You're assuming progress stopped in 1973. US space budgets still represent over 80% of global space spending. Going further than the Moon is significantly harder than going to the moon. Nobody had ever done that engineering (landing and surviving on mars) before, and it wasn't easy. You're also totally discounting our satellite arrays, like the space telescopes, of which there are several that do different things, and our earth monitoring and GPS satellites. All of these were difficult, expensive engineering projects. You're also discounting our probes, which have been further into the universe in every direction than anyone else. There isn't a single area where we aren't ahead, except perhaps choosing the Shuttle over something more similar to the Soyuz, which we're working on now. The number of spacecrafts NASA has built and launched since 73 is staggering.
If you think they're going to catch up, lets take a look at their plans. They're looking to build a space station to launch between 2019 and 2020. The project seems closest to Skylab, our space station from 1973, except that Skylab launched 36 years ago and was 4 times larger than the proposed Chinese design. Perhaps they'll be able to steal our plans and shrink it down to something that they can afford to meet their goal. Then there is their lunar exploration plans. They don't plan to land men on the moon until around 2024. If nothing goes wrong, and they achieve their goal, they'll have accomplished what we did 55 years before. That's largely the extent of their space ambitions.
Compare to NASA's plans (from Wikipedia):
It is the current space policy of the United States that NASA, "execute a sustained and affordable human and robotic program of space exploration and develop, acquire, and use civil space systems to advance fundamental scientific knowledge of our Earth system, solar system, and universe."[8] NASA's ongoing investigations include in-depth surveys of Mars and Saturn and studies of the Earth and the Sun. Other NASA spacecraft are presently en route to Mercury and Pluto. With missions to Jupiter in planning stages, NASA's itinerary covers over half the solar system.
An improved and larger planetary rover, Mars Science Laboratory, is under construction and slated to launch in 2011, after a slight delay caused by hardware challenges, which has bumped it back from the October 2009 scheduled launch.[9] The New Horizons mission to Pluto was launched in 2006 and will fly by Pluto in 2015. The probe received a gravity assist from Jupiter in February 2007, examining some of Jupiter's inner moons and testing on-board instruments during the fly-by. On the horizon of NASA's plans is the MAVEN spacecraft as part of the Mars Scout Program to study the atmosphere of Mars.
So the Chinese go to the Moon, and we go to Mercury, Pluto, Mars, and Saturn. I don't know if you've seen the MSL, but that is going to produce some phenomenal research, and is about the size and weight of a Mini-Cooper. Nobody has ever landed anything that size on the Martian surface before, so we had to develop all of the technology to make it possible. In addition to that NASA, plans to begin building a permanent moon base in 2020, and have it fully functional and inhabited by 2024.
Perhaps before we declare China the winner in space, it would be prudent to wait until their plans are at least as ambitious as our own and they develop any real, innovative, never been done before, technology. At present, even with their spending levels, they're falling behind. They may be great thieves and reverse engineers, but they're not going to catch us, and certainly not pass us, any time soon.
Calling for the death of NASA when our space budgets represents 80% of global space spending is delusional. Non-U.S. space budgets only represent about 5 percent of global space economic activity. With figures like that, you've got to be wishing that America will fail, because the odds sure seem to be pointing the other way. Wish in one hand, and shit in the other, and see which fills up first.
You honestly believe that in the next two years China can catch up on the last 40 years of NASA R&D? They would have to land a man on the moon, develop and launch a space telescope better than the JWST, they would have had to land and operate rovers on Mars 3 years ago, since we've already operated rovers on Mars for 5 years, construct a global satellite communications network, and a global satellite positioning system. They aren't even close to being near where the US is, nobody is. We've been miles and miles ahead for decades.
Of the 5,736 satellites that had been launched by 2006, China was responsible for a whopping 99, while the US and Former Soviet Union have launched 5,043. The only way they're going to catch up in the next two years is if everyone but the Chinese begins traveling faster than the speed of light. With the relativistic effects, the Chinese may have a shot.
Nice shot at the NASA budget by the way. Were you aware that it was over 10 times higher than the Chinese space budget in 2007? In 2008, the CSNA budget was $1.3B, whereas the NASA budget was over $17B, with another $21B going to the DoD Space Budget. I know that it's vastly easier to follow in the footsteps of somebody else who is actually doing all the tough, expensive research, without performing any real cutting edge research, but if they were to catch up to us, then pass us, wouldn't it require them to spend nearly as much money as us? Even assuming they can just steal all of our designs until they catch up, how are they going to pass us with less than 10% of the budget?
What has you, and so many people like you, so convinced that we're going to be dominated in every field by other countries that are nowhere near catching us? Why do you hate this country so much? It's certainly not rational, we're so far ahead at this point even if we gave them the research and a couple of billion dollars a year, they'd still be dropping further back.
