As a semi-experienced linux user, I have to say that the man pages are often next to useless. When I want to do something, I expect to find directions that explain exactly how to do it, not a set of rules and conditions that, if manipulated precisely, can give me exactly what I want - but no examples on how to employ, or to even invoke those rules and conditions.
Most of what I know I've learned from online tutorials, old Solaris manuals (which don't help when command syntaxes differ), and the Google Groups (formerly Deja) newsgroup archives, and of course, just spending countless hours hunched over a keyboard pounding away at the problem until I give up or the problem goes away.
That's nuts.
I'd propose that one essential disc that should ship with every distro is an all-in one help/tutorial system that replaces (or at least is positioned as an alternative) to the man system. While I was able to tough it out because I had another computer with an internet connection and a browser, a newbie setting his/her system up for the first time will likely not have that luxury. Having a locally available source for help/reference would help a lot.
I'm glad Apple has taken the lead in giving what would have been 3rd party apps (they bought the foundations of the iTunes music app, FinalCut, etc. all from other companies) and polishing them up to get new customers. When companies start going cross-platform (ie, from a pure-mac stance to a Mac/PC one), it's almost inevitable that one of them (the Mac side) gets short-changed. Some manager or number cruncher decides that there's more money on the Windows side, the Windows side eats up more than it's share of the allocated programmer budget, Mac programmers leave and are replaced, not by Mac programmers, but by Windows programmers, they decide to unify the code base but end up with all of the Windows bugs on the Mac side because their compiler tools are all Windows-based now, etc.
The other advantage in having Apple take these types of software under their wing is that they can strategically coordinate releases of both software and hardware. Looking at the Xserves, the XSAN, the software tools, OS X, etc., you can clearly see that they're targeting high-end, corporate users of media software (ie, entertainment). The scientific community is already sold on the Unix underlayer of OS X - X11 make is possible to port a lot of apps.
No corporate officer, who also held a majority portion of the company, could be forced to choose a dollar today instead of 300 dollars tomorrow and nothing today.
He'd have to make that case to the people who own the other 30% of the company - which in this case, included his own employees. I left something out, which may change your opinion - in the theoretical Google case, they went public and were subject to a public buyout offer. In the case of the entrepreneur, he had not gone public, and the shares were locked up in the company until they went public, were were acquired.
As a corporate officer, the founder has a responsibility to maximize return to his shreholders (over what ever timeframe he chooses)
Ahh, but that's just it. As he explained it, being the founder, and being a corporate officer became two different roles once he was no longer the sole shareholder. Being the corporate officer meant being responsible for ALL shareholders, not just himself. Of course, this is what he was being told by the VC who had given him money in exchange for the 15%, so take it with a grain of salt. However, I've seen bigger stinks over fewer stakes (witness Disney, for example), where a minority of shareholders try and get a board (and hence, the corporate officers) to bend over some issue of corporate responsibility or governance.
Also, consider situations where an external force attempts a hostile takeover because they think a company is worth more in pieces than it is as a whole, it's stitting on too much cash, etc. In these cases, management has to respond to ward off the hostile bid by increasing dividends, repurchasing shares, etc. I'd point to that as an example of where someone who is a corporate officer (and who may have been the founder) has to do something short-term to deal with an unwanted buyer, no matter what the original timeframe of action was.
Mind you, in the original case with the entrepreneur, he considered being acquired, but eventually decided not to take the deal. He had to deal with pissed employees (rumors on the grapevine that they were all going to get rich), and because of SEC disclosure rules, could not tell them the deal that would have happened (that the employees were going to get screwed - one of the reasons he decided not to take the deal.) Even though he was doing the right thing, he still had to deal with the fallout of the decision. Why even consider the deal? Because he felt that he owed his employees and the other investor a chance to cash out - ie, their interests (getting rich) and his interests (running a business he liked) were no longer in sync.
We had a guest the other night (I'm taking a high-tech entrepreneurship and venture initiation class this quarter), who basically said that after they sold part of the company (in the form of a venture stake for about 15%, and another further 15% to the employees in the form of stock and stock option grants), he suddenly had the fiduciary duty to maximize return to his shareholders. Even though they were not the majority (he and the other founder held 70%), as a member of the board and a corporate officer, he was legally obligated to consider actions that he, as a founder, didn't think were good in the long term.
One example. Google sells 30% of the company. Some guy (Bill Gates for example) comes along and offers 6 times the current share price for Google stock in an acquisition deal. For that kind of return for their shareholders, Google's board cannot ignore the offer and tell Bill to go away. Google's majority owners may end up not voting to sell, but their time, the time of the board, corporate officers, etc. would be eaten up having to deal with this.
I think the point was the companies may have also "invented" the engine, but when they went to take it to market, the "puny inventor"'s legion of lawyers (he sold the idea to a pure-ip portfolio company) said that all the money the companies spent didn't mean squat, since they (the guys who now own the "puny inventor"'s invention) were there first.
Itellectual property rights are important in a capitalist society. Without being rewarded for work, less work would be done and society would be worse off.
On one hand this is true - without new material/inventions, society would stagnate. However, prior to copyrights and patents, we still had magic combos of herbs and spices (or heating times and types of quenching materials) that made a particular merchant's chicken or cold steel better, and more valuable than everyone else's. The way they protected their products/processes was with trade secrets, which is still valid today, and widely used for formulas (like Coca-Cola) that the inventor does not wish to disclose.
