends as much as 2% of GDP on lawsuits which is many times more than any other developed nation in the world. So we don't like those long EULAs either but the lawyers made us do it.
I'd agree, with two caveats: this project might attract some math prodigy that isn't working on these problems (Ramanujan, anyone?)
The millennium problems were selected because they are both well known and have resisted attempts at solution. I remember being introduced to the P = NP problem in college and you would be hard pressed to find a computer scientist anywhere who has not at least heard of the problem. The problems in the other fields are probably equally famous in their respective disciplines. I must admit that I had not heard of some of the other problems before reading the list, but then again I am unlikely to solve a difficult problem in chemistry simply because I enjoy making homebrew beer. These problems are not going to be solved by the public at large no matter how many monkeys and typewriters you throw at them. The one million dollar prizes probably sensationalized the problems a bit, but people would be working on these even without the prize money because hell who wouldn't want to be known as the person that proved (or disproved) the Riemann Hypothesis? Their name would be remembered along with such greats as Newton, Leibniz, and Euclid and that is some pretty exclusive company considering that most of us will be entirely forgotten one hundred years after our deaths.
But the solution is simple: everybody should pay for the carbon they have already emitted into the atmosphere; when such payments are set up, then India and China will probably be willing to agree to strong limits on their emissions.
The problem with this solution is that what the Chinese and Indian government promise to do and what their people actually end up doing are two entirely different matters. In China the average citizen in the street has almost zero respect for either copyright or intellectual property. The software piracy rate in China has never been less than 90% since the widespread introduction of the personal computer in that country. India on the other hand has a long tradition of government corruption and bribery that still pervades even at the highest level, hence the recent voter revolt against of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party when the highest leaders were caught red handed taking payola. Both countries have billions of people that would have to be policed in order for the regulations to be enforced. It should be clear to all but the most idealistic individuals what the end result would be. The Indian government is never going to waste the time and money that would be required to track down every small rural farmer or unlicensed street vendor who is driving around on a dirty two-stroke diesel moped or pushcart to say nothing of all the illegal small volume factories dumping chemicals straight into the Ganges River. Likewise with China they will never get their people to give up their coal burning habits even if the government itself abides by the cuts.
The environmentalists always forget that environmental quality is by definition a luxury good, meaning that people care more about it the better off they become. The poor Indian or Chinese doesn't give a crap about whether or not the work he does harms the environment, at least in the short run and in the long run we are all dead anyway, because if he doesn't do the work then someone else will and his family will starve. They don't call economics the dismal science for nothing, but it does rather accurately predict the nature of human behavior when it comes to making competing choices with scarce resources.
By the time you get to the other side of the world, maybe you can use it as a night light.
That would be a really neat effect for your next techno rave (global trance dj or whatever) in the middle of nowhere...a green laser beam pusling across the sky while some club diva in a cage is singing some bull about climbing mountains and reaching for the sky.
Let me see if I understand. You're suggesting that queue systems are innately flawed, and that market forces are better.
I am not suggesting that queues are innately flawed, after all I frequently use them in my software designs, but rather when it comes to allocating goods and services in an economy they produce very inefficient outcomes. The auction allows the market to find the equilibrium price on goods which only come up for sale periodically and are not subject to the type of daily buying and selling that would allow an accurate determination of price based upon retail supply and demand.
Market forces are a patently ludicrous solution for the example. If students could afford housing at market rates, then they wouldn't need subsidies. If the University felt that market forces provided fair and socially desirable outcomes, then it wouldn't provide subsidies. The example doesn't help the argument.
The queue, as suggested previously with randomized initialization, does not necessarily guarantee a fair and socially desirable outcome either. The people most willing to wait in line for long periods, game the system, or otherwise engage in trickery are not necessarily those students who can least afford NOT to live in subsidized housing. Who decides what is fair and socially desirable anyway? How are you going to decide that in an objective fashion? If your intent is to help those students who can show the most need (i.e. lowest income) then why even have the queue? You could force everyone to submit detailed reports of their financial assets and there would be people who would cheat on that too. If you don't believe that then just look at all the people gaming the federal government with "Medicaid Estate" planning services (i.e. how to hide your assets 101). In the example the housing was subsidized in the sense that the university was charging a sub-market rate based upon competing private apartments surrounding the campus. Why should they charge everyone more fees so that a few randomly chosen, not necessarily needy students, can get a break at the expense of everyone else including perhaps those really needy students. The auction saves everyone a lot of time and grief and even a little money too.
