I'm an academic research mathematician who'll soon be leaving his postdoc to look for work in the financial sector.. or any other interesting sector. I've had a lovely time doing postdocs in interesting new cities, but I'm done with the moving, long distance relationships, etc. I love programming too since like age 7, so anything goes. I promised myself however that I'd try several interesting things before taking any job that required a security clearance, i.e. NSA.
Inside academia, there are literally hordes of well qualified PhDs who'll never ever get proper research jobs simply because the number of good secure research positions grows slower than the national population while every such position produces numerous qualified people (ignore the hordes of under-qualified people graduated by some faculty). We understand this population model when we call the variable rabbits, yet we ignore it when we say academics.
Academia and industry may be losing many of the best-of-the-best to Wall St. but we've more than enough qualified people for all the high level jobs. If society wants more people in a particular field, then society must allocate the resources. You could for example quadruple the NSF's budget by shaving off just over %2 of the $900 billion military budget.
Don't like how Wall St. extracts so much money from the venture capital and IPO process? Fine, allocate $10--$50 billion for federally backed public interest venture capital operations, hell back it from social security, surely better than 3%. There will be no shortage of young engineers choosing $60k per year working on their own ventures over whatever salaries Wall St. offers. Just don't complain about people not doing socially useful work in saturated job markets, especially ones so supersaturated that all the young people end up in long distance relationships.
p.s. If we actually invested like $20 billion of social security receipts towards, then we'd see employers complain even more about a lack of qualified people, meaning people who'll do highly skilled work for little money.
I'll buy a MeeGo device that functions well as either a phone or an eink-like ebook reader. I'm not terribly interested in this whole netbooks without keyboards fad started by Apple. If I understand correctly, Nokia has stated their subsequent MeeGo devices will not be phones.
Do you realize that black tuesday was caused by congress increasing the interest rates for buying stocks on margin? There are many heavy handed morality plays that'll tank the whole economy instantly. We'd all benefit from slowly raising the short term capital gains tax, massively elevating inheritance tax, and plugging Wall St. tax loopholes, just don't go overboard or implement the changes too quickly.
We should begin by trying to divorce Wall St. from the general economy as much as possible. A few moderate steps include :
Idea 0. Create & apply stronger anti-trust legislation to break up the largest Wall St. banks.
Idea 1. Enforce all the existing state restrictions on lean holders, preventing foreclosures on most securitized mortgages, and driving Wall St. out of the mortgage business for good.
Idea 2. Wean companies off the commercial paper market. We might begin by simply toughening up reporting requirements, ensuring that more of their day to day debt gets reported to shareholders, reporting the share price less their debt, etc.
Idea 3. Create a bank bailout framework that eliminates the large scale moral hazards. For example, all the economic stabilization achieved by the previous Wall St. bailout might be achieved by instead pushing smaller solvent banks into the commercial paper market, say by both offering them the financial backing to do so, and by assigning NSA and CIA personnel to them. You simply let the big banks fail while building up smaller banks that'll replace them, but you make sure that someone keeps all the commercial paper moving.
Idea 4. Stop Wall St.'s IPO rent seeking. There ain't enough money here to seriously impact Wall St.'s bottom line, but they've fucked up the IPO market big time. In a related note, we could invest meaningful amounts of social security funds in independent venture capital organizations.
Apple is the bad guy using patents anti-compeditively in this case. Apple simply ignored Nokia's patents on real shit, but sues everyone over their unjust patents on user interfaces. Apple might have simply ignored Nokia while they pursued minor Android users, but Nokia had the grace to make Apple fight a big boy first.
Imho, the best case scenario would be Apple's patents all being torn down, and serious review of Nokia's patents as well.
An amusing scenario that'd showcase the stupidity of the patent system would be : Apple ends up unable to sell iPhone in Europe, while Nokia ends up unable to sell Windws Phone 7 phones in the U.S., i.e. your oblivion situation. Ain't likely though.
Also, Maemo was a far better & way more open operating system than Android.
It isn't insane when a country protect its workforce by using unfair competition laws to force foreign countries to abide by some safety and environmental standards.
We'd all applaud if Microsoft was lobbying for that sort of environmental, safety, etc. law, even if we knew they'd eventually apply to the president to help obtain this sort of law. Yet, they're going straight for the draconian copyright law, so we should yell & scream.
Btw, there is only one sane copyright law for software, namely software derives its copyright from its source code, and any software distributed without the source code receives no copyright protection.
Aniti-GPL people are morons about this point. If I write stuff, I'll use whatever license I want. If that's the GPL, well that's awesome. I've never understood why you are telling me I cannot license software however I want.
All that'll happen here will be : Apple introduces security vulnerabilities into their SMB code.