The whole idea behind patents and copyright is that we'll reward you for a fixed time (ie, with a legal monopoly) IN EXCHANGE for widely publicising your invention or creative work (and allowing free copies once your legal monopoly runs out.) Monopolies, especially government granted ones, run counter to Adam Smith's arguments (from an essay on Adam Smith's philosophies:)
Smith set forth two linked and indispensable conditions to be met if the economic system he described were to work: There must be free movement for all in the system so that each man might seek the best opportunity for his labor or resources. And there must be free competition among all, for the buyer's shilling, for markets, for labor and for jobs. There must be no monopolies or combinations in restraint of trade or limiting entry into new fields, and no government-granted privileges for a favored few.
Besides, if it was necessary to compensate an inventor or writer for their work in order to produce a vibrant society, how do you explain the massive industries in China, Taiwan, and India, which were originally built on copying someone else's work? They still consumed raw materials (which had to be bought), still employed employees (who spent their paychecks), and sold to consumers (where the product fulfilled a need), all for less than the original product sold for (I'm assuming.) I'm not saying this kind of copying is healthy in the long run (most of those industries have since moved on from copying someone else's IP to generating it, much as the United States went from copying stuff from the European continent to originating it), but it certainly sparks the kind of competition upon which capitalism is based.
Your new need for fire protection, police protection, fresh water, road access, sewage service, educational facilities, and hospital facilities raised your taxes.
You're assuming you're close enough for them to provide you with road access, sewage, and fresh water. Some localities won't provide you with those things if you're too far away, yet will tax your property regardless.
I will concede fire and police. However, you won't get any property tax rebates for having your own security force, or building your building out of fireproof materials, so anyone who tries to improve their own safety (and increasing their property values as a consequence) ends up subsidizing the fellow who does the absolute minimum, or who doesn't even own property.
Actually, the nuclear based solution IS the simplest. It's nothing more than a small mass of isotope, a thermocouple, and a pair of wires. It's certainly simpler than a pair of solar panels, or the gyrations you'd need to go through to get rid of the dust coating (electrostatic attraction probably is the factor here.) The Voyager series of probes use these radioisotope-powered thermocouples, and look how long their active life has been.
When the "experts" talk about the upwards of 1 Trillion, they probably (and perhaps rightly so) are taking into account the massive amounts of pork-barreling it will take to grease the wheels for the duration of the time it will take to plan, build, launch, and recover the mission. All it takes is a few assholes to make some sort of fuss over jobs, environmental impact, better uses for the money, etc. and WHAM, everything slams to a halt. They (meaning the politicians who are potential wrenches in the gears) know this, and so do the people doing the planning. Thus the 1 Trillion has to include the payola to these individuals to let the Mars mission alone.
At least... that's my theory. Whether it's maliciously deliberate or not, these individuals (who move in and out of the halls of power on revolving doors) can make everything grind to a halt. For the government to do anything on this scale requires that they keep these bozos happy and well away from the space program. All it takes is an election year, and you can see what happens if a challenger decides to take his (or her) axe to the incumbent's supported programs.
Contrast this to a private endeavor, where if the space mission fails, the company fails (or at least, is greatly diminished.) There is little incentive to burn money on stupid arguments, and great incentive to make it work the first time around. Can it be done in 6.5 billion? Given that the Russians still have the infrastructure to do this sort of thing, and that for pork-barrel politics we'd end up having to build such a thing from scratch (to spread the work around to enough congressional districts), that's one big cost that they can avoid. However, I have to say, this group's mission description (fly 6 men to the surface of Mars, funded in part by a reality program) sounds a bit fly-by-night to me.
The earlier Russian proposal (put a station in Mars orbit and teleoperate robot probes/construction equipment from there) sounds like the one that is most likely to succeed. Fewer problems with having to enter/escape a gravity well, not having to deal with all the damn dust, and ease of construction (just put more modules up.)
Probably the environmental impact of the plant itself - it will have to be sited near the coastline, away from already developed areas like harbors or bays, meaning that it will likely displace marshland or other undeveloped coastline. There will be waste discharge as a by-product of the desalianation process, which will increase local salinity. Desalination requires a pressure differential to overcome osmotic forces - the power for this will probably come from electricity. Electricity is in short supply in some places, which means that the water plant will require a coal, nuclear, gas-fired, or hydro plant to contribute part of its output to desalienate the water.
From a tax perspective, these plants will need to be built by somebody, probably with bond issues, and will require taxes to pay off. I'd be more pissed about that than the environmental impact.
Leave the science to the scientists and the biologists who've made it their life work to ensure its safe, viable, and benefits the world.
You seem to missing an important point here. The scientists and biologists developing these new variants are being paid by corporate entities whose purpose is to reap as much profit as possible from this kind of research. In the absence of FDA-like regulations on GM plant life, it is not inconceivable that some non-scientist in a management position may decide that a certain product is "safe enough".
Besides, just because a scientist or biologist working on a project thinks that it is safe, does not make it so. Asbestos, PCBs, CFCs, DDT, filling in of swamps, etc., were all considered safe and standard practices, UNTIL our understanding of the world advanced sufficiently to understand what was wrong with using these items/performing these operations in everyday life. Of course, it can be taken in extremes the other way also (ie, anti-nuclear sentiment, irrational expectations of how low some "contaminant" should be.)
In this case, you have to ask yourself - is enabling the use of herbicides for ultra-weed free lawns worth the risk of possibly enabling herbicide resistance in related species? This isn't some patient population where the use of some drug to save lives (ie antibiotics) may generate drug resistance... it's to allow gardeners and landscapers to use *more* herbicides without having to worry about the effects on their lawns!
