> Besides if the goverments don't start expanding, who is going to be able to police the multinationals?
20th Century Multinational Body Count: Tens of thousands, maybe a million, tops.
20th Century Governmental Body Count: Tens of millions. Possibly 100,000,000.
> this fundamentally scientific approach to politics and economics
DingDingDingDingDing! Pseudoscience alert!
Though, in defence of Marx and Engels, they hadn't been able to test their hypotheses at the time they came upw ith 'em.
That said, by 2002, the results of the experiments they conducted are pretty clear. They came up with an interesting hypothesis, but attempts to validate the hypothesis using the Real World as a laboratory resulted in tens of millions of deaths and the collapse of the experimental apparatus.
The hypothesis was shown to be false, and in the name of basic scientific ethics, I pray we never try any more large-scale experiments.
(More precisely, having seen the number of "to each" and "from each" phaseouts and arbitrary restrictions in the Internal Revenue Code, I pray we cease building the partially-completed large-scale experiment in North America before any further damage is done. Tax "software" is evil - every year, the slaves should be forced to confront the ornamentation that gives the master's whip in all its brutal, byzantine glory. Only then might they actually vote the bastards out.)
> The problem is that it's not necessarily the people who make things possible that get rich.
No, but it's often likely. Considering myself as an example - I make my employer's product easier to use.
Should I get all the money? No. I couldn't build that product myself, nor could I ship it, nor could I support it. So I get a portion of that money. It's called "wages".
Your point about patents is well-stated - just because someone invented the transistor, doesn't mean they should get a royalty on every transistor in every IC ever fabbed.
Those who invented the transistor were paid what they were worth (in both dollars and "fame":) - if they hadn't been paid enough, they'd have done something else with their time.
As for OSS/FS - the notion of a software commons by the voluntary consent of those writing the software in the commons - is great! Because software (unlike transistors) costs nothing to reproduce, if I choose to write something cool with the intention of allowing others to copy it, then everybody has something cool.
Can I put food on the table that way? Probably not. I'm good at what I do, but I'm not that good. So I trade my labor for dollars, as do about 50-odd other people with whom I work. The guy who started the whole ball rolling (with little more than a good idea and some cash of his own) has made damn good money over the few years. He risked almost all he had, and has been rewarded commensurately ("$BIGNUM in the bank, $BIGHOUSE on the lot, and a fun place to work"). We have also been well-rewarded ("a good paying job in a fun place to work") in comparison with what we risked (which was almost nothing).
And as a result of his risk and effort (and his willingness to trade some of his dollars for our work - meeting with our willingness to trade our work for some of his dollars), we've created a product that people are willing to trade their dollars for. Most of those dollars (after the looters take 40%) go to the coffers of the company, as well they should. If and when the company cannot support its customer base or develop products its customers wants, it hires more employees by offering them some of those dollars in the form of wages. (Umm, and again, the looters take about 40% of those dollars, too. Funny thing about looters. There never seem to be enough dollars for them to loot, or enough ways for them to loot dollars.)
Can someone who's damn good at what he does put food on his table via open source/free software? Sure - so long as there's a geek in the bar, neither ESR nor RMS nor Linus will ever have to pay for beer again.:-)
(And the best part about open source / free software is that because no dollars change hands, there's nothing for the looters to grab!)
> George Soros has $3000 million to his name. He could rid himself of $2500 million and still be one of the wealthiest men on earth. > >
That's seven million people fed for a year at a dollar a day.
That's 0.1% of the world's population. But let's continue with your altruistic notion that George Soros (who earned his money) should divest himself of his wealth and distribute it "fairly".
> That'd be clean water for every person on the planet (clean water is easy; there's a sand-filter technology that's perhaps a hundred bucks a pop); that's all malnutrition eliminated; that's basic healthcare for everyone.
There are 6 billion people on the planet.
George Soros could give each of them $0.50. (Or, more likely, governments could take his $3000 million, leaving him with nothing, and distribute the fifty cents "equally".)
Next year, George Soros would have nothing to give. So even if you could provide basic health care, education, food, etc. for $0.50 per person per year (you'd be hard pressed to do it at $0.50 per person per day!) you can't go back to him, because you've drained him dry.
Now whom will you loot to buy food and health care for the poor?
> Imagine if all those ultra-mega-elite rich were to get some compassion and donate 10% of their unimaginable wealth to solving these basic problems of human needs.
I have. Eventually, you run out of ultra-mega-elite rich people to loot, and the system collapses.
No thanks. Look at the standard of living 100 years ago, and compare it to today. Flush toilets, hot water, antibiotics, refrigeration, crossing the Atlantic ocean in hours instead of weeks, air conditioning in the home and office, a printing press and Cray supercomputer on every desk, and if the price of that standard of living is that the people who made all these things possible get rich as a result of my choosing to purchase them, then so be it.
*nods* - your WW2 vs Desert Storm analogy is bang-on.
Every dollar we invested in R&D cut down on the collateral damage in Iraq - and back then, smart bombs were expensive. Despite the fact that our aiming technology had improved somewhat, we still had to use a lot of "dumb bombs".
Ten years of further R&D expenditures have allowed us to cut down further on collateral damage in Afghanistan, and to do so cheaply - we now have smart-bomb accuracy at dumb-bomb prices.