Who cares? Ain't nobody gonna run a publicly accessible SMB server, especially not on Apple hardware. Are there even any publicly accessible web servers on Apple hardware. lol Ain't nobody gonna write viruses that exploit Apple's cruddy SMB code. Apple hasn't contributed jack to samba development, btw.
Apple's customers will not suffer. Samba will not suffer. Microsoft won't really benefit. etc. Who cares? Seriously.
As an aside, there is one big fucking reason for licensing code under the GPL v3 : All the patent restrictions motivate some minority of companies to license your code directly, avoiding the GPL v3. Yet conversely the GPL v3 does not obstruct widespread corporate adoption. For me, that's a winning combination that ensures my continued usage of the GPL v3.
Aww man, I'm envisioning the ultimate troll of gamer culture here :
You first write the most bad ass multiplayer online first person shooter ever. It involves ever so slight roleplaying elements that reward users who play online enough with single player missions that actually carry a compelling plot. Yet, all that plot revolves around a gay man seeking revenge against a homophobic skinhead gang that murdered his lover. All the gay guys are really buff while all the skinheads are strung out skanks. In fact, you end up seducing one or two secretly gay skinheads to further your progress.
You might however claim your initial Teen ESRB by avoiding most sexual themes, gamboling, etc. After the initial T release, you begin adding completely benign online missions that's necessary for further advancment that clarify the character's homosexuality and revenge motive. Again, nothing overtly sexual that might elevate a legitimate rating above Teen, but obviously the shit will hit the fan once all the gamers realize they're playing a gay guy. After that shit settles down, you finally add an explicitly romantic seduction mission, but still suppress all explicit sex. Is innuendo still rated T? I donno, maybe. And lastly you add a "directors cut" online mission that provides your character with training for the phallic looking rail gun BFG, but only extremely good online player can reach, and involves gay sex cut scene.
Yes obviously the video streaming sites like megavideo either aren't blocking reuploading or else reuploaders are altering the file's contents slightly.
We obviously need these bit locker sites for many reasons like emergency bandwidth for resisting traffic spikes, pseudo-anonymous publication, and simply avoiding the email file size limit. An sha or md5 based file filter sounds like the best overall compromise because it complicates the process by forcing pirates to encrypt or alter the file.
It creates a censorship infrastructure that is inherently much more damaging that authors not being paid.
In particular, they ain't just blocking sites like thepiratebay.org that openly facilitate piracy. Instead, they're going after sites like megaupload that offer valuable legitimate services for small business, namely inexpensive hosting and user friendly file transfer, and actively discourage piracy.
You ever noticed how all the books you download from bit locker sites are encrypted? All those sites ban a file's name, hash, etc. when they get reports of abuse.
I'd imagined just issuing more stock that devalued the shares held by the board and executives, but obviously that makes those shares no longer tradable on the exchange, which actually seems overly complex, punitive, etc. (I'm not drunk now)
In broad strokes, I was proposing imposing some form of fiduciary duty to the stock holders upon the board members and executives that directed the oversized acquisition, i.e. they must put their personal wealth on the line. An easy solution might be claw back terms in the contracts granting them stock & options, i.e. they lose all the lions share of their renumeration if the company falls precipitously during the years following a huge merger.
We might alternatively impose a "deliberative process" upon large mergers. You might for example require the justice department to prosecute every sufficiently large merger at least through the discovery phase. And then require a final shareholder vote for approval only after the discovery phase. In short, you make sure the acquiring company's stock holders understand they're paying higher than fair market value.
Ahh, that $39 billion never existed. AT&T has simply offered T-mobile stockholder stock in AT&T, i.e. they're simply offering $39B of their shareholder's money. You rarely see share holders paying out for improving infrastructure, but they'll somehow always get conned into ponying up for mergers.
In fact, such mergers almost never help the shareholders of the acquiring company. Cash acquisitions average out about like investing in the S&P500. Stock acquisitions almost always cost shareholders significantly, i.e. the acquiring company overpays. Yes, the academic business literature has researched this question extensively.
I'm unsure how the stock holders in the acquired company fair, presumably they realize a short term gain, but basically all their long term investment strategy and research work gets shot to hell, costing them valuable effort instead of money.
Who benefits? Ahh, that'd be the guys who went from running a company worth $160B to a company worth $200B. Yeah, their stock took a hit, but they'll just increase their stock packages accordingly. See how that works?
Virtually all stock large mergers are bad for the economy, bad for stock holders, bad for employees, and bad for consumers.