Frankly, it would be great if some other countries stepped up and actually performed some notable space research of their own, rather than taking a free ride courtesy of our taxpayers. In 2009, the whole European Space Agency budget is only $4.85B, the Russian Federal Space Agency budget is only $2.2B, the official China National Space Administration budget is only $500M, and the Indian Space Research Organization budget is only $1.3B. Compared to the NASA budget of $17.3B, these sums are rather paltry. NASA is better funded than every other serious space agency in the world, combined, and you think they're going to catch us. We should seriously consider cutting back NASA funding until the rest of the world does have a chance to catch up, so we no longer have to pay to subsidize their space programs by performing all the hard R&D.
If, on the other hand, you agree with us that the issues affecting software are drastically different than those pertaining to pharmaceutics and company names, then you'll agree with us that using the term is, in itself, stupid.
The thing that they all have in common is that they're all property that has value. Software, pharmaceuticals, and company names are all excellent examples. I've already explained the value of software in the GP post. The brand name Coca-Cola, the world's most valuable, is worth about $67 billion. The reason for this is the Coca-Cola logo, color scheme, layout, and name have been associated in such a way with their product, that it's immediately recognizable around the world. Developing this brand recognition doesn't come cheap, and without being able to protect it, no company would pay to develop it in the first place, and it would be vastly harder for consumers to quickly identify and recognize quality, or crappy, products.
Pharmaceuticals are also a great example, because without the ability to sell the drug, or prevent others from coming in and selling the drug for only the manufacturing costs, it wouldn't be possible to develop new drugs. Between R&D and testing, new drug development is ungodly expensive. Without copyright and patents, only the government could afford to develop new drugs. Good luck if you have a disease that doesn't affect a large number of voters. Even more worrisome, if companies did continue to produce drugs, they'd do whatever they could to hide and protect the formulation, which would certainly stifle innovation.
Like it or not, intellectual property is the correct term. It's all about protecting the value of something intangible so that development costs can be recuperated. The argument otherwise is kind of like the people that make the argument that games are overpriced because it only costs $0.25 to stamp the disk, and a few dollars to retail it. What they aren't understanding is that you aren't buying a disk, you're buying the game that cost $100M to build that's on the disk. If anyone can copy the product because there are no duplication costs, and you can never recuperate your investment, you can never afford to gamble and make the investment in the first place. This has absolutely nothing to do with evil greedy capitalists conspiring to bankrupt liberal college hippies by creating unlimited money printing presses with zero cost of duplication IP. You have to look further than what's immediately in front of you. There's a hell of a lot more to it than, it doesn't cost anything to make more of it. The supply is artificial. The fact is, if there were an unlimited supply, it wouldn't be able to exist in the first place.
Maybe he hasn't "evolved" to the stage where he believes he needs to kill his problems yet. Give him some time:P
You've got a lot to learn. Killing your problems is only a human condition if you're a foolish liberal. Chimps are intensly territorial, and there have even been documented incidents of chimp communities going to war with one another, to the extent that the larger group will hunt down and kill every member of the smaller group. The behavior isn't confined to chimps. Some species of ants actually enslave others.
The queen of an established slavemaking colony will produce new queens who leave the colony to develop their own colony. The young slavemaking queen will wait outside of the colony she is leaving and follow a group of raiding slave makers into her new colony. As the worker slavemakers raid this colony for eggs, the queen takes advantage of the battle by using it to sneak into the colony. Once it finds the queen, it kills her and takes her place. The new queen mimics the old queen by consuming pheromones from her body and releasing them to the attending ants. This new queen having mated with a slavemaking male earlier begins to produce new slave makers. Other variations on these hostile takeovers include one South American species whose workers secrete a chemical on a host colony that causes the ants of the host colony to evacuate the nest. In their haste to leave, pupae will be left behind. These developing ants are then taken back to the slave maker nest. Another variation is in a European species that attacks ants that are significantly larger in size. The queen invades a nest by clinging on the rightful queen and slowly chokes her to death.
Also, I'm glad to see the description of the term "Intellectual Property" called for precisely what it is : propaganda. It's time for this term to be thrown out, and not to let so-called self-professed "intellectual property owners" inject this horrible term into the collective mind-set any further - it muddies the water of the discussion.
The layoffs that would occur as all developed software immediately entered the public domain because there was no legal recourse for copying binaries or code, and the resulting explosion of DRM and trusted computing initiatives would be fascinating to watch, but somehow I don't think it would help the economy very much. Perhaps it's called "Intellectual Property" because it can cost billions of dollars to develop, and wouldn't be economically feasible to develop without the protections afforded to tangible property.