If anything, it hurts: as a reader, I'm no longer thinking about European companies trying to build online brands (something for which pure market forces might be good) -- I'm thinking about college students, education, and social darwinism. The parent has created a rhetorical knot which I must undo before I can accept that auctions would improve the allocation of.eu domains.
I was trying to use an example where I had personal experience and to which many slashdot readers can probably relate. Most of us here have either attended college at some point or plan to, so a college related example seemed like a good way to go. The example analogy could perhaps have been better but the main point concerning the auction and market forces remains intact.
There are ways to pay for college even if you are poor. You can borrow money, attend a less expensive school, or dodge bullets in Iraq for a few years so that Uncle Sam will pay. Nobody ever said that it would be easy, but then again few things worth having are easy to get. I went the borrowing route personally, but everyone will have to decide on their own what sort of risks they are willing to take to get what they want.
That is exactly what they did do the following year;D However, the auction system is still better because it distributes the cost of offering the housing more efficiently. If they auction the housing to students who are willing to pay more than the surplus can be used by the university to lower fees that everyone has to pay. The prices will be bid up until they begin to approximate the off campus apartments and everyone pays proprortionally lower non discretionary fees (i.e. tuition) and ends up paying the market rate for housing.
How about having a week-long period where everyone requests all the domains they want, then for names with multiple requests, randomly picking a winner who pays the same flat rate as everyone else
The company in question set up one hundred proxies who all could have entered the drawing one time and given this company a 100 to 1 advantage over the non cheaters. This same phenomenon often occurs in elections, especially in poorer countries with entrenched corruption, where the ballot box is "stuffed" with entries filled out by phantom voters. As for the opportunistic vs the wealthy the two are very often one in the same or at least they tend to become the same over the long run.
They were bogus because they were not real registrars but rather companies squating on a domain name.
The auction system solves this problem because in the end somebody has to pay from a verified line of credit. Thus, it doesn't matter how many proxies somebody uses because they still have to cough up the money when the hammer falls. The post was made out of frustration because people keep trying the same things that always fail and wonder why they fail. There is no suggestion of ivory tower here...auctions can and do solve these types of problems every day in the real world without resorting to some complex and ultimately futile non-money based system that is proof against all cheating.
I think it's more a case of the cat being out of the bag.
Remember also that the NSA is concerned with practical mission concerns and not just the theoretical side of cryptography. In the real world the weakness is rarely in the algorithm chosen, but rather in bungled key management, social engineering, or other physical security concerns which serve as the weak link in the chain. The NSA would not bother brute forcing your key if they could log your keystrokes from a van parked somewhere in the neighborhood or bug your keyboard while you are not home or trick someone at your company to give out the passphrase during a pretext phone call, or any number of other ways that intelligence agencies know about. The secure transmission and storage of keys is the real problem and most private entities are no match for experienced agents of the system when it comes to securing their sensitive data.
There seems to be a special place in the liberal heart for the notion of queues and everyone lining up for their "fair share" of whatever is being doled out. It sounds like a good idea in principle, but in practice this type of scheme inevitably falls victim to the realities of human nature. I remember experiencing something like this first hand when the housing authority at my university decided that a limited number of subsidized campus housing units would be doled out based upon a queue system. Of course, they thought that everyone would be nice and orderly, but in practice people camped outside the office for days before the rush began with one person "holding" spaces for twenty of his friends and people buying and selling places in line. They opened the process at midnight and everyone rushed the doors. The campus police were overwhelmed and they were lucky that there wasn't a riot. The point of all this is that the market has demonstrated time and again that queuing and rationing ultimately fail to satisfy anyone as somebody will always get the short end of the stick even though they would have paid more for item x than item y. Instead of trying to enforce some silly queuing system where people can and will find ways to cheat why did they not have an auction instead? Obviously some names like sex.eu are going to be worth hell of a lot more than blog.eu so why not let competing bidders determine exactly how much more? They could have used the proceeds to create a holding company for long term management of the domain and offer whatever names that were left at a fixed price. The conservative Europeans should have known better than to try and create a non-price based system that could not be abused by those crafty American companies and their high priced consultants.