Imho, we should require that public companies engaging in an acquisition over $1B and over say 3% of their market cap to declare a 5 year target stock price. And indemnify all stock shares except those held by the board of directors and the executives against any short fall below that price that could be traced to the acquisition. In a stroke, that'd ensure that those making the acquisition decisions took the brunt of the stock price hit, thus ending these ridiculous scams.
It'll give AT&T a absolute monopoly on the GSM network, meaning all the coolest foreign phones will run only on AT&T. AT&T's infrastructure sucks now precisely because Apple gave them a fucking device monopoly and hoards of locked-in users with the iPhone.
I avoid carriers like Verizon, Sprint, MetroPCS, etc. that employ Qualcomm's shitty "ass rape the consumers though device lock-in" technology, i.e. buy only GSM phones. Note the rows for note the operator locking and intellectual property on that table. I avoid the most monopolistic of the GSM carriers too though, i.e. AT&T.
It follows that this acquisition presents a very big problem for me. It'll suck ass if all the interesting foreign phones, traditionally better than phones available in the U.S., are now only usable on AT&T and their virtual carriers. Yes, Android has improved the phone situation on Qualcomm's carriers like Sprint of course, but that doesn't resolve the fundamental evil that is Qualcomm's carrier lock-in via ESN.
Btw, you should also oppose this deal if you own significant stock in Microsoft : We know the best hardware running Windows Phone 7 will come from Nokia, making them GSM and AT&T only.
Our courts would take the "mothers operation" scenario into account, even if you're robbing a bank. It certainly doesn't 'get you off' but it changes things. And the same applies to all the other examples I gave. Yes, all the examples I gave are all stupid behavior, but that's the point : people are often stupid, but that doesn't make them bad.
For this reason, any system that administers punishments must generally account for the gradations in human motivations, much like our courts.
Example : High school disciplinary procedures come under fire all the time because the administrators are too stupid to apply the rules with the necessary finesse. We don't see nearly the same problems in university disciplinary because the ultimate judges are clever well educated people.
An arbitrary punishment of auto-banning all infringers would just destroy Google's credibility with the Russian, Chinese, Indian, etc. developers who'll engage in casual infringement, pushing them towards because it'll punish the partially or potentially legit developers much more than the wholesale infringers. In fact, it'll push them into becoming wholesale infringers by forcing them to break more rules even to participate legitimately.
Google's only easy answer is banning only the worst offenders, ideally only after analyzing their modus operandi well enough to slow similar infringers in future. You know, if you take an antibiotic every day, you'll just find yourself fighting off stronger anti-biuotic resistant diseases. Anyone who doesn't understand that qualifies as stupid.
As I said, there is one useful middle ground punishment google may apply to casual infringers, namely delaying their payments and demanding more identification. That sort of punishment will discourage causal infringers.
In any case, google's lawyers have obviously thought through this system extremely well. I'm sure they've already understood the stupidity of auto-bans from their experience with google video, youtube, and google docs.
You seriously think google should damage their Android ecosystem by deleting non-infringing apps because the developer posted an infringing app? Umm, that's just plain retarded. Do you realize how bad the scenario I described would look for Google? lol
You realize that a criminal or civil court would take all that shit I described into consideration, right? Even if the infringer had only ever posted infringing content! Google isn't interested in or able to recreate our court system here.
Also, courts get kinda touchy about anyone cutting in on their territory. In particular, our infringer with a sick mother could absolutely find an ambulance chaser to sue google for his own lost legit revenue plus lawyer fees plus whatever. Do you think google should deduct their lawyer's expenses from the original legit developers profits?
As I said, the original developers asking for bans are just fucking morons who understand nothing about the wider world outside.
Yes, a criminal court would care about exactly those points. If google doesn't want to worry about that shit, then google must be very conservative on banning people. Ain't rocket science, just the wider world outside your cubicle.
I'm afraid the independent developers bitching here are just fucking morons. You know, even take down requests on youtube and other big sites don't warrant account termination. There are numerous ways google could shoot themselves in the foot by doing what this moronic developer asks.
First, there might be significant collateral damage : Imagine a developer with legit games too who just posted that infringing game because his mother needs an operation. Imagine two co-developers have falling out, one registers their new game first, reports the second's game as infringing, and gets the second account banned. Imagine a developer reposts another's game because he owns part but got cheated by the official developer. etc. Any such collateral damages impacts the Android market place itself, not just the developers. And such collateral damage cases should not need to seek special dispensation from google.
Second, you don't want to scare away infringing users who might become legitimate non-infringing users and improve the Android market place. A ban for infringement obviously isn't going to dissuade a professional infringer, but it'll very likely drive away a legitimate developer who's just cheating to test the waters.