GTA 4, for instance, cost about $100M to develop. Given the quality of open source games, I think it's a totally fair assessment that without being able to sell the content, quality modern games couldn't exist without unbreakable DRM and trusted computing. In the short term, this would kill the industry. In the long term, it would increase the PC software development barrier of entry to match that of console game development.
What about the entertainment industry? Let's use the Dark Knight as an example. The budget was $185M. If anyone could copy and distribute the film, would it be economically possible to profit after such an outlay (hint: it wasn't released in China for "cultural reasons")?
The fact of the matter is that getting rid of copyright would do more to harm the economy than it would ever be able to do to help it. Large scale, expensive R&D and engineering projects wouldn't be economically feasible, because there would be no way to prevent others from directly copying and distributing your product. Not only would the dissolution of copyright crush engineering innovation, it would also cripple the arts. Only in liberal fantasy land will tens or hundreds of millions of dollars be invested to produce a product that can't be sold, but only supported.
Why is it OK for everyone to expect programmers to work for free, but not graphic artists? Programming is tedious, hard work, that few people are able to do at all, and even fewer are able to do well. Expecting to be paid for performing work that other people find useful is the rule, not the exception.
Plus the Republicans are as bad as the Dems on this, both sides have thrown in bullshit riders on the bill to turn it into a money-grab for pet interests.
Only 3 RINO Republicans in the entire congress voted for this. Not a single house Republican had anything to do with it. The house minority leader threw the bill and criticized the congress for not having even taken the time to read the damn thing.
This bill is as partisan as it gets. The Republicans had practically nothing to do with this mess, and opposed it every step of the way. You can't sit back and say that the Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats, when only three even voted for it.
The radio spectrum is NOT private property, it is PUBLIC!
And the public has already decided what it wants to listen to. If the public isn't interested in liberal radio, perhaps it isn't in the public interest to force radio stations to carry content that almost nobody cares about.
So what? You don't seem to be getting the point. Your entire argument is that the conservatives might lose some money under the fairness doctrine. And that may be a legitimate point. However, MY argument is that a fairness doctrine allows freedom of speech and discussion -- especially political discussion -- over the public airwaves. And I am sorry, dude, but my right to freedom of speech very clearly trumps your right to make a profit. Further, you have NO logical basis to argue that conservative speech would be curtailed in the process. So, since your argument is one of corporate profit vs. free speech... guess what? THAT argument is ended. You lose.
You're either very naive, or an idiot. You can't make a free speech argument about something that's designed to restrict and force speech. Indeed, when the FCC began to repeal the doctrine in the 80s, the reason given was "that the doctrine hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment". I'm sure you don't understand how that could be, so I'll go ahead and explain it to you.
Radio stations setup their programing to maximize their profitability. Their profitability is based on the number of advertisements they can sell, and the rate they can sell them for. The more people that listen to a program, the more money they can make from their advertising. At this point, conservative talk radio is at least 10 times more profitable than liberal talk radio, as its audience is an order of magnitude larger.
Under the fairness doctrine, broadcasters are forced to give free comparable airtime (i.e. comparable prime-time slot, same length) for dissenting opinions. This is important because the best liberal show is an order of magnitude less popular than the best conservative shows. Because they must be bundled together under the doctrine, this lowers the value of the conservative show to about 60% of its standalone value. Because of this, it's more profitable to drop talk radio all together, and give away no free airtime. In this way, free speech is abridged.
This isn't about money or political speech. It's about conservative talk radio. How do you explain the growth in talk radio stations from 400 to over 1,400 after the repeal of the fairness doctrine? If the programs aren't economically viable, they won't be on the air at all. That restricts speech.
You liberals are incredible. If you actually believe that a show that in the free market can only attract 10% of the audience of another will draw comparable advertising rates, you must be high. Forced bundling will only dilute the value of the conservative show, which will most definitely affect broadcast decisions. Back of the envelope calculations don't need to be that accurate, in this case the difference in popularity is massive enough the results should be plainly obvious.
And there absolutely was an adjacency requirement in the original fairness doctrine. If there wasn't, it would be simple to just run Air America reruns at 3AM to fulfill the requirement. Nobody wants to listen to that crap anyway.
Morning and afternoon drive dayparts in radio are 4 hours each (6a-10a, 3p-7p) and even if you include the five hours of non-prime midday airtime in between, you're still looking at a 13 hour window, not even half of which is filled up with Limbaugh + Anti Limbaugh.