I'm consistently amazed at the attitude of those who equate weapons R&D with "how to kill more people faster". News flash from 1960 - we've been able to do that for 40 years. Most, if not all, of our R&D since that time has been into making weapons that kill what they're aimed at, but nothing more.
Overkill makes for nice screen shots in video games, but it's pointless when you know you're gonna have to rebuild the civilian infrastructure when the shooting stops.
> And, regardless, this ignores that the primary purpose for the nuclear weapon testing usage of this computer isn't to design new weapons, it's to ensure that the current weapons are effective and are not dangerous in storage.
> is the death shriek of an innocent server running Apache on a PII 450 somewhere in central Colorado... May God have mercy on Tattered Cover's admin.;)
New.gov negotiating position: "Well, their legal bills didn't bankrupt 'em, but their bandwidth bills sure will!";-)
> Limiting the ability to *design* nuclear weapons also doesn't really limit a nation's ability to *get* nuclear weapons,
I agree with 90% of what you said, so I'll nitpick on the 10%.
Given enough fissionables, any nation can make something that goes BOOM.
For any given BOOM, the quantity that constitutes "enough" is directly proportional to the skill of that nation's weapons designers.
If you're a rogue nation, busily accumulating fissionables for your bombmakers, being stuck with a bad design is gonna delay your bombmaking effort for a few years, and once you have "enough" for a bomb, you won't be able to build as many of 'em.
Inasmuch as we can observe signs of weapons production, the smaller "enough" is for them, the harder that job is, and the less likely it is that we'll be able to do anything about it before it's Too Late.
Although it's not enough to stop proliferation, I believe that limiting the ability of rogue nations to improve their weapons design is a significant and ongoing part of nonproliferation.
> There's no point in improving our nuclear arsenal if we're not prepared to use it. This is NOT the message we want to send out to the rest of the world!
Well, duh. There's no point in even maintaining (let alone improving!) a nuclear arsenal unless you're prepared to use it.
Look up "Deterrence".
We have a nuclear arsenal. We've maintained it for 50 years. And we've stated (for the better part of those 50 years), under what conditions we are prepared to use it.
> Designing and building thermonuke depthcharges, bunkerbusters and tactical neutron bombs is NOT the way to go about that. If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.
Eminently true -- I conclude, therefore, that we are going to design them, or at least do as much of the design work as possible, so that if we decide we need to build them, we can do so at a moment's notice.
That's not being rash, that's being prudent.
> What we need, not just to defend ourselves, but to enrich ourselves, to enhance our prestige and enrich our increasingly-international culture, is international good will.
Peace in our time, eh?
Dude, what's it like, chanelling the spirit of Neville Chamberlain?:-)
> No, because that's not the only thing it's for. It's also used to simulate the effects of aging on our nuclear arsenal without having to actually detonate any bomb, which is a good thing.
Well-said.
And even if (and it's a not-bloody-likely-"if") what we learn makes its way into the design of new weapons, it appears that we're moving towards an arsenal featuring "really small nukes to penetrate and take out deep hardened bunkers with negligible surface fallout", as opposed to the more traditional "lob a 20M airburst at a city and let the fallout land where it may".
(And for those who'll jump up and say "Aha, that's what they're trying to do! Design more weapons! All weapons bad!", I point out that the probability of this is extremely low -- a moment's thought will make it obvious that the type of physics required to model the behavior of an earth-penetrating weapon is pretty much completely unrelated to the physics involved in simulating what goes on at the heart of a nuke.)
Bottom line: This is just an extremely cool physics simulation, no doubt most of it highly classified, but as this level of computing power becomes cheaper and more prevalent, I can think of ways in which some of the physics being modeled could also be used in the design of nuclear rockets and other next-generation propulsion systems.
> You seem to have an odd view of a complete failure. In the first 8 weeks it was available, there were 30,000 subscribers for XM. These people had to pay $300+ for the XM receiver as well as the $10/per month subscription fee. Have no idea of current subscriber base.
Of course, you seem to have an odd view of success. When KPMG said, on March 19, 2002 that XMSR's need for additional financing "raises substantial doubt about our [XMSR's] ability to continue as a going concern", the stock dropped 13%.
> Granted, that $300K/month is not even close to enough to keep XM-Radio afloat, this does not imply complete failure of the music-rental business model. In fact, it is direct evidence that it could be successful, provided the economics are right.
Sure, anything can be successful, provided the economics are right.
1) We spend gazillions of dollars building a satellite radio system,
2) The economics become right!
3) Profit!
As you correctly point out, their current revenues aren't even close to keep 'em afloat. Given how far away they are from profitability, I'd say that's an indication, not that it could be successful, but that the economics are wrong. How wrong? Well...
They project that they'll end the year with 350K subscribers. But even $3.5M per month - call that $50M/year - is a far cry from profitability when you're spending >$280M/year (indeed, $130M in last quarter of 2001! $53M on sales and marketing, $40M on operating costs!) to keep the business running.
Let's see. It cost them $135M to run the network last quarter. They took in $500K in revenue - $245K from subscribers, $294K from advertisers, on 27000 subscribers. *giggle*
They have about $200M in the bank.
If it costs them the same $135M to run it this quarter (1Q02) and they had 76000 subscribers, then I'd be hard pressed to see them get more than triple that. But I'm feeling generous - so let's quadruple the revenue - that's still only about $2M of revenue. Hey, double it to $5M for all I care.