Third, Google can actually process future infringement claims more efficiently if infringers continue using the same accounts. In other words, the infringed upon developers are subsidizing google's copyright enforcement efforts by their lost revenue, assuming they even lost any revenue. In fact, Google could slightly delay payouts to developers with an infringement history, increasing the recouped damages, possibly even above the lost revenues.
If there's one fucking thing we've learned recently, it's that law enforcement types are god awful fucking gullible when they think they're listening to their own kind. We've hard proof that the Egyptian secret police carried out two major terrorists attacks inside Egypt and blamed their own country. And western intelligence services just blindly believed their lies. We understand how the evidence for chemical weapons in Iraq was entirely & purely focally fabricated by Iraqi ex-pat living in Germany. We even had some asshat put his wife on the no fly list when she was outside the country.
We obviously cannot trust our law enforcement and intelligence services without serious judicial oversight. In particular, we cannot trust the buffoons hoping that 'better algorithm' will give them some pre-crime detector. Instead, they'll just harass more innocent people based upon imaginary plots and connections.
Yeah, it's called a legislative shakedown. I don't mind google being pushed around by idealistic Europeans, but once America's asshats get into the game, well it's a shakedown pure & simple.
Google would eventually turn evil once Sergey Brin dies of course, but thus far they ain't too bad. We should encourage Larry and Sergey to push positive moral aims through their company itself, rather than adopting Gate's be evil & then be nice approach.
There are not many Americans currently being tortured or indefinitely detained without due process, plus those being so overtly abused are very high profile cases.
There are however countless cases of law enforcement inventing evidence to harass or detain some random guy they don't like. And this writing analysis software will obviously get used by them.
In addition, foreign governments and peace organizations routinely get fooled by state secret police.
Imagine a Stasi, Egyptian SSIS, FBI, etc. officer who really really wants to lock you up for terrorist talk. He'll first write out what he wants you to say. He'll then look at your writing, make some changes, check the score, and repeat until score says conviction.
I'd imagine this software would be very easy to fool if you wanted to commit the resources too. Or even just keep tweaking your fake document until you produce the desired result from the software.
In fact, most people drive stick shifts outside North America, including in Europe.
You're describing more the convenience of iTunes itself, not the iPods. There are plenty of "fat" music players that'll provide all the syncing & such that iTunes does, but using any mp3 player. Apple benefits enormously from the synergy between iTunes and the iPods.
Appearance plays an enormous role in the adoption of phones, mp3 players, and tablets, just witness Apple crowing over thinning down by a couple millimeters.
iPads are basically a very portable and flexible television, but writing on them sucks ass since they lack a physical keyboard. If you never write much, that's fine. Yet, there's we've a classification of jobs called 'white collar' that frequently connotes spending much of your day typing on a physical keyboard. And that keyboard determines their "primary computing device".
Apple's laptops rock, except how they keep this stupid DVD drive around. I'll get an Air for my next laptop.
I'll almost surely choose Linux for my next desktop though. Mac OS X just doesn't exploit powerful machines nearly as well as Linux. And the Linux desktop environments are plenty good enough when your not perpetually inserting weird hardware, like external monitors.
I will never buy any iOS device however, not an iPad, not an iPhone, not an iPod Touch, etc. iPhone was an extremely strong assault on Symbian, but it's no mobile computer. Maemo wiped the floor with iOS functionality wise, even lacking the "apps". Android likewise deftly defeats iOS.
Isn't "there's an app for that" precisely Apple's narrow minded vision of interoperability with the likes of facebook and google?
*If* there was a standard for friending and access between different social networking providers, Apple might roll their own into MobileMe effectively endorsing that standard over Facebook. I doubt you'd see them cripple facebook on their products even then. And they'd never try going it alone without an established user base and a standard to follow.
Apple takes existing technology and polish the implementation until it fits the average user perfectly. You'll never see them deliver well on any technology that hasn't been well rehearsed elsewhere first.
In fact, their only even inkling towards new technology has been backing the LLVM project, but that's partially meant to make up for shortcomings in their BSD kernel, i.e. protecting them from needing to switch kernels to Linux or something.
Apple could obviously deliver a solid social networking application. It's an old established technology that'll benefit from polishing. Yet, I'm doubtful they'd deliver any new killer features. And their existing strong market positions won't help them much.
Apple could never handle search, way too mathematically intensive, subtle processing scalability issues, etc. And again their existing market positions are useless and they'd simply never deliver anything better than Google.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an academic research mathematician who'll soon be leaving his postdoc to look for work in the financial sector.. or any other interesting sector. I've had a lovely time doing postdocs in interesting new cities, but I'm done with the moving, long distance relationships, etc. I love programming too since like age 7, so anything goes. I promised myself however that I'd try several interesting things before taking any job that required a security clearance, i.e. NSA.