If gmail wants to store a bunch of my obsolete PGP'd mails please let them do so. Email's never been really private. If you really care about email privacy you should encrypt your mail.
Bingo. Mod this guy insightful. I can't see anyone who's using any of the "free" e-mail services, which store your mail on THEIR servers, and send and receive in mostly cleartext, being able to complain about Google. If you don't like cleartext mail, you should be using PGP regardless of what e-mail service you use.
Amazing. At some point, Google could have copies of every new document or content produced, all for the cost of hosting. They would, by default, become the next Library of Congress.
So, who's the lucky supplier that has the contract to provide all the drives and computer assemblies? Any RFP's available for wiring all this stuff up and maintaining it?
Now that I think about it, all this stuff about income taxes and sales taxes masks a real problem: corporate tax evasion.
Hell, even Warren Buffett thinks that something is up. According to him, federal income taxes paid by all U.S. companies fell by 16 percent, from 1995 to 2003. I'd say, forget about the small fries and target the big multinational corporations that are siphoning off funds, and leaving the rest of us taxpayers with the bill.
Know what else the country didn't have in 1913? National highways to maintain, huge publicly funded transit systems, security agencies like the NSA and CIA to keep you safe, social security, medicare, the largest military in the universe..
Of that list you put out, the only things that really require income tax to fund are the NSA, CIA, and the military. Transit and highways fall under transportation (which can be funded by gas and transit taxes, and by local and state bond issues which will be paid with local and state taxes), social security and medicare are welfare taxes that are levied separately from the federal income tax.
Apart from the issues with all of these items (ie, Social Security, where you pay money in for the people currently drawing out, in exchange for the thin possibility some wage earner in the future will do the same for you), the government needs money only to do the things that we, as a people, have deemed that it is necessary for the government to do.
For example, with regards to the common defense, most people don't want to devote part of their time to serving in the armed forces, so we pay people to serve full-time and part-time (also, a volunteer force is more effective, but the idea is we'd rather commit money than time.) Same thing with law enforcement, the court system, roads, etc. - it is a delegation of authority and responsibility, that requires funding in order to work.
Because shit costs money, and people like you are too greedy to fork it over for the general good by choice, so we have to legislate it out of you.
"We", meaning the majority of American citizens, or "we", as in the minority of special interests think they know what's best for the rest of us? Most of us are fine with being taxed for services we use - its the services we DON'T use, and the misuses of those funds that we object to. Consider that fact that the federal income tax is a "pay as you go" tax - if you run a business, you must remit quarterly tax receipts if you expect to make a profit that year. As an individual, you must pay taxes throughout the year, and come tax day, you either get to pay more money, or you get a refund (with no interest.)
Where does that money go? To print lots of paper for stupid laws proposed by special interests, to pay for staff and telephones, and fax machines for the politicians who then spend time debating these stupid laws, who then pass the stupid laws, which are then challenged in court, resulting in more money to print more paper, pay judges, court reporters, etc. to try the case in court, and finally, if upheld, to pay for enforcement of those laws.
In the case of tax laws, they're taxing you in order to pay for enforcers to make sure you're paying your taxes. What a racket!
Personally, I think the government is way too easy on tax evasion. In my opinion, if you don't care enough about the country to pay a small portion of it, then you don't care enough to stay here either. They should all be stripped of their citizenship and deported. Fines / Jailtime is too easy.
Funny thing you propose that. Too bad the IRS will not let anyone give up their US Citizenship if they think that they're doing it to evade taxes.
Personally, I think anyone who shirks from jury duty should be stripped of citizenship. If I'm going to have to give up a month's pay because two sets of assholes have nothing better to do than waste the time of a judge and jury on a civil case (they ended up settling while we were on the second day of deliberations), then by god, you should too!
Airplanes have had autopilot for years in open airspace, but there aren't that many planes out there (none in the commercial world that I know of) that can land/take off, or taxi, under computer control. It's easier to have the computer doing things when you have hundreds of miles to play with, and a good radar/navigation system. It's quite another thing to have the computer dealing with a lot of traffic - some of it computer controlled, and some of it not.
One good application for computer control would be on HOV (carpool) lanes. There you only have one lane, and the slowest car ahead of you dictates the speed for all the cars following. Having a computer be able to maximize speeds would be of great benefit in utilizing the HOV lane to the fullest extent - assuming that the HOV lane is well constructed, and actually goes anywhere...
Does anyone know what the residuals level (if any) is for the voice actors on The Simpsons? I'm just curious as to how much all those re-runs are worth to them on a yearly basis, apart from the per-episode payments.
So how do you determine accuracy? I can see someone with macros dominating the game if his shots hit every time (text-based bots.) Or, someone with a running bot navigating him from room to room, in order to dodge shots.
Cool effort though, and nice descriptions. I'd try it myself, but the site has finally gotten slashdotted...
Re:"hazards and risks are poorly understood"
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Buckyballs Kill Fish
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· Score: 4, Interesting
You must have missed the section where it refers to the oxidizing effects of buckyballs:
But buckyballs can also steal electrons from surrounding molecules -- a process known as oxidation and a common mechanism of tissue damage.
Basically, you have a great replacement for hydrogen peroxide or chlorine. Great for disinfecting, bad for living tissues over a prolonged exposure time. The question is, are the buckyballs being consumed in the process, or are they acting as catalytic agents? If they're acting like catalytic agents, we could have the makings of another CFC fiasco on our hands. I'm thinking buckyballs have to be consumed at some point - otherwise all the buckyballs created by natural processes like fires would have killed off everything alive a long time ago.