So lets do the math then. Limbaugh has the most popular talk radio show in the country, with 14 million weekly listeners, compared to the 1.5 million attracted by the most popular liberal show. Since Limbaugh airs from 3-6 on the west coast, 6-9 would have to be given to the liberal show in the same area. Suppose that the advertising on the 6-9 slot now sells for $750k/week, and the Limbaugh show goes for $1M/week. Given that the liberal show is only about 10% as popular, we'll assume that advertising would go for $100k/week. Therefore, in order to keep the Limbaugh show, it would cost the station $650k/week, effectively lowering the returns on the Limbaugh show to just just $350k/week because of the unpopular liberal show. Now if the station could get $750k/week for other content for that time slot, they'd make $400k/week more than they would with the Limbaugh show, because they wouldn't be forced to run the unpopular content.
Your argument isn't well thought out. The Fairness Doctrine is all about silencing conservative speech on the radio.
You are contradicting yourself. First you say that they want to force the conservative stations (which have the majority of money-making talk shows, according to you), then in the next sentence you say that most of the networks are liberal... therefore the liberals own most of the stations.
Most of the television networks are liberal. Talk radio is the only area that's dominated by conservatives.
Sorry, dude, but it can't work both ways.
No shit.
If the liberals owned most of the networks, but they were unprofitable, then they would sell them. That's what sane people do. If the liberals owned the networks that ran the conservative talk shows, and they were the only ones that made money, then the liberals probably would not want to shut them down. But if they did want to shut them down, they could do so without a fairness doctrine... after all, if they own the network they don't have to run the show.
They have. Liberal talk radio has never really taken off, so there are very few stations compared to conservative talk radio. Because the libs are unable to compete, in the interest of "fairness" they would force the stations that have conservative shows to dedicated the same amount of time to liberal shows in comparable time slots, which is essentially impossible since there isn't any money in liberal talk radio. The most popular liberal hosts on Air America only attract about 1.5 million weekly listeners, whereas Rush Limbaugh averages 14 million, and has been as high as 20 million.
The main thing that you are forgetting is that if the liberals owned most of the newtorks EXCEPT for those that ran the conservative talk shows, the fairness doctrine would still give equal conservative time to their own liberal views... if they wanted to shut down all the conservative networks, they would be shooting themselves in the feet, because the fairness doctrine would force them to allow equal time for the conservatives on the liberal shows!
No, it wouldn't. What would happen is that the stations would have to either reduce the length of, or cancel the conservative radio shows because they wouldn't be able to take the hit of airing hours of unpopular, unprofitable liberal shows.
In summary: what you say makes no sense at all. The fairness doctrine does nothing but give people a choice as to what they want to listen to, no matter who is running the show. And that is a good thing for America, whether you are a liberal or a conservative. The only way you could possibly believe that such a choice is a bad thing (unless you actually believe the delusion you were spouting), is if you are afraid of someone else's message.
In summary, you're wrong. The fairness doctrine is primarily about silencing Rush Limbaugh since the stations that air his 3 hour show would then be forced to air 3 hour liberal shows in comparable time slots, which they can't do because there is no money in liberal radio. They'd either have to cancel the show or scale it back, which is exactly why the Democrats want this back.
The fairness doctrine is all about silencing conservative talk radio by forcing the stations to carry unprofitable liberal radio. All of the major networks except Fox lean to the left, which is why the Democrats including Pelosi are so keen on it.
Not that anyone in this day and age learns from mistakes any longer -- following the economic crash, people are seeking to get back to "business as usual" failing to appreciate that "business as usual" is what caused the crash.
The economic crash occurred because the government forced lenders to make bad loans to people that couldn't afford them by creating a secondary market for the notes which overvalued the assets so people like Franklin Raines could get their full bonuses. It has nothing to do with "business as usual", especially at technology companies.
The challenge I see for NetFlix is dealing with the moves towards bandwidth caps - a movie a night is likely to rapidly push people to the cap; and they are likely to be mad at NetFlix, not their ISP. As a result, I see pressure form larger ISPs, at least, to pressure NetFlix in paying for bandwidth or working out a revenue split where NetFlix is bundled with the service.
That's precisely why cable ISPs have been pursuing bandwidth caps so aggressively, and net neutrality is so vital.
Is there a way to do that with a Windows client connecting to a headless Linux server? I currently edit my code using Netbeans on a Windows box connecting to the server running Samba, but it's way too slow. And before anyone says it, there are a variety of reasons I can't switch to desktop Linux, as much as I would like to.
Specter has been a Republican in Name Only since at least 2004, when conservative Congressman Toomey ran against him in the primary because of his liberal voting record. Collins and Snowe have been considered RINOs because of their liberal voting record since 1999, when they voted to acquit Clinton. Nice try though, but as with almost everything, as a Democrat you're uninformed.
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No wonder the Democrats always want to raise taxes. They don't pay anyway!
Probably because it's one of the only games that really appeals to women. The entire game is decorating and forming relationships between characters.