Inside academia, there are literally hordes of well qualified PhDs who'll never ever get proper research jobs simply because the number of good secure research positions grows slower than the national population while every such position produces numerous qualified people (ignore the hordes of under-qualified people graduated by some faculty). We understand this population model when we call the variable rabbits, yet we ignore it when we say academics.
Academia and industry may be losing many of the best-of-the-best to Wall St. but we've more than enough qualified people for all the high level jobs. If society wants more people in a particular field, then society must allocate the resources. You could for example quadruple the NSF's budget by shaving off just over %2 of the $900 billion military budget.
Don't like how Wall St. extracts so much money from the venture capital and IPO process? Fine, allocate $10--$50 billion for federally backed public interest venture capital operations, hell back it from social security, surely better than 3%. There will be no shortage of young engineers choosing $60k per year working on their own ventures over whatever salaries Wall St. offers. Just don't complain about people not doing socially useful work in saturated job markets, especially ones so supersaturated that all the young people end up in long distance relationships.
p.s. If we actually invested like $20 billion of social security receipts towards, then we'd see employers complain even more about a lack of qualified people, meaning people who'll do highly skilled work for little money.
I'll buy a MeeGo device that functions well as either a phone or an eink-like ebook reader. I'm not terribly interested in this whole netbooks without keyboards fad started by Apple. If I understand correctly, Nokia has stated their subsequent MeeGo devices will not be phones.
Do you realize that black tuesday was caused by congress increasing the interest rates for buying stocks on margin? There are many heavy handed morality plays that'll tank the whole economy instantly. We'd all benefit from slowly raising the short term capital gains tax, massively elevating inheritance tax, and plugging Wall St. tax loopholes, just don't go overboard or implement the changes too quickly.
We should begin by trying to divorce Wall St. from the general economy as much as possible. A few moderate steps include :
Idea 0. Create & apply stronger anti-trust legislation to break up the largest Wall St. banks.
Idea 1. Enforce all the existing state restrictions on lean holders, preventing foreclosures on most securitized mortgages, and driving Wall St. out of the mortgage business for good.
Idea 2. Wean companies off the commercial paper market. We might begin by simply toughening up reporting requirements, ensuring that more of their day to day debt gets reported to shareholders, reporting the share price less their debt, etc.
Idea 3. Create a bank bailout framework that eliminates the large scale moral hazards. For example, all the economic stabilization achieved by the previous Wall St. bailout might be achieved by instead pushing smaller solvent banks into the commercial paper market, say by both offering them the financial backing to do so, and by assigning NSA and CIA personnel to them. You simply let the big banks fail while building up smaller banks that'll replace them, but you make sure that someone keeps all the commercial paper moving.
Idea 4. Stop Wall St.'s IPO rent seeking. There ain't enough money here to seriously impact Wall St.'s bottom line, but they've fucked up the IPO market big time. In a related note, we could invest meaningful amounts of social security funds in independent venture capital organizations.
Apple is the bad guy using patents anti-compeditively in this case. Apple simply ignored Nokia's patents on real shit, but sues everyone over their unjust patents on user interfaces. Apple might have simply ignored Nokia while they pursued minor Android users, but Nokia had the grace to make Apple fight a big boy first.
Imho, the best case scenario would be Apple's patents all being torn down, and serious review of Nokia's patents as well.
An amusing scenario that'd showcase the stupidity of the patent system would be : Apple ends up unable to sell iPhone in Europe, while Nokia ends up unable to sell Windws Phone 7 phones in the U.S., i.e. your oblivion situation. Ain't likely though.
Also, Maemo was a far better & way more open operating system than Android.
It isn't insane when a country protect its workforce by using unfair competition laws to force foreign countries to abide by some safety and environmental standards.
We'd all applaud if Microsoft was lobbying for that sort of environmental, safety, etc. law, even if we knew they'd eventually apply to the president to help obtain this sort of law. Yet, they're going straight for the draconian copyright law, so we should yell & scream.
Btw, there is only one sane copyright law for software, namely software derives its copyright from its source code, and any software distributed without the source code receives no copyright protection.
Aniti-GPL people are morons about this point. If I write stuff, I'll use whatever license I want. If that's the GPL, well that's awesome. I've never understood why you are telling me I cannot license software however I want.
All that'll happen here will be : Apple introduces security vulnerabilities into their SMB code.
Who cares? Ain't nobody gonna run a publicly accessible SMB server, especially not on Apple hardware. Are there even any publicly accessible web servers on Apple hardware. lol Ain't nobody gonna write viruses that exploit Apple's cruddy SMB code. Apple hasn't contributed jack to samba development, btw.