If my guesses are right, that leaves 'em with $200M - 130M = $70M in cash as of April 1st.
In a business that's costing them $130M per quarter.
Unless I've grossly overestimated the business model (but "system operating costs" and "sales and marketing" don't look like one-time startup costs to me), or grossly underestimated subscriber growth (as in, by an order of magnitude - but even 350,000 subscribers at my generous $22/month estimate will only give $23M per quarter), XMSR will have to get more financing (issue more stock, get a loan, issue bonds or convertible debentures) before summer, or they'll no longer have the cash to pay the bills.
We'll find out in a few weeks when their first quarter report comes out.
Personal opinion - XMSR is cool tech. Sometimes, being first to market with new tech is an advantage (Amazon, eBay). But other times, particularly in industries with high startup costs, it can kill you (ILEC-vs-CLEC, all the dead DSL companies, and now most of the telcos). The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
As always, do your own due diligence. I have no position (long nor short) in XMSR. The ramblings of a geek on Slashdot are no substitute for professional investment advice.
> scene from Rainbow 6 [ashleypomeroy.com]
vs.
Real Life [yahoo.com]
I'm in a misanthropic mood today, so....
Close, but no cigar. The Yahoo screenshot beats Rainbow Six hands-down.
Better stun grenade damage rendering on the Yahoo screenshot. Observe area where smoke damage didn't adhere to wall.
Way better gibs on Yahoo - dig the way the gibs follow the bullet traces and get embedded in the wall. Rainbow Six has bullet holes in the wall, but they're all identical, and contain no trace of gibs.
Dig the floor texture on Yahoo. (Though that's probably the result of better hardware, not better software... The Yahoo player must have assloads of texture RAM on their video card. Check out the lighting effects from the flashbulb and all that floor debris! Wow!)
Long as we're talking textures - love the way they rendered the metal at the back of the room in Yahoo. Very nicely-done. Makes me want to jump up and down just to watch the reflections render in real time, as well as the transparent chunk of gibs on the left-hand metal texture.
Gravity, folks! What's up with that weapon sticking up in mid-air in Rainbow Six? (Rigor mortis doesn't set in that quickly!) C'mon, we know you can do better than that!
More gravity - look at the way the pools of blood on the Yahoo screenshot follow the joints between the tiles on the floor texture. So it's not all from better hardware for the floor textures - the floor is actually a 3-D object, and the Yahoo software accurately models liquid flow, which has gotta be a first for an FPS.
Facial/body textures - the dead guys in the Yahoo screenshot are really nicely rendered. Their uniforms look like they're made of cloth, not polygon/textures, and even things like their headgear and sunglasses are rendered separately - dig the way the foreground guy's k00l shadez have fallen off.
Yeah, I had to do a double-take, too. The Yahoo engine's pretty good, but I think it's still gonna be a few years before we have enough CPU power (and hardware) to get it on the desktop.
But there's the most important difference: According to rumors, unlike Rainbow Six, when you frag a terrorist in the Yahoo game, he stays fragged. We're not just talking about no-respawn, we're talking "Once fragged, he stays the fuck out of your LAN party!"
> What if I were to pick up the document and
browse it WITHOUT reading the agreement?
Wasn't there a DMCA suit threatened because someone on Slashdot did just that -- used an external "unzip" program to extract the PDF out of a self-extracting archive, and in so doing, bypassed the clickwrap license?
> You go after the actual copyright violators. Target the particularly egregious ones first. But don't restrict the rights of the common law-abinding citizen in order to stop the few criminals. That's just stupid. Gun control has the same problem. Despite the fact that the VAST majority of crimes are comitted with guns that are NOT legally owned, the leftists want to go after law-abiding legal gun owners.
Another case for research and knowing your audience.
When you meet with a Representative or Senator, research his or her voting record. Choose your analogies to match your audience.
For instance, this analogy - "CBDTPA on my computer is like a law requiring mandatory trigger locks on guns!"
If the Congressman/woman is a "strong supporter of Second Amendment Rights to self-defence", that's a good analogy to use. Your politician sees trigger locks as an unnecessary government intrusion on the rights of law-abiding gun owners (that criminals will ignore anyways), and will likely realize that CBDTPA is a simliarly-heavy-handed intrusion on the rights of law-abiding computer users, that criminals will also ignore.
But if your Congressman/woman has gone on record sponsoring a bill for trigger locks because "trigger locks make homes safer for kids", it's not a good analogy to use. This politician sincerely believes that trigger locks prevent crime and make the world a better place -- and your bringing up of the analogy will only undermine your argument. All you'll do is make them think "Gee, if we needed trigger locks to make guns safer, we must need CPDTPA to make computers safer too!"
It doesn't matter what you think trigger locks are good or bad -- it matters that you know what they think of trigger locks before you bring it up. Otherwise, you could just be (ahem:) shooting yourself in the foot.
Bonus points if you do research on bills and issues your Congressman/woman has actually sponsored or taken serious interest in, and can figure out a valid analogy that makes CBDTPA look like the opposite of what they want to do with their political career.
> America needs to stop making laws supporting Big Business, and we need to start supporting the
small people, Joe Shmo American.
Depends on whose party your Senator's from.