You're assuming progress stopped in 1973. US space budgets still represent over 80% of global space spending. Going further than the Moon is significantly harder than going to the moon. Nobody had ever done that engineering (landing and surviving on mars) before, and it wasn't easy. You're also totally discounting our satellite arrays, like the space telescopes, of which there are several that do different things, and our earth monitoring and GPS satellites. All of these were difficult, expensive engineering projects. You're also discounting our probes, which have been further into the universe in every direction than anyone else. There isn't a single area where we aren't ahead, except perhaps choosing the Shuttle over something more similar to the Soyuz, which we're working on now. The number of spacecrafts NASA has built and launched since 73 is staggering.
If you think they're going to catch up, lets take a look at their plans. They're looking to build a space station to launch between 2019 and 2020. The project seems closest to Skylab, our space station from 1973, except that Skylab launched 36 years ago and was 4 times larger than the proposed Chinese design. Perhaps they'll be able to steal our plans and shrink it down to something that they can afford to meet their goal. Then there is their lunar exploration plans. They don't plan to land men on the moon until around 2024. If nothing goes wrong, and they achieve their goal, they'll have accomplished what we did 55 years before. That's largely the extent of their space ambitions.
Compare to NASA's plans (from Wikipedia):
It is the current space policy of the United States that NASA, "execute a sustained and affordable human and robotic program of space exploration and develop, acquire, and use civil space systems to advance fundamental scientific knowledge of our Earth system, solar system, and universe."[8] NASA's ongoing investigations include in-depth surveys of Mars and Saturn and studies of the Earth and the Sun. Other NASA spacecraft are presently en route to Mercury and Pluto. With missions to Jupiter in planning stages, NASA's itinerary covers over half the solar system.
An improved and larger planetary rover, Mars Science Laboratory, is under construction and slated to launch in 2011, after a slight delay caused by hardware challenges, which has bumped it back from the October 2009 scheduled launch.[9] The New Horizons mission to Pluto was launched in 2006 and will fly by Pluto in 2015. The probe received a gravity assist from Jupiter in February 2007, examining some of Jupiter's inner moons and testing on-board instruments during the fly-by. On the horizon of NASA's plans is the MAVEN spacecraft as part of the Mars Scout Program to study the atmosphere of Mars.
So the Chinese go to the Moon, and we go to Mercury, Pluto, Mars, and Saturn. I don't know if you've seen the MSL, but that is going to produce some phenomenal research, and is about the size and weight of a Mini-Cooper. Nobody has ever landed anything that size on the Martian surface before, so we had to develop all of the technology to make it possible. In addition to that NASA, plans to begin building a permanent moon base in 2020, and have it fully functional and inhabited by 2024.
Perhaps before we declare China the winner in space, it would be prudent to wait until their plans are at least as ambitious as our own and they develop any real, innovative, never been done before, technology. At present, even with their spending levels, they're falling behind. They may be great thieves and reverse engineers, but they're not going to catch us, and certainly not pass us, any time soon.
Calling for the death of NASA when our space budgets represents 80% of global space spending is delusional. Non-U.S. space budgets only represent about 5 percent of global space economic activity. With figures like that, you've got to be wishing that America will fail, because the odds sure seem to be pointing the other way. Wish in one hand, and shit in the other, and see which fills up first.
You honestly believe that in the next two years China can catch up on the last 40 years of NASA R&D? They would have to land a man on the moon, develop and launch a space telescope better than the JWST, they would have had to land and operate rovers on Mars 3 years ago, since we've already operated rovers on Mars for 5 years, construct a global satellite communications network, and a global satellite positioning system. They aren't even close to being near where the US is, nobody is. We've been miles and miles ahead for decades.
Of the 5,736 satellites that had been launched by 2006, China was responsible for a whopping 99, while the US and Former Soviet Union have launched 5,043. The only way they're going to catch up in the next two years is if everyone but the Chinese begins traveling faster than the speed of light. With the relativistic effects, the Chinese may have a shot.
Nice shot at the NASA budget by the way. Were you aware that it was over 10 times higher than the Chinese space budget in 2007? In 2008, the CSNA budget was $1.3B, whereas the NASA budget was over $17B, with another $21B going to the DoD Space Budget. I know that it's vastly easier to follow in the footsteps of somebody else who is actually doing all the tough, expensive research, without performing any real cutting edge research, but if they were to catch up to us, then pass us, wouldn't it require them to spend nearly as much money as us? Even assuming they can just steal all of our designs until they catch up, how are they going to pass us with less than 10% of the budget?
What has you, and so many people like you, so convinced that we're going to be dominated in every field by other countries that are nowhere near catching us? Why do you hate this country so much? It's certainly not rational, we're so far ahead at this point even if we gave them the research and a couple of billion dollars a year, they'd still be dropping further back.