Apple's customers will not suffer. Samba will not suffer. Microsoft won't really benefit. etc. Who cares? Seriously.
As an aside, there is one big fucking reason for licensing code under the GPL v3 : All the patent restrictions motivate some minority of companies to license your code directly, avoiding the GPL v3. Yet conversely the GPL v3 does not obstruct widespread corporate adoption. For me, that's a winning combination that ensures my continued usage of the GPL v3.
Aww man, I'm envisioning the ultimate troll of gamer culture here :
You first write the most bad ass multiplayer online first person shooter ever. It involves ever so slight roleplaying elements that reward users who play online enough with single player missions that actually carry a compelling plot. Yet, all that plot revolves around a gay man seeking revenge against a homophobic skinhead gang that murdered his lover. All the gay guys are really buff while all the skinheads are strung out skanks. In fact, you end up seducing one or two secretly gay skinheads to further your progress.
You might however claim your initial Teen ESRB by avoiding most sexual themes, gamboling, etc. After the initial T release, you begin adding completely benign online missions that's necessary for further advancment that clarify the character's homosexuality and revenge motive. Again, nothing overtly sexual that might elevate a legitimate rating above Teen, but obviously the shit will hit the fan once all the gamers realize they're playing a gay guy. After that shit settles down, you finally add an explicitly romantic seduction mission, but still suppress all explicit sex. Is innuendo still rated T? I donno, maybe. And lastly you add a "directors cut" online mission that provides your character with training for the phallic looking rail gun BFG, but only extremely good online player can reach, and involves gay sex cut scene.
Epic Win!! :)
Any files that are removed are added to a file filter (based on md5 hashing of the file) to prevent the exact same file from being uploaded again.
Yes obviously the video streaming sites like megavideo either aren't blocking reuploading or else reuploaders are altering the file's contents slightly.
We obviously need these bit locker sites for many reasons like emergency bandwidth for resisting traffic spikes, pseudo-anonymous publication, and simply avoiding the email file size limit. An sha or md5 based file filter sounds like the best overall compromise because it complicates the process by forcing pirates to encrypt or alter the file.
It creates a censorship infrastructure that is inherently much more damaging that authors not being paid.
In particular, they ain't just blocking sites like thepiratebay.org that openly facilitate piracy. Instead, they're going after sites like megaupload that offer valuable legitimate services for small business, namely inexpensive hosting and user friendly file transfer, and actively discourage piracy.
You ever noticed how all the books you download from bit locker sites are encrypted? All those sites ban a file's name, hash, etc. when they get reports of abuse.
I'd imagined just issuing more stock that devalued the shares held by the board and executives, but obviously that makes those shares no longer tradable on the exchange, which actually seems overly complex, punitive, etc. (I'm not drunk now)
In broad strokes, I was proposing imposing some form of fiduciary duty to the stock holders upon the board members and executives that directed the oversized acquisition, i.e. they must put their personal wealth on the line. An easy solution might be claw back terms in the contracts granting them stock & options, i.e. they lose all the lions share of their renumeration if the company falls precipitously during the years following a huge merger.
We might alternatively impose a "deliberative process" upon large mergers. You might for example require the justice department to prosecute every sufficiently large merger at least through the discovery phase. And then require a final shareholder vote for approval only after the discovery phase. In short, you make sure the acquiring company's stock holders understand they're paying higher than fair market value.
Ahh, that $39 billion never existed. AT&T has simply offered T-mobile stockholder stock in AT&T, i.e. they're simply offering $39B of their shareholder's money. You rarely see share holders paying out for improving infrastructure, but they'll somehow always get conned into ponying up for mergers.
In fact, such mergers almost never help the shareholders of the acquiring company. Cash acquisitions average out about like investing in the S&P500. Stock acquisitions almost always cost shareholders significantly, i.e. the acquiring company overpays. Yes, the academic business literature has researched this question extensively.
I'm unsure how the stock holders in the acquired company fair, presumably they realize a short term gain, but basically all their long term investment strategy and research work gets shot to hell, costing them valuable effort instead of money.
Who benefits? Ahh, that'd be the guys who went from running a company worth $160B to a company worth $200B. Yeah, their stock took a hit, but they'll just increase their stock packages accordingly. See how that works?
Virtually all stock large mergers are bad for the economy, bad for stock holders, bad for employees, and bad for consumers.
Imho, we should require that public companies engaging in an acquisition over $1B and over say 3% of their market cap to declare a 5 year target stock price. And indemnify all stock shares except those held by the board of directors and the executives against any short fall below that price that could be traced to the acquisition. In a stroke, that'd ensure that those making the acquisition decisions took the brunt of the stock price hit, thus ending these ridiculous scams.