Actually, I'm surprised that instead of supporting and nurturing technologies (like p2p) and liberalizing the restrictions on information in support of new industries that can employ lots of US workers, they're supporting legislation that will drive these industries offshore, thereby shifting what could have been US jobs overseas.
Consider how much economic activity was generated by the whole Y2K thing, and by how much economic (ie, hardware purchases, purchases of broadband) by Napster. These events, although by themsleves, did not contribute a lasting economic impact, the investments that they induced people to make (ie, always on internet, faster computers, more computers everywhere), created a ready market for all those internet companies that survived the shakeout - ie, Amazon, eBay, etc.
For an example of how US restrictions have nurtured overseas industries, look at India's pharmecuticals industry, which went from generics and copying patented drugs, to partnerships with US companies to conduct research, manufacturing, and clinical trials. A similar gap is happening in embryonic stem cell research. China is driving development of new video entertainment technologies because they don't want to be beholden to US patents on every unit they sell (ie, Dolby, MPEG2, etc.)
The early movie industry was based on what the movie companies would now call "piracy". Songwriters at the turn of the century decried recording technology as theft of the songwriter's trade. Basically, whole industries have all, at one point or another, been accused of unfairness (ie, unfair competition, destroying jobs, etc.) Many, if not all of them, have spawned far more jobs and economic wealth than the industries that preceeded them.
Instead of turning back the clock at the behest of monied interestes, and setting US economic progress back years, if not decades, we should be liberalizing our laws. The idea that to effectively promote a new music act, or book, or movie, requires a whole bunch of money and time is no longer true (the demise of the multiple layers of distribution between recording artist and the now defunct corner record store - which didn't exist one hundred years ago, is an example of that.) Regarding research, investment, and development - the money will ALWAYS be invested when investors smell money - the fact that they will have to recoup their money faster, or will have to contend with more competition merely drives more competing efforts, which means MORE JOBS FOR EVERYONE, MORE CHOICE FOR CONSUMERS, and A MORE EFFICIENT ECONOMY.
Well, we could deploy a combination of a solar-powered ion-thruster and a mass driver, or we could rig up a solar sail and try and tack the asteroid into position. I imagine if we can slow down its relative velocity, we can let the Sun do the rest of the work. If we can put it into the right trajectory, we can work off a lot of the kinetic energy through gravity transfers. Besides, we don't need this asteroid in orbit overnight - as long as we change its course to orbit the Sun and keep it within accessible range, we can move it closer later with better technology.
A WiFi Fidonet/Freenet, on the run
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Mobile Wifi Backpack
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually, if you had enough traffic density, this could act as a supplement to wired WiFi access. Consider FidoNet - nothing but nodes that talked to other nodes when able (ie, during the middle of the night for a few minutes when long distance charges were the least). You could send non-time-critical (encrypted) mail via a local node, and hopefully, if it ever linked up to the main network, your mail would make it. You'd probably want to keep broadcasting this mail for delivery until it was accepted by a minimum number of unwired nodes, or until you got confirmation that it had been sent.
This would also be an interesting application for a freenet-like network. A mobile, distributed collection of nodes could contain a lot of information, possibly distributed backups, local caches of streaming media, etc. AND, you wouldn't necessarily have to tote around backpacks either - stick one of these in the trunk of your car, and you can have a mobile node in traffic.
Lastly, if you give these nodes the capability to smart-mesh traffic if there are enough of them nearby, you could introduce wired endpoints that would turn a collection of semi-isolated nodes into a full interconnected wired network.
I'm surprised that nobody has brought up manufacturing in space. No, not manufacturing for consumption on Earth, but manufacturing for consumption in SPACE. After all, given the costs to loft up a pound of consumables or equipment to orbit, doesn't it make sense to manufacture solar panels, station-keeping fuel, re-entry shielding, and other items in space to save on the costs of having to haul all that crap up with us?
Especially stuff like consumables - life-support water/oxygen, re-entry shielding, a good portion of that is dead weight on the way up, and just adds to the launch cost (since you need more fuel for the weight, and more fuel adds more weight, and you need more fuel to compensate for the weight of the extra fuel, etc.)
Just get a supplier in space to manufacture the stuff - as long as their prices are cheaper than manufacturing the equivalent on Earth, insuring the payload for launch, and actually lofting it into orbit, they can make a profit. Of course, they need raw materials... which can come from the Moon, or from the asteroid belt. It may be a long pipeline (ie, you have to go fetch an iron-nickel asteroid 9 months in advance of needing it, because of the transit time), but since you don't have to go down, then back up a gravity well, it's relatively cheap in terms of fuel costs. Put a few nuclear reactors in orbit, and all we need in the way of fuel is water ice for reaction mass.
You know, I wouldn't mind sitting through commercials if they came BEFORE the program, during a 3 min half-way intermission, and just before the credits rolled, and a minute or two after. I wouldn't mind these things because right now, they're screwing with the schedule, overlapping shows so parts of one get cut off if you're recording multiple shows on different channels, and doing other very, very, very annoying things.
I think PBS has the formula just right - run the commercials in the beginning, and run the rest in the last 10-15 minutes of the hour. As long as they're good, nobody will mind watching them, since everybody else will be screening their commercials at about that time, AND, nobody will ever miss their favorite shows! As it is now, they're carving up part of the actual programs (ie, compressing the credits, or shoving them aside, or putting up stupid pop-ups) in order to put in even MORE ads. The most criminal thing are those pop-ups that COVER UP IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON THE SCREEN.