Frankly, it would be great if some other countries stepped up and actually performed some notable space research of their own, rather than taking a free ride courtesy of our taxpayers. In 2009, the whole European Space Agency budget is only $4.85B, the Russian Federal Space Agency budget is only $2.2B, the official China National Space Administration budget is only $500M, and the Indian Space Research Organization budget is only $1.3B. Compared to the NASA budget of $17.3B, these sums are rather paltry. NASA is better funded than every other serious space agency in the world, combined, and you think they're going to catch us. We should seriously consider cutting back NASA funding until the rest of the world does have a chance to catch up, so we no longer have to pay to subsidize their space programs by performing all the hard R&D.
Because the only other sensible thing to write is, "plans to file an appeal?"
If, on the other hand, you agree with us that the issues affecting software are drastically different than those pertaining to pharmaceutics and company names, then you'll agree with us that using the term is, in itself, stupid.
The thing that they all have in common is that they're all property that has value. Software, pharmaceuticals, and company names are all excellent examples. I've already explained the value of software in the GP post. The brand name Coca-Cola, the world's most valuable, is worth about $67 billion. The reason for this is the Coca-Cola logo, color scheme, layout, and name have been associated in such a way with their product, that it's immediately recognizable around the world. Developing this brand recognition doesn't come cheap, and without being able to protect it, no company would pay to develop it in the first place, and it would be vastly harder for consumers to quickly identify and recognize quality, or crappy, products.
Pharmaceuticals are also a great example, because without the ability to sell the drug, or prevent others from coming in and selling the drug for only the manufacturing costs, it wouldn't be possible to develop new drugs. Between R&D and testing, new drug development is ungodly expensive. Without copyright and patents, only the government could afford to develop new drugs. Good luck if you have a disease that doesn't affect a large number of voters. Even more worrisome, if companies did continue to produce drugs, they'd do whatever they could to hide and protect the formulation, which would certainly stifle innovation.
Like it or not, intellectual property is the correct term. It's all about protecting the value of something intangible so that development costs can be recuperated. The argument otherwise is kind of like the people that make the argument that games are overpriced because it only costs $0.25 to stamp the disk, and a few dollars to retail it. What they aren't understanding is that you aren't buying a disk, you're buying the game that cost $100M to build that's on the disk. If anyone can copy the product because there are no duplication costs, and you can never recuperate your investment, you can never afford to gamble and make the investment in the first place. This has absolutely nothing to do with evil greedy capitalists conspiring to bankrupt liberal college hippies by creating unlimited money printing presses with zero cost of duplication IP. You have to look further than what's immediately in front of you. There's a hell of a lot more to it than, it doesn't cost anything to make more of it. The supply is artificial. The fact is, if there were an unlimited supply, it wouldn't be able to exist in the first place.
It would seem that NASA is not as serious about the new space race as China. Someone will end up controlling the skies, just got to wonder whom.
Since they'd still be behind even if we wound the clock back to 1969, I don't think we've got a whole lot to worry about.
Maybe he hasn't "evolved" to the stage where he believes he needs to kill his problems yet. Give him some time :P
You've got a lot to learn. Killing your problems is only a human condition if you're a foolish liberal. Chimps are intensly territorial, and there have even been documented incidents of chimp communities going to war with one another, to the extent that the larger group will hunt down and kill every member of the smaller group. The behavior isn't confined to chimps. Some species of ants actually enslave others.
The queen of an established slavemaking colony will produce new queens who leave the colony to develop their own colony. The young slavemaking queen will wait outside of the colony she is leaving and follow a group of raiding slave makers into her new colony. As the worker slavemakers raid this colony for eggs, the queen takes advantage of the battle by using it to sneak into the colony. Once it finds the queen, it kills her and takes her place. The new queen mimics the old queen by consuming pheromones from her body and releasing them to the attending ants. This new queen having mated with a slavemaking male earlier begins to produce new slave makers. Other variations on these hostile takeovers include one South American species whose workers secrete a chemical on a host colony that causes the ants of the host colony to evacuate the nest. In their haste to leave, pupae will be left behind. These developing ants are then taken back to the slave maker nest. Another variation is in a European species that attacks ants that are significantly larger in size. The queen invades a nest by clinging on the rightful queen and slowly chokes her to death.
Also, I'm glad to see the description of the term "Intellectual Property" called for precisely what it is : propaganda. It's time for this term to be thrown out, and not to let so-called self-professed "intellectual property owners" inject this horrible term into the collective mind-set any further - it muddies the water of the discussion.
The layoffs that would occur as all developed software immediately entered the public domain because there was no legal recourse for copying binaries or code, and the resulting explosion of DRM and trusted computing initiatives would be fascinating to watch, but somehow I don't think it would help the economy very much. Perhaps it's called "Intellectual Property" because it can cost billions of dollars to develop, and wouldn't be economically feasible to develop without the protections afforded to tangible property.