The quote is commonly attributed to Barnum; however the evidence suggests that it was probably fabricated or misquoted by his competitors in an attempt to discredit him. The matter is further complicated by the fact that Barnum never denied that he said it and that he allegedly thanked his competitors, albeit sarcastically, for the free publicity.
You forgot the part where it integrates people centered applications on a collaborative platform with total quality management propagated across the enterprise while simultaneously increasing productivity, lowering costs, and solving world hunger seamlessly.
Try overriding an OnPaint event on a ListViewBox for instance)
I have written an entire design surface control in C# complete with resizing, scales, transforms, rotations, layers, and rubberband selections all without flicker. It is not difficult to create custom controls for either Windows Forms or ASP.NET, especially when you compare it to using MFC or the Win32 C APIs. BTW...if you want to handle your own drawing in OnPaint, the proper way to implement this is to inherit from UserControl rather than an existing windows control such as ListView.
It has been my experience in software development that sharp users can give valuable feedback in the areas of usability and expected behaviors, but this is no substitute for trapping errors and logging failures on the user's machine when it comes to tracking down less visible faults.
Actually, pre-fab walls are old news. Problem is, there's a very distinct line one crosses when one goes from cubicle-style construction (which is basically classified as "furniture")
On the bright side, when you decide to torch the place and escape to an island resort with your $305,326.13 in cashiers checks you can be sure that the resulting fire will pretty much take care of everything...including your red swingline stapler.
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The wealthiest 5% of households hold nearly 60% of all the wealth.
They also pay 35% of the total federal tax revenue.
Wealth disparity has increased over the last 20 years.
The overall standard of living has increased. The average american can afford to buy more goods and services with the same income now than he could 20 years ago and they curse Walmart for offering them what they want at a low price...you just cant win with some people. The equality of distribution is less important than the overall standard of living. If you want equality combined with high unemployment and overpriced goods and services then try France.
The bottom 60% of households hold 4.2% of the wealth despite earning 26.8% of the income.
Because they spend too much of their disposable income rather than saving what they can and taking advantage of opportunities to purchase assets instead of taking on more debt to finance depreciating liabilities like that Disney vacation or that new flat panel television.
For something like a DVD the intrinsic value is the the cost of making and transporting that DVD.
This was a popular economic theory in the first half of the nineteenth century, although now mostly discredited, called the Labor Theory of Value. The basic idea was that a good or service was worth as much as the factors which were consumed in its production. This theory was promoted especially by early communist thinkers such as Karl Marx in their explanation of the relationships between workers as the owners of their labor and those who controlled the other factors of production (i.e. the bourgeoisie). The main problem with this theory is that it does not explain the relative value that people place upon one good or service in preference to another given that:
A: There is a limited amount of resources available to produce all of the good and services that are demanded by the economy.
B: The price that people are WILLING to pay is not always equal to or more than the cost of PRODUCING the good or service in which case people will either make/do it themselves, find a substitute, or do without.
The DVD may actually cost $50 dollars to produce (it doesn't but assume for the sake of argument that it does), but I would rather have the $50 bucks in my pocket to spend on something else so I will choose not to buy it. If enough other people feel the same way then the product will either be sold in the black market for less or not sold at all because nobody wants to buy it at the price that it costs to produce it. Adam Smith said it best when he said, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it."
Or "you must have cookies enabled" when all it does is track you at their website. Do I really need javascript or cookies to get a price or product review?
Perhaps not javascript, but cookies are commonly used to maintain state between requests or to keep track of the login status of the current session. There are only so many ways to maintain state in a browser session, for all the hype over browser based applications, and with URLs limited to 256 characters or less than what are you going to do? It never ceases to amaze me how people are always trying to work around the browser to badly emulate things that GUI client applications have been doing well for 20+ years. So the answer to your question is that cookies are needed to maintain state because http was originally designed to be stateless and they need some way to get around that so that they can present you with a pseudo application via a browser which was originally designed to link html pages in a stateless fashion. They opted to attach rockets and gyroscopes to a clothes dryer in an attempt to create a flying machine instead of simply designing a plane.
I am one of those young people. I'm finishing up a stint in the Army, and going back to finish my final year of my BS in Computer Information Systems. ( I was mobilized during my senior year of college.) I firmly believe that there is plenty out there for me -- but not in something like programming, rather I believe my talent lies in being a Systems Analyst for a business, or something both technical and managerial in nature.