The first rule in making a political argument is to KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.
If you're writing to a Republican Congressman, the thrust of your argument against the CBDTPA is that this is a Democrat-sponsored bill to favor a niche industry ($35B revenues) and the liberal elite of Hollywood (who donate disproportionately to Democrats when it's campaign time), while destroying the much more important ($600B revenues) technology industry that drives American innovation economic growth.
If you're writing to a Democratic Congressman, you use the other argument: CBDTPA is merely the latest way Big Business (Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA) is trouncing the rights of the Little Guy consumer (they tried to take his VCR, failed, and now are trying to take away his computer), and the independent creative community (no more independent films or indie bands when you can't do your own digital editing or burn your own CDs.)
Incidentally, both of these arguments are true. CBDTPA is a threat to the technology industry and the independent artist alike.
But your Congressman is very likely to have a political bias towards favoring only of these arguments (nothing wrong with that; it's his job to have a political bias on issues! That's why he got elected over the candidate from the other party!), only one of those arguments is likely to make an impression on him strong enough to influence his vote.
Re:How To Respond to 'Touchy-Feely' Games @ work?
on
Managing Einsteins
·
· Score: 3, Funny
> Now, insert that moment in the circle.
The circle with your favorite color, other than red or, I forgot to mention, black, is in front of you. Go
ahead and take a step forward into the circle. Go ahead! Now, how do you feel!?!" > >Any template responses to share?
For your particular touchy-feely game, I came up with:
"I still feel like a complete idiot, sitting around new-agey mindgames with you, when I could be having fun developing code that you could be selling for a profit!"
> No kidding, i work with techs all day long and there are no einsteins that i can see. When a sysadmin is asking you what "ping" means, then i'm afraid the boundaries of astrophysics are not even within sight.
In keeping with the Einstein / astrophysics thread, "your admin is so far beyond clueless that he couldn't find clueless with very-long-baseline interferometry":)
> I understand the desperation that's felt by someone with cancer, but really, what kind of person is going to believe that the miracle cure for cancer is sitting on some shady website and not in the hospitals?
Anyone who hasn't been trained in the ways of logical reasoned thought is a target for quacks.
Quackery is a multimillion dollar business in America. (Depending on how strictly or loosely you define it, it's a multibillion dollar business.)
If you don't have time to go through that whole list, the short answer to your question is that quacks use every trick in the book to find the most efficient way of separating the emotionally-vulnerable from their money, and (like any other group of professionals), they're extremely good at it. They even have lobby groups to get laws changed in their favor.
Unlike most professionals, of course, quacks harm their clients, rather than helping them.
I'm gratified to see the FTC moving in on these bastards as part of the spam problem, but I'm afraid it's just the tip of the iceberg.
> for the government to get it's invasive little paws into the stream of email everywhere! Sounds like an excuse to install "Herbivore".
"It's a SPAM-fighter! Honest!" Can't wait to see my tax dollars at work.
You know, I'd much rather have Carnivore being used to track down and exterminate the chronic offenders like A--- R----- (priors for bank fraud) and other spam kingpins.
In fact, if Carnivore can be used by the FBI to put pigfuckers (apologies to those of you who merely fuck pigs) like A--- R----- and E------ H----- and the others like them in prison for running multi-year criminal conspiracies to defraud, then I'd be all for it.
Imagine the headline: DCS-1000 used to capture a guy with a multiyear history of fraud, seize his assets, and put him in jail.
With the technology they've got available for deployment on the 'net, the Feds could end spam in a day and simultaneously gain widespread public support for Carnivore.
Sounds like a win-win to me. Any G-men reading? Wanna pass this on to your PR guys, run a few focus groups/surveys, and see if it'll fly with the public? I've got a dozen Krispy Kremes that says it will. You guys probably have me pegged as one of "those silly privacy nuts". If even someone like me would support Carnivore as a spam-extermination tool, then Lord knows Joe and Jane Q. Public would go for it.
> a) IBM approach- GPL windows and keep office closed > b) keep everything closed and make GPL illegal by changing the law > c) find a way to crack GPL legally (find/make a hole in it that makes it unefforceable somehow; hey OJ got off first time around;-) > d) buy Linus Torvalds/Red Hat off [perhaps they have already;-)] > e) create their own Linux distro add closed source interfaces and stuff office and IE on top > f) abandon the software domain and put their $30+G into other businesses > g) spread out into other applications; move away from the OS > h) Buy off Richard Stallman > i) kill em; kill all of them (order hits on main GPL proponents) >j) who cares? let's just buy a small Island somewhere instead. Australia?
That's not how you play the quiz game! You forgot to match the organizations with the approaches!
a) IBM.
b) MPAA/Hollings/Disney axis.
c) Adobe vs. Sklyarov.
d) Microsoft I - starve, then purchase, the competition!:-)
e) Microsoft II - embrace and extend.
f) Enron! (Hey, nobody said the $30Gigabucks had to go to profitable ventures...)
g) Gotta be the Compaq/HP strategic focus dilution gambit.
h) The Make-a-Wish Foundation, 'cuz a wish from a genie the only way you'll get RMS to sell out to anyone.
i) Sauron, Inc.
j) Libertarian Party / Oceania Foundation
> [Microsoft says] " Standards are the means by which software can compete on the basis of merit, and Microsoft takes advantage of the fact
that pragmatically, a market leader's de facto standard speaks much louder than any written document." > >
What are they supposed to do? It's hard to innovate when a standard is set in stone.