GTA 4, for instance, cost about $100M to develop. Given the quality of open source games, I think it's a totally fair assessment that without being able to sell the content, quality modern games couldn't exist without unbreakable DRM and trusted computing. In the short term, this would kill the industry. In the long term, it would increase the PC software development barrier of entry to match that of console game development.
What about the entertainment industry? Let's use the Dark Knight as an example. The budget was $185M. If anyone could copy and distribute the film, would it be economically possible to profit after such an outlay (hint: it wasn't released in China for "cultural reasons")?
The fact of the matter is that getting rid of copyright would do more to harm the economy than it would ever be able to do to help it. Large scale, expensive R&D and engineering projects wouldn't be economically feasible, because there would be no way to prevent others from directly copying and distributing your product. Not only would the dissolution of copyright crush engineering innovation, it would also cripple the arts. Only in liberal fantasy land will tens or hundreds of millions of dollars be invested to produce a product that can't be sold, but only supported.
Why is it OK for everyone to expect programmers to work for free, but not graphic artists? Programming is tedious, hard work, that few people are able to do at all, and even fewer are able to do well. Expecting to be paid for performing work that other people find useful is the rule, not the exception.
The Republicans mandated that the GSEs make bad loans so poor minorities could end up in houses they couldn't afford?
Plus the Republicans are as bad as the Dems on this, both sides have thrown in bullshit riders on the bill to turn it into a money-grab for pet interests.
Only 3 RINO Republicans in the entire congress voted for this. Not a single house Republican had anything to do with it. The house minority leader threw the bill and criticized the congress for not having even taken the time to read the damn thing.
This bill is as partisan as it gets. The Republicans had practically nothing to do with this mess, and opposed it every step of the way. You can't sit back and say that the Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats, when only three even voted for it.
The radio spectrum is NOT private property, it is PUBLIC!
And the public has already decided what it wants to listen to. If the public isn't interested in liberal radio, perhaps it isn't in the public interest to force radio stations to carry content that almost nobody cares about.
So what? You don't seem to be getting the point.
Your entire argument is that the conservatives might lose some money under the fairness doctrine. And that may be a legitimate point. However, MY argument is that a fairness doctrine allows freedom of speech and discussion -- especially political discussion -- over the public airwaves. And I am sorry, dude, but my right to freedom of speech very clearly trumps your right to make a profit. Further, you have NO logical basis to argue that conservative speech would be curtailed in the process. So, since your argument is one of corporate profit vs. free speech... guess what? THAT argument is ended. You lose.
You're either very naive, or an idiot. You can't make a free speech argument about something that's designed to restrict and force speech. Indeed, when the FCC began to repeal the doctrine in the 80s, the reason given was "that the doctrine hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment". I'm sure you don't understand how that could be, so I'll go ahead and explain it to you.
Radio stations setup their programing to maximize their profitability. Their profitability is based on the number of advertisements they can sell, and the rate they can sell them for. The more people that listen to a program, the more money they can make from their advertising. At this point, conservative talk radio is at least 10 times more profitable than liberal talk radio, as its audience is an order of magnitude larger.
Under the fairness doctrine, broadcasters are forced to give free comparable airtime (i.e. comparable prime-time slot, same length) for dissenting opinions. This is important because the best liberal show is an order of magnitude less popular than the best conservative shows. Because they must be bundled together under the doctrine, this lowers the value of the conservative show to about 60% of its standalone value. Because of this, it's more profitable to drop talk radio all together, and give away no free airtime. In this way, free speech is abridged.
This isn't about money or political speech. It's about conservative talk radio. How do you explain the growth in talk radio stations from 400 to over 1,400 after the repeal of the fairness doctrine? If the programs aren't economically viable, they won't be on the air at all. That restricts speech.
You liberals are incredible. If you actually believe that a show that in the free market can only attract 10% of the audience of another will draw comparable advertising rates, you must be high. Forced bundling will only dilute the value of the conservative show, which will most definitely affect broadcast decisions. Back of the envelope calculations don't need to be that accurate, in this case the difference in popularity is massive enough the results should be plainly obvious.
And there absolutely was an adjacency requirement in the original fairness doctrine. If there wasn't, it would be simple to just run Air America reruns at 3AM to fulfill the requirement. Nobody wants to listen to that crap anyway.
Morning and afternoon drive dayparts in radio are 4 hours each (6a-10a, 3p-7p) and even if you include the five hours of non-prime midday airtime in between, you're still looking at a 13 hour window, not even half of which is filled up with Limbaugh + Anti Limbaugh.