You said that you were deployed during your senior year of college? I am just curious but have you considered working for one of the private military contractors? You may end up in the same situations that you were in on deployment with the Army but this time you would be earning many times the salary...of course you have to survive to spend it, but nothing is perfect. Seriously though, I doubt that there are very many higher paying jobs, at least in the short run, for a young person with military and especially combat experience. Take it for what you will but is it not worth at least considering?
Imagine, back in Nazi Germany, if the people had taken a stand against their Nazi oppressors early on, World War II could have been averted and tens of millions of people would not have died.
Heh...you obviously didn't live in the fading days of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich or you would realize how utterly ridiculous that statement is. The people of Germany had been crushed for a decade under the punishing war reparations demanded by the allies at Versailles following the conclusion of the first world war. There was simply no way to squeeze that much blood from a turnip and after years of starving and suffering among the masses the people were willing to listen to just about anyone who claimed that they could make things better and especially to a skillful rabble rouser, which Hitler undoubtedly was, who played on their desires and fears. If the allies had not been so vengeful and greedy at the end of the first war the second would not have happened, but the German people were not going to take a stand against the one person who promised to put food on their tables and end their years of unemployment and suffering. Actually John Maynard Keynes, the famed British economist, predicted World War II as far back as 1919 in his book "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" from which the following excerpt was taken:
"If we take the view that for at least a generation to come Germany cannot be trusted with even a modicum of prosperity, that while all our recent allies are angels of light, all our recent enemies, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and the rest, are children of the devil, that year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled, and that she must be ringed round by enemies; Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of reaction and the despairing convulsions of revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation"
The electronica genre does not have to involve simply pushing play on a laptop. The DJ may choose to dynamically alter the streams as they are playing either with software or with turntables as they did in earlier performances. If the DJ was able to manually manipulate a vast console of controls to dynamically and spontaneously mix complex tracks on demand then he or she would surely be recognized and appreciated by the crowds for this additional level of spontaneity and skill. If I am not much mistaken this is exactly what occurs in the clubbing scenes even today.
An extremely substantial percentage of people who listen to music do NOT go to live venues. I'm going to go way out on a limb and throw a completely fictitious guess out. I'll bet that less than 10 percent of the people who listen to music regularly will attend a concert or see a live band this year.
I agree with you that it is difficult to say exactly what percentage of listeners attend a live concert during a given period of time. However, how many of these people who would NOT attend a billed concert WOULD attend a sporting event, festival, or other live venue where music may be a part of the event even if it is not the primary focus?
Most bands will never make it as a profitable venture. I'd like to know exactly how all of this digital music advertising is going to get the bands enough scratch to pay the bills generated by the rental of larger venues.
These costs could be fronted by a wealthy sponsor or promoter, whose primary business is not necessarily music promotion like the recording industry of today, in return for paying the band members a salary and/or percentages of the total event profits. For example, when I was attending university, a friend of mine had a band that was sponsored by Budweiser and played at various outdoor festivals and other events where Budweiser was already a sponsor.
Really, the only way most bands will ever play a stadium or concert hall is by having financial backing from some wealthy third party. And if all you ever do is play bars, well... the life and scope of your band is limited.
The band does not need to play in stadium sized venues to make a decent amount of profit, especially if the higher costs of these larger venues force higher ticket prices or less profit per ticket sale despite the larger (hopefully) attendance.
I hate to say it, but the media companies do serve some good. For all their draconian actions, their structure allows bands with potential to try big and fail, funded by financially successful acts. Most music never makes a profit.
This is true, but the terms are sometimes a bit onerus otherwise every band would be falling over themselves to get a recording contract despite the large promotional and studio debts they receive in return.
Most bands can't even afford the cost of professional recording. And despite what some guys with a $500 card and Cubase would have you believe, you need really good equipment and a talented recording engineer to make a really good demo. I've got $2500 in microphones in my little home studio.
I cannot speak to this since I have neither recorded a demo nor assisted another in that endeavor. However, would it not stand to reason that if the demand was high enough smaller independent studios would compete to rent time to all of the aspiring bands out there? Suppose that the price is high then why is it high? If the high prices reflect higher profits on the part of the studios and not just their actuall costs then competitor studios would surely enter the market to get their share of a "hot" industry thereby driving down rental prices. Perhaps I am way off base here but if so then what makes the music industry a special case against the prevailing theory of market forces?