Is it any wonder people have either resorted to Tivo/ReplayTV, or stopped watching network tv altogether?
Damn, that's a good idea. Full length trailers stored on your Tivo, so you can pick through what's playing at your local theatre without having to go hunting around on the web, waiting for the trailers to download. I wish I had that capability on my ReplayTV:(
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As a semi-experienced linux user, I have to say that the man pages are often next to useless. When I want to do something, I expect to find directions that explain exactly how to do it, not a set of rules and conditions that, if manipulated precisely, can give me exactly what I want - but no examples on how to employ, or to even invoke those rules and conditions.
Most of what I know I've learned from online tutorials, old Solaris manuals (which don't help when command syntaxes differ), and the Google Groups (formerly Deja) newsgroup archives, and of course, just spending countless hours hunched over a keyboard pounding away at the problem until I give up or the problem goes away.
That's nuts.
I'd propose that one essential disc that should ship with every distro is an all-in one help/tutorial system that replaces (or at least is positioned as an alternative) to the man system. While I was able to tough it out because I had another computer with an internet connection and a browser, a newbie setting his/her system up for the first time will likely not have that luxury. Having a locally available source for help/reference would help a lot.
I'm glad Apple has taken the lead in giving what would have been 3rd party apps (they bought the foundations of the iTunes music app, FinalCut, etc. all from other companies) and polishing them up to get new customers. When companies start going cross-platform (ie, from a pure-mac stance to a Mac/PC one), it's almost inevitable that one of them (the Mac side) gets short-changed. Some manager or number cruncher decides that there's more money on the Windows side, the Windows side eats up more than it's share of the allocated programmer budget, Mac programmers leave and are replaced, not by Mac programmers, but by Windows programmers, they decide to unify the code base but end up with all of the Windows bugs on the Mac side because their compiler tools are all Windows-based now, etc.
The other advantage in having Apple take these types of software under their wing is that they can strategically coordinate releases of both software and hardware. Looking at the Xserves, the XSAN, the software tools, OS X, etc., you can clearly see that they're targeting high-end, corporate users of media software (ie, entertainment). The scientific community is already sold on the Unix underlayer of OS X - X11 make is possible to port a lot of apps.
No corporate officer, who also held a majority portion of the company, could be forced to choose a dollar today instead of 300 dollars tomorrow and nothing today.
He'd have to make that case to the people who own the other 30% of the company - which in this case, included his own employees. I left something out, which may change your opinion - in the theoretical Google case, they went public and were subject to a public buyout offer. In the case of the entrepreneur, he had not gone public, and the shares were locked up in the company until they went public, were were acquired.
As a corporate officer, the founder has a responsibility to maximize return to his shreholders (over what ever timeframe he chooses)
Ahh, but that's just it. As he explained it, being the founder, and being a corporate officer became two different roles once he was no longer the sole shareholder. Being the corporate officer meant being responsible for ALL shareholders, not just himself. Of course, this is what he was being told by the VC who had given him money in exchange for the 15%, so take it with a grain of salt. However, I've seen bigger stinks over fewer stakes (witness Disney, for example), where a minority of shareholders try and get a board (and hence, the corporate officers) to bend over some issue of corporate responsibility or governance.
Also, consider situations where an external force attempts a hostile takeover because they think a company is worth more in pieces than it is as a whole, it's stitting on too much cash, etc. In these cases, management has to respond to ward off the hostile bid by increasing dividends, repurchasing shares, etc. I'd point to that as an example of where someone who is a corporate officer (and who may have been the founder) has to do something short-term to deal with an unwanted buyer, no matter what the original timeframe of action was.
Mind you, in the original case with the entrepreneur, he considered being acquired, but eventually decided not to take the deal. He had to deal with pissed employees (rumors on the grapevine that they were all going to get rich), and because of SEC disclosure rules, could not tell them the deal that would have happened (that the employees were going to get screwed - one of the reasons he decided not to take the deal.) Even though he was doing the right thing, he still had to deal with the fallout of the decision. Why even consider the deal? Because he felt that he owed his employees and the other investor a chance to cash out - ie, their interests (getting rich) and his interests (running a business he liked) were no longer in sync.
We had a guest the other night (I'm taking a high-tech entrepreneurship and venture initiation class this quarter), who basically said that after they sold part of the company (in the form of a venture stake for about 15%, and another further 15% to the employees in the form of stock and stock option grants), he suddenly had the fiduciary duty to maximize return to his shareholders. Even though they were not the majority (he and the other founder held 70%), as a member of the board and a corporate officer, he was legally obligated to consider actions that he, as a founder, didn't think were good in the long term.
One example. Google sells 30% of the company. Some guy (Bill Gates for example) comes along and offers 6 times the current share price for Google stock in an acquisition deal. For that kind of return for their shareholders, Google's board cannot ignore the offer and tell Bill to go away. Google's majority owners may end up not voting to sell, but their time, the time of the board, corporate officers, etc. would be eaten up having to deal with this.
Itellectual property rights are important in a capitalist society. Without being rewarded for work, less work would be done and society would be worse off.
On one hand this is true - without new material/inventions, society would stagnate. However, prior to copyrights and patents, we still had magic combos of herbs and spices (or heating times and types of quenching materials) that made a particular merchant's chicken or cold steel better, and more valuable than everyone else's. The way they protected their products/processes was with trade secrets, which is still valid today, and widely used for formulas (like Coca-Cola) that the inventor does not wish to disclose.