So lets do the math then. Limbaugh has the most popular talk radio show in the country, with 14 million weekly listeners, compared to the 1.5 million attracted by the most popular liberal show. Since Limbaugh airs from 3-6 on the west coast, 6-9 would have to be given to the liberal show in the same area. Suppose that the advertising on the 6-9 slot now sells for $750k/week, and the Limbaugh show goes for $1M/week. Given that the liberal show is only about 10% as popular, we'll assume that advertising would go for $100k/week. Therefore, in order to keep the Limbaugh show, it would cost the station $650k/week, effectively lowering the returns on the Limbaugh show to just just $350k/week because of the unpopular liberal show. Now if the station could get $750k/week for other content for that time slot, they'd make $400k/week more than they would with the Limbaugh show, because they wouldn't be forced to run the unpopular content.
Your argument isn't well thought out. The Fairness Doctrine is all about silencing conservative speech on the radio.
You are contradicting yourself. First you say that they want to force the conservative stations (which have the majority of money-making talk shows, according to you), then in the next sentence you say that most of the networks are liberal... therefore the liberals own most of the stations.
Most of the television networks are liberal. Talk radio is the only area that's dominated by conservatives.
Sorry, dude, but it can't work both ways.
No shit.
If the liberals owned most of the networks, but they were unprofitable, then they would sell them. That's what sane people do. If the liberals owned the networks that ran the conservative talk shows, and they were the only ones that made money, then the liberals probably would not want to shut them down. But if they did want to shut them down, they could do so without a fairness doctrine... after all, if they own the network they don't have to run the show.
They have. Liberal talk radio has never really taken off, so there are very few stations compared to conservative talk radio. Because the libs are unable to compete, in the interest of "fairness" they would force the stations that have conservative shows to dedicated the same amount of time to liberal shows in comparable time slots, which is essentially impossible since there isn't any money in liberal talk radio. The most popular liberal hosts on Air America only attract about 1.5 million weekly listeners, whereas Rush Limbaugh averages 14 million, and has been as high as 20 million.
The main thing that you are forgetting is that if the liberals owned most of the newtorks EXCEPT for those that ran the conservative talk shows, the fairness doctrine would still give equal conservative time to their own liberal views... if they wanted to shut down all the conservative networks, they would be shooting themselves in the feet, because the fairness doctrine would force them to allow equal time for the conservatives on the liberal shows!
No, it wouldn't. What would happen is that the stations would have to either reduce the length of, or cancel the conservative radio shows because they wouldn't be able to take the hit of airing hours of unpopular, unprofitable liberal shows.
In summary: what you say makes no sense at all. The fairness doctrine does nothing but give people a choice as to what they want to listen to, no matter who is running the show. And that is a good thing for America, whether you are a liberal or a conservative. The only way you could possibly believe that such a choice is a bad thing (unless you actually believe the delusion you were spouting), is if you are afraid of someone else's message.
In summary, you're wrong. The fairness doctrine is primarily about silencing Rush Limbaugh since the stations that air his 3 hour show would then be forced to air 3 hour liberal shows in comparable time slots, which they can't do because there is no money in liberal radio. They'd either have to cancel the show or scale it back, which is exactly why the Democrats want this back.
The fairness doctrine is all about silencing conservative talk radio by forcing the stations to carry unprofitable liberal radio. All of the major networks except Fox lean to the left, which is why the Democrats including Pelosi are so keen on it.
Not that anyone in this day and age learns from mistakes any longer -- following the economic crash, people are seeking to get back to "business as usual" failing to appreciate that "business as usual" is what caused the crash.
The economic crash occurred because the government forced lenders to make bad loans to people that couldn't afford them by creating a secondary market for the notes which overvalued the assets so people like Franklin Raines could get their full bonuses. It has nothing to do with "business as usual", especially at technology companies.
I think they'd have had to actually vote for it (excluding the 3 house RINOs) for there to be concessions.
The challenge I see for NetFlix is dealing with the moves towards bandwidth caps - a movie a night is likely to rapidly push people to the cap; and they are likely to be mad at NetFlix, not their ISP. As a result, I see pressure form larger ISPs, at least, to pressure NetFlix in paying for bandwidth or working out a revenue split where NetFlix is bundled with the service.
That's precisely why cable ISPs have been pursuing bandwidth caps so aggressively, and net neutrality is so vital.
Is there a way to do that with a Windows client connecting to a headless Linux server? I currently edit my code using Netbeans on a Windows box connecting to the server running Samba, but it's way too slow. And before anyone says it, there are a variety of reasons I can't switch to desktop Linux, as much as I would like to.
Specter has been a Republican in Name Only since at least 2004, when conservative Congressman Toomey ran against him in the primary because of his liberal voting record. Collins and Snowe have been considered RINOs because of their liberal voting record since 1999, when they voted to acquit Clinton. Nice try though, but as with almost everything, as a Democrat you're uninformed.