"I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou."
- Paul Tomblin, as seen in USENET, in one of my all-time favorite.sigs.
Re:Carnivore is doomed....
on
Carnivore Update
·
· Score: 4, Funny
> Unfortunately, no, you can't. Law enforcement is specificially exempted from the DMCA.
If CBDTPA has a similar exemption, that sounds like the beginning of a great recruitment campaign for the FBI!
"Were you good with computers? Remember how much fun it was to have a real computer on your desk? Want to use a computer again? The FBI is recruiting people who were good with computers. The pay ain't great, but the fringe benefits are great. Imagine having a real computer on your desk again. No other organization can offer that! Send your resume today!"
> Also, the NSA and FBI don't have millions of people on staff to do this. They've been paying lots of overtime in the past six months, and they're still way behind in the work. > >
Why don't you send them a resume?
"The NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas
of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new
research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and
ask for one."
Slashdot Mirror
20th Century Multinational Body Count: Tens of thousands, maybe a million, tops.
20th Century Governmental Body Count: Tens of millions. Possibly 100,000,000.
I'll take my chances with the multinationals.
DingDingDingDingDing! Pseudoscience alert!
Though, in defence of Marx and Engels, they hadn't been able to test their hypotheses at the time they came upw ith 'em.
That said, by 2002, the results of the experiments they conducted are pretty clear. They came up with an interesting hypothesis, but attempts to validate the hypothesis using the Real World as a laboratory resulted in tens of millions of deaths and the collapse of the experimental apparatus.
The hypothesis was shown to be false, and in the name of basic scientific ethics, I pray we never try any more large-scale experiments.
(More precisely, having seen the number of "to each" and "from each" phaseouts and arbitrary restrictions in the Internal Revenue Code, I pray we cease building the partially-completed large-scale experiment in North America before any further damage is done. Tax "software" is evil - every year, the slaves should be forced to confront the ornamentation that gives the master's whip in all its brutal, byzantine glory. Only then might they actually vote the bastards out.)
No, but it's often likely. Considering myself as an example - I make my employer's product easier to use.
Should I get all the money? No. I couldn't build that product myself, nor could I ship it, nor could I support it. So I get a portion of that money. It's called "wages".
Your point about patents is well-stated - just because someone invented the transistor, doesn't mean they should get a royalty on every transistor in every IC ever fabbed.
Those who invented the transistor were paid what they were worth (in both dollars and "fame" :) - if they hadn't been paid enough, they'd have done something else with their time.
As for OSS/FS - the notion of a software commons by the voluntary consent of those writing the software in the commons - is great! Because software (unlike transistors) costs nothing to reproduce, if I choose to write something cool with the intention of allowing others to copy it, then everybody has something cool.
Can I put food on the table that way? Probably not. I'm good at what I do, but I'm not that good. So I trade my labor for dollars, as do about 50-odd other people with whom I work. The guy who started the whole ball rolling (with little more than a good idea and some cash of his own) has made damn good money over the few years. He risked almost all he had, and has been rewarded commensurately ("$BIGNUM in the bank, $BIGHOUSE on the lot, and a fun place to work"). We have also been well-rewarded ("a good paying job in a fun place to work") in comparison with what we risked (which was almost nothing).
And as a result of his risk and effort (and his willingness to trade some of his dollars for our work - meeting with our willingness to trade our work for some of his dollars), we've created a product that people are willing to trade their dollars for. Most of those dollars (after the looters take 40%) go to the coffers of the company, as well they should. If and when the company cannot support its customer base or develop products its customers wants, it hires more employees by offering them some of those dollars in the form of wages. (Umm, and again, the looters take about 40% of those dollars, too. Funny thing about looters. There never seem to be enough dollars for them to loot, or enough ways for them to loot dollars.)
Can someone who's damn good at what he does put food on his table via open source/free software? Sure - so long as there's a geek in the bar, neither ESR nor RMS nor Linus will ever have to pay for beer again. :-)
(And the best part about open source / free software is that because no dollars change hands, there's nothing for the looters to grab!)
>
> That's seven million people fed for a year at a dollar a day. That's 0.1% of the world's population. But let's continue with your altruistic notion that George Soros (who earned his money) should divest himself of his wealth and distribute it "fairly".
> That'd be clean water for every person on the planet (clean water is easy; there's a sand-filter technology that's perhaps a hundred bucks a pop); that's all malnutrition eliminated; that's basic healthcare for everyone.
There are 6 billion people on the planet.
George Soros could give each of them $0.50. (Or, more likely, governments could take his $3000 million, leaving him with nothing, and distribute the fifty cents "equally".)
Next year, George Soros would have nothing to give. So even if you could provide basic health care, education, food, etc. for $0.50 per person per year (you'd be hard pressed to do it at $0.50 per person per day!) you can't go back to him, because you've drained him dry.
Now whom will you loot to buy food and health care for the poor?
> Imagine if all those ultra-mega-elite rich were to get some compassion and donate 10% of their unimaginable wealth to solving these basic problems of human needs.
I have. Eventually, you run out of ultra-mega-elite rich people to loot, and the system collapses.