It'll give AT&T a absolute monopoly on the GSM network, meaning all the coolest foreign phones will run only on AT&T. AT&T's infrastructure sucks now precisely because Apple gave them a fucking device monopoly and hoards of locked-in users with the iPhone.
I avoid carriers like Verizon, Sprint, MetroPCS, etc. that employ Qualcomm's shitty "ass rape the consumers though device lock-in" technology, i.e. buy only GSM phones. Note the rows for note the operator locking and intellectual property on that table. I avoid the most monopolistic of the GSM carriers too though, i.e. AT&T.
It follows that this acquisition presents a very big problem for me. It'll suck ass if all the interesting foreign phones, traditionally better than phones available in the U.S., are now only usable on AT&T and their virtual carriers. Yes, Android has improved the phone situation on Qualcomm's carriers like Sprint of course, but that doesn't resolve the fundamental evil that is Qualcomm's carrier lock-in via ESN.
Btw, you should also oppose this deal if you own significant stock in Microsoft : We know the best hardware running Windows Phone 7 will come from Nokia, making them GSM and AT&T only.
Our courts would take the "mothers operation" scenario into account, even if you're robbing a bank. It certainly doesn't 'get you off' but it changes things. And the same applies to all the other examples I gave. Yes, all the examples I gave are all stupid behavior, but that's the point : people are often stupid, but that doesn't make them bad.
For this reason, any system that administers punishments must generally account for the gradations in human motivations, much like our courts.
Example : High school disciplinary procedures come under fire all the time because the administrators are too stupid to apply the rules with the necessary finesse. We don't see nearly the same problems in university disciplinary because the ultimate judges are clever well educated people.
An arbitrary punishment of auto-banning all infringers would just destroy Google's credibility with the Russian, Chinese, Indian, etc. developers who'll engage in casual infringement, pushing them towards because it'll punish the partially or potentially legit developers much more than the wholesale infringers. In fact, it'll push them into becoming wholesale infringers by forcing them to break more rules even to participate legitimately.
Google's only easy answer is banning only the worst offenders, ideally only after analyzing their modus operandi well enough to slow similar infringers in future. You know, if you take an antibiotic every day, you'll just find yourself fighting off stronger anti-biuotic resistant diseases. Anyone who doesn't understand that qualifies as stupid.
As I said, there is one useful middle ground punishment google may apply to casual infringers, namely delaying their payments and demanding more identification. That sort of punishment will discourage causal infringers.
In any case, google's lawyers have obviously thought through this system extremely well. I'm sure they've already understood the stupidity of auto-bans from their experience with google video, youtube, and google docs.
You lost me right there.
You seriously think google should damage their Android ecosystem by deleting non-infringing apps because the developer posted an infringing app? Umm, that's just plain retarded. Do you realize how bad the scenario I described would look for Google? lol
You realize that a criminal or civil court would take all that shit I described into consideration, right? Even if the infringer had only ever posted infringing content! Google isn't interested in or able to recreate our court system here.
Also, courts get kinda touchy about anyone cutting in on their territory. In particular, our infringer with a sick mother could absolutely find an ambulance chaser to sue google for his own lost legit revenue plus lawyer fees plus whatever. Do you think google should deduct their lawyer's expenses from the original legit developers profits?
As I said, the original developers asking for bans are just fucking morons who understand nothing about the wider world outside.
Yes, a criminal court would care about exactly those points. If google doesn't want to worry about that shit, then google must be very conservative on banning people. Ain't rocket science, just the wider world outside your cubicle.
I'm afraid the independent developers bitching here are just fucking morons. You know, even take down requests on youtube and other big sites don't warrant account termination. There are numerous ways google could shoot themselves in the foot by doing what this moronic developer asks.
First, there might be significant collateral damage : Imagine a developer with legit games too who just posted that infringing game because his mother needs an operation. Imagine two co-developers have falling out, one registers their new game first, reports the second's game as infringing, and gets the second account banned. Imagine a developer reposts another's game because he owns part but got cheated by the official developer. etc. Any such collateral damages impacts the Android market place itself, not just the developers. And such collateral damage cases should not need to seek special dispensation from google.
Second, you don't want to scare away infringing users who might become legitimate non-infringing users and improve the Android market place. A ban for infringement obviously isn't going to dissuade a professional infringer, but it'll very likely drive away a legitimate developer who's just cheating to test the waters.
Third, Google can actually process future infringement claims more efficiently if infringers continue using the same accounts. In other words, the infringed upon developers are subsidizing google's copyright enforcement efforts by their lost revenue, assuming they even lost any revenue. In fact, Google could slightly delay payouts to developers with an infringement history, increasing the recouped damages, possibly even above the lost revenues.