I don't want to see music become free, unless the artists who made it choose it to be.
I agree with you here entirely. The music is your creation and is owned by you, or if you signed the recording contract, perhaps jointly with the record label. The owner of the work has the right to dictate the terms as long as the copyright lasts, absolutely. However, this right to control your distribution cannot extend to blanket bans on technology that has many other significant non-infringing uses besides potentially making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works (i.e. the Betamax precedent).
I remember downloading the Microsoft Virtual PC product from the company MSDN subscription a few months back to try it out and the performance really tanked on my dev workstation. It was just not fast enough to do any serious development tasks inside the virtual instance. Perhaps if the software were installed on a more powerful machine and then configured to accept terminal server connections, but I never bothered to go that far. I already have three decent older servers retired from production for my testing purposes, none of which are substantially more powerful than my current workstation, and the chances of purchasing allocating funds for a shiny new Virtual PC test server are slim right now so I will just make do with my machines and switcher box for the time being. Has anyone else had a similar experience with virtualization or am I missing something?
One of the questions was "what can I do to be a better employee?" "You know, I'm being asked that all the time..." I nearly vomited.
I myself have often wondered why management feels the need to insult the intelligence of their employees, especially when those employees have engineering degrees or other advanced forms of education. Surely they know that running a fortune 1000 software company is not the same as running the local fast food franchise and yet they continually try to equate the two with their bumbling and inept leadership styles. If they want to motivate their employees and reward outstanding achievements then why not offer cash bonuses and stock options just as they do for themselves? Are the contributions by the engineers and others to the ultimate success of their enterprise any less important than their own? Would they be satisfied with meaningless platitudes, tired clichés, and a free t-shirt with the logo of the company emblazoned across the front instead of their cash bonus? Certainly not, so why should we be expected to believe that the bear shit is better than the buckwheat when anyone can see that the emperor has no clothes? If there are managers reading this then please remember that your engineers are intelligent people and will not be placated by reverse physiology, worthless trinkets, or motivational speeches. If you want to get the most out of your engineers then treat them with the same respect that you would extend to your management colleagues and offer real rewards for real work because in the end, if it were you, would you expect anything less?
Speaking as a software engineer I can honestly say that I despise writing these things as much as most users do reading them. However, they are unfortunately very necessary in the often litigious society in which we live if for no other reason than to protect the author from frivolous litigation. Even if you give your software away for free you still have to include those clauses disclaiming liabilities for "loss of business" (on a free product no less, but some people really do have that much nerve), "merchantability", and/or "fitness for a particular purpose", and all the rest of that crap. If there were fewer asshat attorneys that sue anyone at the drop of hat then these types of verbose agreements would not be as necessary. You say "just use the GPL" but that is not always an option because of certain clauses in the GPL that limit ones ability to restrict access to trade secrets. I am not knocking the GPL, if you want to license your work under those terms then go ahead, but it is not always possible from a business standpoint. The excessive legalese in our society is an antibody to the excessive amount of litigation, in fact I have read, cannot remember the source, that the United States spends as much as 2% of GDP on lawsuits which is many times more than any other developed nation in the world. So we don't like those long EULAs either but the lawyers made us do it.
I'd agree, with two caveats: this project might attract some math prodigy that isn't working on these problems (Ramanujan, anyone?)
The millennium problems were selected because they are both well known and have resisted attempts at solution. I remember being introduced to the P = NP problem in college and you would be hard pressed to find a computer scientist anywhere who has not at least heard of the problem. The problems in the other fields are probably equally famous in their respective disciplines. I must admit that I had not heard of some of the other problems before reading the list, but then again I am unlikely to solve a difficult problem in chemistry simply because I enjoy making homebrew beer. These problems are not going to be solved by the public at large no matter how many monkeys and typewriters you throw at them. The one million dollar prizes probably sensationalized the problems a bit, but people would be working on these even without the prize money because hell who wouldn't want to be known as the person that proved (or disproved) the Riemann Hypothesis? Their name would be remembered along with such greats as Newton, Leibniz, and Euclid and that is some pretty exclusive company considering that most of us will be entirely forgotten one hundred years after our deaths.
But the solution is simple: everybody should pay for the carbon they have already emitted into the atmosphere; when such payments are set up, then India and China will probably be willing to agree to strong limits on their emissions.