The whole idea behind patents and copyright is that we'll reward you for a fixed time (ie, with a legal monopoly) IN EXCHANGE for widely publicising your invention or creative work (and allowing free copies once your legal monopoly runs out.) Monopolies, especially government granted ones, run counter to Adam Smith's arguments (from an essay on Adam Smith's philosophies:)Besides, if it was necessary to compensate an inventor or writer for their work in order to produce a vibrant society, how do you explain the massive industries in China, Taiwan, and India, which were originally built on copying someone else's work? They still consumed raw materials (which had to be bought), still employed employees (who spent their paychecks), and sold to consumers (where the product fulfilled a need), all for less than the original product sold for (I'm assuming.) I'm not saying this kind of copying is healthy in the long run (most of those industries have since moved on from copying someone else's IP to generating it, much as the United States went from copying stuff from the European continent to originating it), but it certainly sparks the kind of competition upon which capitalism is based.
Your new need for fire protection, police protection, fresh water, road access, sewage service, educational facilities, and hospital facilities raised your taxes.
You're assuming you're close enough for them to provide you with road access, sewage, and fresh water. Some localities won't provide you with those things if you're too far away, yet will tax your property regardless.
I will concede fire and police. However, you won't get any property tax rebates for having your own security force, or building your building out of fireproof materials, so anyone who tries to improve their own safety (and increasing their property values as a consequence) ends up subsidizing the fellow who does the absolute minimum, or who doesn't even own property.
Actually, the nuclear based solution IS the simplest. It's nothing more than a small mass of isotope, a thermocouple, and a pair of wires. It's certainly simpler than a pair of solar panels, or the gyrations you'd need to go through to get rid of the dust coating (electrostatic attraction probably is the factor here.) The Voyager series of probes use these radioisotope-powered thermocouples, and look how long their active life has been.
Of course, there's the alternate explaination of the 1 Trillion figure - which is that it's completely made up.
When the "experts" talk about the upwards of 1 Trillion, they probably (and perhaps rightly so) are taking into account the massive amounts of pork-barreling it will take to grease the wheels for the duration of the time it will take to plan, build, launch, and recover the mission. All it takes is a few assholes to make some sort of fuss over jobs, environmental impact, better uses for the money, etc. and WHAM, everything slams to a halt. They (meaning the politicians who are potential wrenches in the gears) know this, and so do the people doing the planning. Thus the 1 Trillion has to include the payola to these individuals to let the Mars mission alone.
At least... that's my theory. Whether it's maliciously deliberate or not, these individuals (who move in and out of the halls of power on revolving doors) can make everything grind to a halt. For the government to do anything on this scale requires that they keep these bozos happy and well away from the space program. All it takes is an election year, and you can see what happens if a challenger decides to take his (or her) axe to the incumbent's supported programs.
Contrast this to a private endeavor, where if the space mission fails, the company fails (or at least, is greatly diminished.) There is little incentive to burn money on stupid arguments, and great incentive to make it work the first time around. Can it be done in 6.5 billion? Given that the Russians still have the infrastructure to do this sort of thing, and that for pork-barrel politics we'd end up having to build such a thing from scratch (to spread the work around to enough congressional districts), that's one big cost that they can avoid. However, I have to say, this group's mission description (fly 6 men to the surface of Mars, funded in part by a reality program) sounds a bit fly-by-night to me.
The earlier Russian proposal (put a station in Mars orbit and teleoperate robot probes/construction equipment from there) sounds like the one that is most likely to succeed. Fewer problems with having to enter/escape a gravity well, not having to deal with all the damn dust, and ease of construction (just put more modules up.)
Probably the environmental impact of the plant itself - it will have to be sited near the coastline, away from already developed areas like harbors or bays, meaning that it will likely displace marshland or other undeveloped coastline. There will be waste discharge as a by-product of the desalianation process, which will increase local salinity. Desalination requires a pressure differential to overcome osmotic forces - the power for this will probably come from electricity. Electricity is in short supply in some places, which means that the water plant will require a coal, nuclear, gas-fired, or hydro plant to contribute part of its output to desalienate the water.
From a tax perspective, these plants will need to be built by somebody, probably with bond issues, and will require taxes to pay off. I'd be more pissed about that than the environmental impact.
Leave the science to the scientists and the biologists who've made it their life work to ensure its safe, viable, and benefits the world.
You seem to missing an important point here. The scientists and biologists developing these new variants are being paid by corporate entities whose purpose is to reap as much profit as possible from this kind of research. In the absence of FDA-like regulations on GM plant life, it is not inconceivable that some non-scientist in a management position may decide that a certain product is "safe enough".
Besides, just because a scientist or biologist working on a project thinks that it is safe, does not make it so. Asbestos, PCBs, CFCs, DDT, filling in of swamps, etc., were all considered safe and standard practices, UNTIL our understanding of the world advanced sufficiently to understand what was wrong with using these items/performing these operations in everyday life. Of course, it can be taken in extremes the other way also (ie, anti-nuclear sentiment, irrational expectations of how low some "contaminant" should be.)
In this case, you have to ask yourself - is enabling the use of herbicides for ultra-weed free lawns worth the risk of possibly enabling herbicide resistance in related species? This isn't some patient population where the use of some drug to save lives (ie antibiotics) may generate drug resistance... it's to allow gardeners and landscapers to use *more* herbicides without having to worry about the effects on their lawns!
If gmail wants to store a bunch of my obsolete PGP'd mails please let them do so. Email's never been really private. If you really care about email privacy you should encrypt your mail.