If there's one fucking thing we've learned recently, it's that law enforcement types are god awful fucking gullible when they think they're listening to their own kind. We've hard proof that the Egyptian secret police carried out two major terrorists attacks inside Egypt and blamed their own country. And western intelligence services just blindly believed their lies. We understand how the evidence for chemical weapons in Iraq was entirely & purely focally fabricated by Iraqi ex-pat living in Germany. We even had some asshat put his wife on the no fly list when she was outside the country.
We obviously cannot trust our law enforcement and intelligence services without serious judicial oversight. In particular, we cannot trust the buffoons hoping that 'better algorithm' will give them some pre-crime detector. Instead, they'll just harass more innocent people based upon imaginary plots and connections.
Yeah, it's called a legislative shakedown. I don't mind google being pushed around by idealistic Europeans, but once America's asshats get into the game, well it's a shakedown pure & simple.
Google would eventually turn evil once Sergey Brin dies of course, but thus far they ain't too bad. We should encourage Larry and Sergey to push positive moral aims through their company itself, rather than adopting Gate's be evil & then be nice approach.
There are not many Americans currently being tortured or indefinitely detained without due process, plus those being so overtly abused are very high profile cases.
There are however countless cases of law enforcement inventing evidence to harass or detain some random guy they don't like. And this writing analysis software will obviously get used by them.
In addition, foreign governments and peace organizations routinely get fooled by state secret police.
For example: Amn Dawla Leaks revealed that Gamal Mubarak and Egypt State Security were behind the Sharm el-Sheikh resort bombings in 2005 that killed 88 people and wounded over 200. It appears that Gamal Mubarak's motivation for the attacks was revenge against the resort owner Hussein Salem who had apparently reduced Mubarak's commission for an Israeli gas deal from 10% to 5%. Egypt had blamed Islamists and Bedouins. Pro-Palestinian conspiracy theorists had blamed Israel.
Imagine a Stasi, Egyptian SSIS, FBI, etc. officer who really really wants to lock you up for terrorist talk. He'll first write out what he wants you to say. He'll then look at your writing, make some changes, check the score, and repeat until score says conviction.
I'd imagine this software would be very easy to fool if you wanted to commit the resources too. Or even just keep tweaking your fake document until you produce the desired result from the software.
In fact, most people drive stick shifts outside North America, including in Europe.
You're describing more the convenience of iTunes itself, not the iPods. There are plenty of "fat" music players that'll provide all the syncing & such that iTunes does, but using any mp3 player. Apple benefits enormously from the synergy between iTunes and the iPods.
Appearance plays an enormous role in the adoption of phones, mp3 players, and tablets, just witness Apple crowing over thinning down by a couple millimeters.
iPads are basically a very portable and flexible television, but writing on them sucks ass since they lack a physical keyboard. If you never write much, that's fine. Yet, there's we've a classification of jobs called 'white collar' that frequently connotes spending much of your day typing on a physical keyboard. And that keyboard determines their "primary computing device".
Apple's laptops rock, except how they keep this stupid DVD drive around. I'll get an Air for my next laptop.
I'll almost surely choose Linux for my next desktop though. Mac OS X just doesn't exploit powerful machines nearly as well as Linux. And the Linux desktop environments are plenty good enough when your not perpetually inserting weird hardware, like external monitors.
I will never buy any iOS device however, not an iPad, not an iPhone, not an iPod Touch, etc. iPhone was an extremely strong assault on Symbian, but it's no mobile computer. Maemo wiped the floor with iOS functionality wise, even lacking the "apps". Android likewise deftly defeats iOS.
Isn't "there's an app for that" precisely Apple's narrow minded vision of interoperability with the likes of facebook and google?
*If* there was a standard for friending and access between different social networking providers, Apple might roll their own into MobileMe effectively endorsing that standard over Facebook. I doubt you'd see them cripple facebook on their products even then. And they'd never try going it alone without an established user base and a standard to follow.
Apple takes existing technology and polish the implementation until it fits the average user perfectly. You'll never see them deliver well on any technology that hasn't been well rehearsed elsewhere first.
In fact, their only even inkling towards new technology has been backing the LLVM project, but that's partially meant to make up for shortcomings in their BSD kernel, i.e. protecting them from needing to switch kernels to Linux or something.
Apple could obviously deliver a solid social networking application. It's an old established technology that'll benefit from polishing. Yet, I'm doubtful they'd deliver any new killer features. And their existing strong market positions won't help them much.
Apple could never handle search, way too mathematically intensive, subtle processing scalability issues, etc. And again their existing market positions are useless and they'd simply never deliver anything better than Google.