The problem with this solution is that what the Chinese and Indian government promise to do and what their people actually end up doing are two entirely different matters. In China the average citizen in the street has almost zero respect for either copyright or intellectual property. The software piracy rate in China has never been less than 90% since the widespread introduction of the personal computer in that country. India on the other hand has a long tradition of government corruption and bribery that still pervades even at the highest level, hence the recent voter revolt against of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party when the highest leaders were caught red handed taking payola. Both countries have billions of people that would have to be policed in order for the regulations to be enforced. It should be clear to all but the most idealistic individuals what the end result would be. The Indian government is never going to waste the time and money that would be required to track down every small rural farmer or unlicensed street vendor who is driving around on a dirty two-stroke diesel moped or pushcart to say nothing of all the illegal small volume factories dumping chemicals straight into the Ganges River. Likewise with China they will never get their people to give up their coal burning habits even if the government itself abides by the cuts.
The environmentalists always forget that environmental quality is by definition a luxury good, meaning that people care more about it the better off they become. The poor Indian or Chinese doesn't give a crap about whether or not the work he does harms the environment, at least in the short run and in the long run we are all dead anyway, because if he doesn't do the work then someone else will and his family will starve. They don't call economics the dismal science for nothing, but it does rather accurately predict the nature of human behavior when it comes to making competing choices with scarce resources.
By the time you get to the other side of the world, maybe you can use it as a night light.
That would be a really neat effect for your next techno rave (global trance dj or whatever) in the middle of nowhere...a green laser beam pusling across the sky while some club diva in a cage is singing some bull about climbing mountains and reaching for the sky.
Let me see if I understand. You're suggesting that queue systems are innately flawed, and that market forces are better.
.eu domains.
I am not suggesting that queues are innately flawed, after all I frequently use them in my software designs, but rather when it comes to allocating goods and services in an economy they produce very inefficient outcomes. The auction allows the market to find the equilibrium price on goods which only come up for sale periodically and are not subject to the type of daily buying and selling that would allow an accurate determination of price based upon retail supply and demand.
Market forces are a patently ludicrous solution for the example. If students could afford housing at market rates, then they wouldn't need subsidies. If the University felt that market forces provided fair and socially desirable outcomes, then it wouldn't provide subsidies. The example doesn't help the argument.
The queue, as suggested previously with randomized initialization, does not necessarily guarantee a fair and socially desirable outcome either. The people most willing to wait in line for long periods, game the system, or otherwise engage in trickery are not necessarily those students who can least afford NOT to live in subsidized housing. Who decides what is fair and socially desirable anyway? How are you going to decide that in an objective fashion? If your intent is to help those students who can show the most need (i.e. lowest income) then why even have the queue? You could force everyone to submit detailed reports of their financial assets and there would be people who would cheat on that too. If you don't believe that then just look at all the people gaming the federal government with "Medicaid Estate" planning services (i.e. how to hide your assets 101). In the example the housing was subsidized in the sense that the university was charging a sub-market rate based upon competing private apartments surrounding the campus. Why should they charge everyone more fees so that a few randomly chosen, not necessarily needy students, can get a break at the expense of everyone else including perhaps those really needy students. The auction saves everyone a lot of time and grief and even a little money too.
If anything, it hurts: as a reader, I'm no longer thinking about European companies trying to build online brands (something for which pure market forces might be good) -- I'm thinking about college students, education, and social darwinism. The parent has created a rhetorical knot which I must undo before I can accept that auctions would improve the allocation of
I was trying to use an example where I had personal experience and to which many slashdot readers can probably relate. Most of us here have either attended college at some point or plan to, so a college related example seemed like a good way to go. The example analogy could perhaps have been better but the main point concerning the auction and market forces remains intact.
There are ways to pay for college even if you are poor. You can borrow money, attend a less expensive school, or dodge bullets in Iraq for a few years so that Uncle Sam will pay. Nobody ever said that it would be easy, but then again few things worth having are easy to get. I went the borrowing route personally, but everyone will have to decide on their own what sort of risks they are willing to take to get what they want.
That is exactly what they did do the following year ;D However, the auction system is still better because it distributes the cost of offering the housing more efficiently. If they auction the housing to students who are willing to pay more than the surplus can be used by the university to lower fees that everyone has to pay. The prices will be bid up until they begin to approximate the off campus apartments and everyone pays proprortionally lower non discretionary fees (i.e. tuition) and ends up paying the market rate for housing.