Bingo. Mod this guy insightful. I can't see anyone who's using any of the "free" e-mail services, which store your mail on THEIR servers, and send and receive in mostly cleartext, being able to complain about Google. If you don't like cleartext mail, you should be using PGP regardless of what e-mail service you use.
Amazing. At some point, Google could have copies of every new document or content produced, all for the cost of hosting. They would, by default, become the next Library of Congress.
So, who's the lucky supplier that has the contract to provide all the drives and computer assemblies? Any RFP's available for wiring all this stuff up and maintaining it?
Now that I think about it, all this stuff about income taxes and sales taxes masks a real problem: corporate tax evasion.
Hell, even Warren Buffett thinks that something is up. According to him, federal income taxes paid by all U.S. companies fell by 16 percent, from 1995 to 2003. I'd say, forget about the small fries and target the big multinational corporations that are siphoning off funds, and leaving the rest of us taxpayers with the bill.
Know what else the country didn't have in 1913? National highways to maintain, huge publicly funded transit systems, security agencies like the NSA and CIA to keep you safe, social security, medicare, the largest military in the universe..
Of that list you put out, the only things that really require income tax to fund are the NSA, CIA, and the military. Transit and highways fall under transportation (which can be funded by gas and transit taxes, and by local and state bond issues which will be paid with local and state taxes), social security and medicare are welfare taxes that are levied separately from the federal income tax.
Apart from the issues with all of these items (ie, Social Security, where you pay money in for the people currently drawing out, in exchange for the thin possibility some wage earner in the future will do the same for you), the government needs money only to do the things that we, as a people, have deemed that it is necessary for the government to do.
For example, with regards to the common defense, most people don't want to devote part of their time to serving in the armed forces, so we pay people to serve full-time and part-time (also, a volunteer force is more effective, but the idea is we'd rather commit money than time.) Same thing with law enforcement, the court system, roads, etc. - it is a delegation of authority and responsibility, that requires funding in order to work.
Because shit costs money, and people like you are too greedy to fork it over for the general good by choice, so we have to legislate it out of you.
"We", meaning the majority of American citizens, or "we", as in the minority of special interests think they know what's best for the rest of us? Most of us are fine with being taxed for services we use - its the services we DON'T use, and the misuses of those funds that we object to. Consider that fact that the federal income tax is a "pay as you go" tax - if you run a business, you must remit quarterly tax receipts if you expect to make a profit that year. As an individual, you must pay taxes throughout the year, and come tax day, you either get to pay more money, or you get a refund (with no interest.)
Where does that money go? To print lots of paper for stupid laws proposed by special interests, to pay for staff and telephones, and fax machines for the politicians who then spend time debating these stupid laws, who then pass the stupid laws, which are then challenged in court, resulting in more money to print more paper, pay judges, court reporters, etc. to try the case in court, and finally, if upheld, to pay for enforcement of those laws.
In the case of tax laws, they're taxing you in order to pay for enforcers to make sure you're paying your taxes. What a racket!
Personally, I think the government is way too easy on tax evasion. In my opinion, if you don't care enough about the country to pay a small portion of it, then you don't care enough to stay here either. They should all be stripped of their citizenship and deported. Fines / Jailtime is too easy.
Funny thing you propose that. Too bad the IRS will not let anyone give up their US Citizenship if they think that they're doing it to evade taxes.
Personally, I think anyone who shirks from jury duty should be stripped of citizenship. If I'm going to have to give up a month's pay because two sets of assholes have nothing better to do than waste the time of a judge and jury on a civil case (they ended up settling while we were on the second day of deliberations), then by god, you should too!
Airplanes have had autopilot for years in open airspace, but there aren't that many planes out there (none in the commercial world that I know of) that can land/take off, or taxi, under computer control. It's easier to have the computer doing things when you have hundreds of miles to play with, and a good radar/navigation system. It's quite another thing to have the computer dealing with a lot of traffic - some of it computer controlled, and some of it not.
One good application for computer control would be on HOV (carpool) lanes. There you only have one lane, and the slowest car ahead of you dictates the speed for all the cars following. Having a computer be able to maximize speeds would be of great benefit in utilizing the HOV lane to the fullest extent - assuming that the HOV lane is well constructed, and actually goes anywhere...
Does anyone know what the residuals level (if any) is for the voice actors on The Simpsons? I'm just curious as to how much all those re-runs are worth to them on a yearly basis, apart from the per-episode payments.
So how do you determine accuracy? I can see someone with macros dominating the game if his shots hit every time (text-based bots.) Or, someone with a running bot navigating him from room to room, in order to dodge shots.
Cool effort though, and nice descriptions. I'd try it myself, but the site has finally gotten slashdotted...
You must have missed the section where it refers to the oxidizing effects of buckyballs:
But buckyballs can also steal electrons from surrounding molecules -- a process known as oxidation and a common mechanism of tissue damage.
Basically, you have a great replacement for hydrogen peroxide or chlorine. Great for disinfecting, bad for living tissues over a prolonged exposure time. The question is, are the buckyballs being consumed in the process, or are they acting as catalytic agents? If they're acting like catalytic agents, we could have the makings of another CFC fiasco on our hands. I'm thinking buckyballs have to be consumed at some point - otherwise all the buckyballs created by natural processes like fires would have killed off everything alive a long time ago.
Actually, I'm surprised that instead of supporting and nurturing technologies (like p2p) and liberalizing the restrictions on information in support of new industries that can employ lots of US workers, they're supporting legislation that will drive these industries offshore, thereby shifting what could have been US jobs overseas.