No thanks. Look at the standard of living 100 years ago, and compare it to today. Flush toilets, hot water, antibiotics, refrigeration, crossing the Atlantic ocean in hours instead of weeks, air conditioning in the home and office, a printing press and Cray supercomputer on every desk, and if the price of that standard of living is that the people who made all these things possible get rich as a result of my choosing to purchase them, then so be it.
Every dollar we invested in R&D cut down on the collateral damage in Iraq - and back then, smart bombs were expensive. Despite the fact that our aiming technology had improved somewhat, we still had to use a lot of "dumb bombs".
Ten years of further R&D expenditures have allowed us to cut down further on collateral damage in Afghanistan, and to do so cheaply - we now have smart-bomb accuracy at dumb-bomb prices.
I'm consistently amazed at the attitude of those who equate weapons R&D with "how to kill more people faster". News flash from 1960 - we've been able to do that for 40 years. Most, if not all, of our R&D since that time has been into making weapons that kill what they're aimed at, but nothing more.
Overkill makes for nice screen shots in video games, but it's pointless when you know you're gonna have to rebuild the civilian infrastructure when the shooting stops.
> And, regardless, this ignores that the primary purpose for the nuclear weapon testing usage of this computer isn't to design new weapons, it's to ensure that the current weapons are effective and are not dangerous in storage.
A point I didn't emphasize enough. Thanks again.
New .gov negotiating position: "Well, their legal bills didn't bankrupt 'em, but their bandwidth bills sure will!" ;-)
I agree with 90% of what you said, so I'll nitpick on the 10%.
Given enough fissionables, any nation can make something that goes BOOM.
For any given BOOM, the quantity that constitutes "enough" is directly proportional to the skill of that nation's weapons designers.
If you're a rogue nation, busily accumulating fissionables for your bombmakers, being stuck with a bad design is gonna delay your bombmaking effort for a few years, and once you have "enough" for a bomb, you won't be able to build as many of 'em.
Inasmuch as we can observe signs of weapons production, the smaller "enough" is for them, the harder that job is, and the less likely it is that we'll be able to do anything about it before it's Too Late.
Although it's not enough to stop proliferation, I believe that limiting the ability of rogue nations to improve their weapons design is a significant and ongoing part of nonproliferation.
I think you misspelt "Unless he cleans up his act, and pronto, Saddam better realize it doesn't matter whether he ducks or not"
Well, duh. There's no point in even maintaining (let alone improving!) a nuclear arsenal unless you're prepared to use it.
Look up "Deterrence".
We have a nuclear arsenal. We've maintained it for 50 years. And we've stated (for the better part of those 50 years), under what conditions we are prepared to use it.
> Designing and building thermonuke depthcharges, bunkerbusters and tactical neutron bombs is NOT the way to go about that. If we're not going to build the things, we shouldn't waste the resources designing them.
Eminently true -- I conclude, therefore, that we are going to design them, or at least do as much of the design work as possible, so that if we decide we need to build them, we can do so at a moment's notice.
That's not being rash, that's being prudent.
> What we need, not just to defend ourselves, but to enrich ourselves, to enhance our prestige and enrich our increasingly-international culture, is international good will.
Peace in our time, eh?
Dude, what's it like, chanelling the spirit of Neville Chamberlain? :-)
Well-said.
And even if (and it's a not-bloody-likely-"if") what we learn makes its way into the design of new weapons, it appears that we're moving towards an arsenal featuring "really small nukes to penetrate and take out deep hardened bunkers with negligible surface fallout", as opposed to the more traditional "lob a 20M airburst at a city and let the fallout land where it may".
(And for those who'll jump up and say "Aha, that's what they're trying to do! Design more weapons! All weapons bad!", I point out that the probability of this is extremely low -- a moment's thought will make it obvious that the type of physics required to model the behavior of an earth-penetrating weapon is pretty much completely unrelated to the physics involved in simulating what goes on at the heart of a nuke.)
Bottom line: This is just an extremely cool physics simulation, no doubt most of it highly classified, but as this level of computing power becomes cheaper and more prevalent, I can think of ways in which some of the physics being modeled could also be used in the design of nuclear rockets and other next-generation propulsion systems.
76,000 as of Apr 1.
Of course, you seem to have an odd view of success. When KPMG said, on March 19, 2002 that XMSR's need for additional financing "raises substantial doubt about our [XMSR's] ability to continue as a going concern", the stock dropped 13%.
> Granted, that $300K/month is not even close to enough to keep XM-Radio afloat, this does not imply complete failure of the music-rental business model. In fact, it is direct evidence that it could be successful, provided the economics are right.
Sure, anything can be successful, provided the economics are right.
1) We spend gazillions of dollars building a satellite radio system,
2) The economics become right!
3) Profit!
As you correctly point out, their current revenues aren't even close to keep 'em afloat. Given how far away they are from profitability, I'd say that's an indication, not that it could be successful, but that the economics are wrong. How wrong? Well...
They project that they'll end the year with 350K subscribers. But even $3.5M per month - call that $50M/year - is a far cry from profitability when you're spending >$280M/year (indeed, $130M in last quarter of 2001! $53M on sales and marketing, $40M on operating costs!) to keep the business running.