How about having a week-long period where everyone requests all the domains they want, then for names with multiple requests, randomly picking a winner who pays the same flat rate as everyone else
The company in question set up one hundred proxies who all could have entered the drawing one time and given this company a 100 to 1 advantage over the non cheaters. This same phenomenon often occurs in elections, especially in poorer countries with entrenched corruption, where the ballot box is "stuffed" with entries filled out by phantom voters. As for the opportunistic vs the wealthy the two are very often one in the same or at least they tend to become the same over the long run.
They were bogus because they were not real registrars but rather companies squating on a domain name.
The auction system solves this problem because in the end somebody has to pay from a verified line of credit. Thus, it doesn't matter how many proxies somebody uses because they still have to cough up the money when the hammer falls. The post was made out of frustration because people keep trying the same things that always fail and wonder why they fail. There is no suggestion of ivory tower here...auctions can and do solve these types of problems every day in the real world without resorting to some complex and ultimately futile non-money based system that is proof against all cheating.
I think it's more a case of the cat being out of the bag.
Remember also that the NSA is concerned with practical mission concerns and not just the theoretical side of cryptography. In the real world the weakness is rarely in the algorithm chosen, but rather in bungled key management, social engineering, or other physical security concerns which serve as the weak link in the chain. The NSA would not bother brute forcing your key if they could log your keystrokes from a van parked somewhere in the neighborhood or bug your keyboard while you are not home or trick someone at your company to give out the passphrase during a pretext phone call, or any number of other ways that intelligence agencies know about. The secure transmission and storage of keys is the real problem and most private entities are no match for experienced agents of the system when it comes to securing their sensitive data.
There seems to be a special place in the liberal heart for the notion of queues and everyone lining up for their "fair share" of whatever is being doled out. It sounds like a good idea in principle, but in practice this type of scheme inevitably falls victim to the realities of human nature. I remember experiencing something like this first hand when the housing authority at my university decided that a limited number of subsidized campus housing units would be doled out based upon a queue system. Of course, they thought that everyone would be nice and orderly, but in practice people camped outside the office for days before the rush began with one person "holding" spaces for twenty of his friends and people buying and selling places in line. They opened the process at midnight and everyone rushed the doors. The campus police were overwhelmed and they were lucky that there wasn't a riot. The point of all this is that the market has demonstrated time and again that queuing and rationing ultimately fail to satisfy anyone as somebody will always get the short end of the stick even though they would have paid more for item x than item y. Instead of trying to enforce some silly queuing system where people can and will find ways to cheat why did they not have an auction instead? Obviously some names like sex.eu are going to be worth hell of a lot more than blog.eu so why not let competing bidders determine exactly how much more? They could have used the proceeds to create a holding company for long term management of the domain and offer whatever names that were left at a fixed price. The conservative Europeans should have known better than to try and create a non-price based system that could not be abused by those crafty American companies and their high priced consultants.
The quote is commonly attributed to Barnum; however the evidence suggests that it was probably fabricated or misquoted by his competitors in an attempt to discredit him. The matter is further complicated by the fact that Barnum never denied that he said it and that he allegedly thanked his competitors, albeit sarcastically, for the free publicity.
There is a sucker born every minute
You forgot the part where it integrates people centered applications on a collaborative platform with total quality management propagated across the enterprise while simultaneously increasing productivity, lowering costs, and solving world hunger seamlessly.
Try overriding an OnPaint event on a ListViewBox for instance)
I have written an entire design surface control in C# complete with resizing, scales, transforms, rotations, layers, and rubberband selections all without flicker. It is not difficult to create custom controls for either Windows Forms or ASP.NET, especially when you compare it to using MFC or the Win32 C APIs. BTW...if you want to handle your own drawing in OnPaint, the proper way to implement this is to inherit from UserControl rather than an existing windows control such as ListView.
It has been my experience in software development that sharp users can give valuable feedback in the areas of usability and expected behaviors, but this is no substitute for trapping errors and logging failures on the user's machine when it comes to tracking down less visible faults.
Actually, pre-fab walls are old news. Problem is, there's a very distinct line one crosses when one goes from cubicle-style construction (which is basically classified as "furniture")
On the bright side, when you decide to torch the place and escape to an island resort with your $305,326.13 in cashiers checks you can be sure that the resulting fire will pretty much take care of everything...including your red swingline stapler.