Consider how much economic activity was generated by the whole Y2K thing, and by how much economic (ie, hardware purchases, purchases of broadband) by Napster. These events, although by themsleves, did not contribute a lasting economic impact, the investments that they induced people to make (ie, always on internet, faster computers, more computers everywhere), created a ready market for all those internet companies that survived the shakeout - ie, Amazon, eBay, etc.
For an example of how US restrictions have nurtured overseas industries, look at India's pharmecuticals industry, which went from generics and copying patented drugs, to partnerships with US companies to conduct research, manufacturing, and clinical trials. A similar gap is happening in embryonic stem cell research. China is driving development of new video entertainment technologies because they don't want to be beholden to US patents on every unit they sell (ie, Dolby, MPEG2, etc.)
The early movie industry was based on what the movie companies would now call "piracy". Songwriters at the turn of the century decried recording technology as theft of the songwriter's trade. Basically, whole industries have all, at one point or another, been accused of unfairness (ie, unfair competition, destroying jobs, etc.) Many, if not all of them, have spawned far more jobs and economic wealth than the industries that preceeded them.
Instead of turning back the clock at the behest of monied interestes, and setting US economic progress back years, if not decades, we should be liberalizing our laws. The idea that to effectively promote a new music act, or book, or movie, requires a whole bunch of money and time is no longer true (the demise of the multiple layers of distribution between recording artist and the now defunct corner record store - which didn't exist one hundred years ago, is an example of that.) Regarding research, investment, and development - the money will ALWAYS be invested when investors smell money - the fact that they will have to recoup their money faster, or will have to contend with more competition merely drives more competing efforts, which means MORE JOBS FOR EVERYONE, MORE CHOICE FOR CONSUMERS, and A MORE EFFICIENT ECONOMY.
Well, we could deploy a combination of a solar-powered ion-thruster and a mass driver, or we could rig up a solar sail and try and tack the asteroid into position. I imagine if we can slow down its relative velocity, we can let the Sun do the rest of the work. If we can put it into the right trajectory, we can work off a lot of the kinetic energy through gravity transfers. Besides, we don't need this asteroid in orbit overnight - as long as we change its course to orbit the Sun and keep it within accessible range, we can move it closer later with better technology.
Actually, if you had enough traffic density, this could act as a supplement to wired WiFi access. Consider FidoNet - nothing but nodes that talked to other nodes when able (ie, during the middle of the night for a few minutes when long distance charges were the least). You could send non-time-critical (encrypted) mail via a local node, and hopefully, if it ever linked up to the main network, your mail would make it. You'd probably want to keep broadcasting this mail for delivery until it was accepted by a minimum number of unwired nodes, or until you got confirmation that it had been sent.
This would also be an interesting application for a freenet-like network. A mobile, distributed collection of nodes could contain a lot of information, possibly distributed backups, local caches of streaming media, etc. AND, you wouldn't necessarily have to tote around backpacks either - stick one of these in the trunk of your car, and you can have a mobile node in traffic.
Lastly, if you give these nodes the capability to smart-mesh traffic if there are enough of them nearby, you could introduce wired endpoints that would turn a collection of semi-isolated nodes into a full interconnected wired network.
I'm surprised that nobody has brought up manufacturing in space. No, not manufacturing for consumption on Earth, but manufacturing for consumption in SPACE. After all, given the costs to loft up a pound of consumables or equipment to orbit, doesn't it make sense to manufacture solar panels, station-keeping fuel, re-entry shielding, and other items in space to save on the costs of having to haul all that crap up with us?
Especially stuff like consumables - life-support water/oxygen, re-entry shielding, a good portion of that is dead weight on the way up, and just adds to the launch cost (since you need more fuel for the weight, and more fuel adds more weight, and you need more fuel to compensate for the weight of the extra fuel, etc.)
Just get a supplier in space to manufacture the stuff - as long as their prices are cheaper than manufacturing the equivalent on Earth, insuring the payload for launch, and actually lofting it into orbit, they can make a profit. Of course, they need raw materials... which can come from the Moon, or from the asteroid belt. It may be a long pipeline (ie, you have to go fetch an iron-nickel asteroid 9 months in advance of needing it, because of the transit time), but since you don't have to go down, then back up a gravity well, it's relatively cheap in terms of fuel costs. Put a few nuclear reactors in orbit, and all we need in the way of fuel is water ice for reaction mass.
You know, I wouldn't mind sitting through commercials if they came BEFORE the program, during a 3 min half-way intermission, and just before the credits rolled, and a minute or two after. I wouldn't mind these things because right now, they're screwing with the schedule, overlapping shows so parts of one get cut off if you're recording multiple shows on different channels, and doing other very, very, very annoying things.
I think PBS has the formula just right - run the commercials in the beginning, and run the rest in the last 10-15 minutes of the hour. As long as they're good, nobody will mind watching them, since everybody else will be screening their commercials at about that time, AND, nobody will ever miss their favorite shows! As it is now, they're carving up part of the actual programs (ie, compressing the credits, or shoving them aside, or putting up stupid pop-ups) in order to put in even MORE ads. The most criminal thing are those pop-ups that COVER UP IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON THE SCREEN.
Is it any wonder people have either resorted to Tivo/ReplayTV, or stopped watching network tv altogether?
Damn, that's a good idea. Full length trailers stored on your Tivo, so you can pick through what's playing at your local theatre without having to go hunting around on the web, waiting for the trailers to download. I wish I had that capability on my ReplayTV :(