Source: XMSR 4Q announcement
Let's see. It cost them $135M to run the network last quarter. They took in $500K in revenue - $245K from subscribers, $294K from advertisers, on 27000 subscribers. *giggle*
They have about $200M in the bank.
If it costs them the same $135M to run it this quarter (1Q02) and they had 76000 subscribers, then I'd be hard pressed to see them get more than triple that. But I'm feeling generous - so let's quadruple the revenue - that's still only about $2M of revenue. Hey, double it to $5M for all I care.
If my guesses are right, that leaves 'em with $200M - 130M = $70M in cash as of April 1st.
In a business that's costing them $130M per quarter.
Unless I've grossly overestimated the business model (but "system operating costs" and "sales and marketing" don't look like one-time startup costs to me), or grossly underestimated subscriber growth (as in, by an order of magnitude - but even 350,000 subscribers at my generous $22/month estimate will only give $23M per quarter), XMSR will have to get more financing (issue more stock, get a loan, issue bonds or convertible debentures) before summer, or they'll no longer have the cash to pay the bills.
We'll find out in a few weeks when their first quarter report comes out.
Personal opinion - XMSR is cool tech. Sometimes, being first to market with new tech is an advantage (Amazon, eBay). But other times, particularly in industries with high startup costs, it can kill you (ILEC-vs-CLEC, all the dead DSL companies, and now most of the telcos). The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
As always, do your own due diligence. I have no position (long nor short) in XMSR. The ramblings of a geek on Slashdot are no substitute for professional investment advice.
I'm in a misanthropic mood today, so....
Close, but no cigar. The Yahoo screenshot beats Rainbow Six hands-down.
- Better stun grenade damage rendering on the Yahoo screenshot. Observe area where smoke damage didn't adhere to wall.
- Way better gibs on Yahoo - dig the way the gibs follow the bullet traces and get embedded in the wall. Rainbow Six has bullet holes in the wall, but they're all identical, and contain no trace of gibs.
- Dig the floor texture on Yahoo. (Though that's probably the result of better hardware, not better software... The Yahoo player must have assloads of texture RAM on their video card. Check out the lighting effects from the flashbulb and all that floor debris! Wow!)
- Long as we're talking textures - love the way they rendered the metal at the back of the room in Yahoo. Very nicely-done. Makes me want to jump up and down just to watch the reflections render in real time, as well as the transparent chunk of gibs on the left-hand metal texture.
- Gravity, folks! What's up with that weapon sticking up in mid-air in Rainbow Six? (Rigor mortis doesn't set in that quickly!) C'mon, we know you can do better than that!
- More gravity - look at the way the pools of blood on the Yahoo screenshot follow the joints between the tiles on the floor texture. So it's not all from better hardware for the floor textures - the floor is actually a 3-D object, and the Yahoo software accurately models liquid flow, which has gotta be a first for an FPS.
- Facial/body textures - the dead guys in the Yahoo screenshot are really nicely rendered. Their uniforms look like they're made of cloth, not polygon/textures, and even things like their headgear and sunglasses are rendered separately - dig the way the foreground guy's k00l shadez have fallen off.
- Better armor modelling. Look around sunglass-guy's head. "Kevlar helmet good, turban bad."
Yeah, I had to do a double-take, too. The Yahoo engine's pretty good, but I think it's still gonna be a few years before we have enough CPU power (and hardware) to get it on the desktop.But there's the most important difference: According to rumors, unlike Rainbow Six, when you frag a terrorist in the Yahoo game, he stays fragged. We're not just talking about no-respawn, we're talking "Once fragged, he stays the fuck out of your LAN party!"
Now That, kids, is realism! *evil grin*
Wasn't there a DMCA suit threatened because someone on Slashdot did just that -- used an external "unzip" program to extract the PDF out of a self-extracting archive, and in so doing, bypassed the clickwrap license?
Another case for research and knowing your audience. When you meet with a Representative or Senator, research his or her voting record. Choose your analogies to match your audience.
For instance, this analogy - "CBDTPA on my computer is like a law requiring mandatory trigger locks on guns!"
If the Congressman/woman is a "strong supporter of Second Amendment Rights to self-defence", that's a good analogy to use. Your politician sees trigger locks as an unnecessary government intrusion on the rights of law-abiding gun owners (that criminals will ignore anyways), and will likely realize that CBDTPA is a simliarly-heavy-handed intrusion on the rights of law-abiding computer users, that criminals will also ignore.
But if your Congressman/woman has gone on record sponsoring a bill for trigger locks because "trigger locks make homes safer for kids", it's not a good analogy to use. This politician sincerely believes that trigger locks prevent crime and make the world a better place -- and your bringing up of the analogy will only undermine your argument. All you'll do is make them think "Gee, if we needed trigger locks to make guns safer, we must need CPDTPA to make computers safer too!"
It doesn't matter what you think trigger locks are good or bad -- it matters that you know what they think of trigger locks before you bring it up. Otherwise, you could just be (ahem :) shooting yourself in the foot.
Bonus points if you do research on bills and issues your Congressman/woman has actually sponsored or taken serious interest in, and can figure out a valid analogy that makes CBDTPA look like the opposite of what they want to do with their political career.
Depends on whose party your Senator's from.
The first rule in making a political argument is to KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.
If you're writing to a Republican Congressman, the thrust of your argument against the CBDTPA is that this is a Democrat-sponsored bill to favor a niche industry ($35B revenues) and the liberal elite of Hollywood (who donate disproportionately to Democrats when it's campaign time), while destroying the much more important ($600B revenues) technology industry that drives American innovation economic growth.
If you're writing to a Democratic Congressman, you use the other argument: CBDTPA is merely the latest way Big Business (Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA) is trouncing the rights of the Little Guy consumer (they tried to take his VCR, failed, and now are trying to take away his computer), and the independent creative community (no more independent films or indie bands when you can't do your own digital editing or burn your own CDs.)
Incidentally, both of these arguments are true. CBDTPA is a threat to the technology industry and the independent artist alike.
But your Congressman is very likely to have a political bias towards favoring only of these arguments (nothing wrong with that; it's his job to have a political bias on issues! That's why he got elected over the candidate from the other party!), only one of those arguments is likely to make an impression on him strong enough to influence his vote.
>
>Any template responses to share?
For your particular touchy-feely game, I came up with:
"I still feel like a complete idiot, sitting around new-agey mindgames with you, when I could be having fun developing code that you could be selling for a profit!"
In keeping with the Einstein / astrophysics thread, "your admin is so far beyond clueless that he couldn't find clueless with very-long-baseline interferometry" :)
Thanks. As of today, and for the first time in my life, I can find some sympathy for the Palestinians.
>
> Puts new meaning to the "Tampax was here" slogan, doesn't it?
Followed immediately, of course, by a Visa commercial. "VISA: It's everywhere you want to be."
I guess there's also a lot of women walking around with credit cards up their cunts.
Anyone who hasn't been trained in the ways of logical reasoned thought is a target for quacks.
Quackery is a multimillion dollar business in America. (Depending on how strictly or loosely you define it, it's a multibillion dollar business.)
The best answer to your question is here:
A Special Message for Cancer Patients Seeking "Alternative" Treatments
If you don't have time to go through that whole list, the short answer to your question is that quacks use every trick in the book to find the most efficient way of separating the emotionally-vulnerable from their money, and (like any other group of professionals), they're extremely good at it. They even have lobby groups to get laws changed in their favor.
Unlike most professionals, of course, quacks harm their clients, rather than helping them.
I'm gratified to see the FTC moving in on these bastards as part of the spam problem, but I'm afraid it's just the tip of the iceberg.
You know, I'd much rather have Carnivore being used to track down and exterminate the chronic offenders like A--- R----- (priors for bank fraud) and other spam kingpins.
In fact, if Carnivore can be used by the FBI to put pigfuckers (apologies to those of you who merely fuck pigs) like A--- R----- and E------ H----- and the others like them in prison for running multi-year criminal conspiracies to defraud, then I'd be all for it.
Imagine the headline: DCS-1000 used to capture a guy with a multiyear history of fraud, seize his assets, and put him in jail.
With the technology they've got available for deployment on the 'net, the Feds could end spam in a day and simultaneously gain widespread public support for Carnivore.
Sounds like a win-win to me. Any G-men reading? Wanna pass this on to your PR guys, run a few focus groups/surveys, and see if it'll fly with the public? I've got a dozen Krispy Kremes that says it will. You guys probably have me pegged as one of "those silly privacy nuts". If even someone like me would support Carnivore as a spam-extermination tool, then Lord knows Joe and Jane Q. Public would go for it.
> b) keep everything closed and make GPL illegal by changing the law
> c) find a way to crack GPL legally (find/make a hole in it that makes it unefforceable somehow; hey OJ got off first time around
> d) buy Linus Torvalds/Red Hat off [perhaps they have already
> e) create their own Linux distro add closed source interfaces and stuff office and IE on top
> f) abandon the software domain and put their $30+G into other businesses
> g) spread out into other applications; move away from the OS
> h) Buy off Richard Stallman
> i) kill em; kill all of them (order hits on main GPL proponents)
>j) who cares? let's just buy a small Island somewhere instead. Australia?
That's not how you play the quiz game! You forgot to match the organizations with the approaches!
a) IBM. :-)
b) MPAA/Hollings/Disney axis.
c) Adobe vs. Sklyarov.
d) Microsoft I - starve, then purchase, the competition!
e) Microsoft II - embrace and extend.
f) Enron! (Hey, nobody said the $30Gigabucks had to go to profitable ventures...)
g) Gotta be the Compaq/HP strategic focus dilution gambit.
h) The Make-a-Wish Foundation, 'cuz a wish from a genie the only way you'll get RMS to sell out to anyone.
i) Sauron, Inc.
j) Libertarian Party / Oceania Foundation
Do I win? :-)
>
> What are they supposed to do? It's hard to innovate when a standard is set in stone.
"I love the way Microsoft follows standards. .sigs.
In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou."
- Paul Tomblin, as seen in USENET, in one of my all-time favorite
If CBDTPA has a similar exemption, that sounds like the beginning of a great recruitment campaign for the FBI!
"Were you good with computers? Remember how much fun it was to have a real computer on your desk? Want to use a computer again? The FBI is recruiting people who were good with computers. The pay ain't great, but the fringe benefits are great. Imagine having a real computer on your desk again. No other organization can offer that! Send your resume today!"
>
> Why don't you send them a resume?
"The NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one."
- Seen in a .sig on USENET ;-)