I tend to agree, assuming the explanation is correct. Dark matter started out as a way to explain galactic rotation.
I think that once a theory starts to gain acceptance it tends to get applied more broadly. Perhaps if the original purpose of the theory of dark matter no longer applies we might find other explanations for other things.
There are a lot of ways you can try to explain things - and obviously scientists try to explain everything with the smallest number of theories. Once dark matter is an accepted tool in the toolbox we'll tend to apply it anywhere we can make it fit. If that tool starts looking not so useful, perhaps we'll find that it isn't actually needed in many other areas where it is currently used.
Or we might find that dark matter does exist, but that it isn't responsible for rotation curves, etc.
Well, by that logic general relativity is just a hypothesis, since it is irreconcilable with quantum mechanics, and for that matter with large-scale gravitational observations like the ones that are the subject of this paper.
In fact, the whole point of this paper is to suggest that general relativity actually works better than we think it does, and obviously relativity itself is a pretty solid theory.
I think the real controversy is that it suggests that Einstein was actually right when people have been steadily becoming more convinced that he was wrong about it.
I think another thing to consider is the scale. From my limited understanding this new work is talking about galactic rotation, and the bullet cluster is talking about extremely rarefied intergalactic gas in a gargantuan structure. It is entirely possible that both results are right for different reasons.
Does Discovery even show anything but video of cute animals these days? It might as well be Animal Planet.
History is a lot better, but you are right that half of it is sensationalized.
I don't mind actually learning something on TV. Maybe they could team up with the Teaching Company and bring some of their content to their network or something? I'm fine if they improve the visualization and make it less lecture-format, but if I can enjoy listening to just audio of a lecture I think I can handle something more cerebral than hunting for bigfoot or ghosts. Storm Chasers actually isn't half bad in concept, but maybe cut the length by 75% and get rid of all the hype. I can be impressed by a tornado without listening to Reed scream into the microphone.
How is it "expensive as hell?" It's $20 for an indoor antenna, and the cost of electricity to run it.
I think he was referring to the broadcast side. If it is expensive to get your show out to everybody, then only certain types of shows will be made available and they'll be loaded with ads.
Contrast that with the web where I can run a website for little marginal cost beyond what it costs to consume content. That means I can afford to blog about my runny nose ad-free and you're free to read it.
We could start building a super-Orion pulsed nuke generation ship now and complete it in maybe 100 years.
Usually these kinds of plans are HIGHLY grandiose (colony ships and all that). I wonder what could be done if we scaled the thing down and only sent a robotic probe.
A robotic probe eliminates many of the shielding issues (sure, it needs it, but not nearly as much), and almost all of the logistical issues. You would need to make the software REALLY good - it can't rely on any kind of interactive communications with Earth. If you keep the mass down you can accelerate much more quickly, and you could treat it as disposable once it gets there. If you're willing to do a flyby (seems like a waste) then you can get there much faster as well. Hmm, wonder what the math works out to on shielding for solar/planetary aerobraking vs powered deceleration (at those speeds you'd need a lot of shielding, but you need a lot of fuel also - the idea of pluging into a photosphere to slow down sounds really neat though).
Well, there was a post a little while back about somebody actually making an antenna resonant at visible light wavelengths, as a possible future solar collector. If you attached an oscillator to it the antenna would emit light - in theory.
The problem is that visible light has a frequency in the hundreds of terahertz, and wavelengths in the hundreds of nanometers.
Antenna design already starts getting tricky in the microwave regions - where you often are using things like waveguides and such since ordinary wiring doesn't work so well. Creating an oscillator or a rectifier that works in the range of visible light will be a serious challenge. Once you do, then direct conversion of electrical/light energy would become possible.
Read up on terahertz technology sometime. In a nutshell optical technology has been moving further and further into the infrared, and radio technology has been moving steadily up the frequency ladder, and the Terahertz region is where they're starting to collide.
Well, only they know what they're thinking. Maybe they figured they could make the web experience better if they controlled it end-to-end. As long as their browser remains standards-compliant I won't complain.
I mentioned in another post that the other big issue here is quality. Spending lots of money doesn't guarantee good quality. I think Google has demonstrated with Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, Gmail, and Google Docs that they're very capable of doing big software projects well.
I've seen less popular software sold that has hundreds of developers that was inferior to stuff created by a dozen guys.
To use an analogy from another post - you can spend millions building the world's greatest bubble sort, and it won't change the fact that it is a bubble sort. Design matters a lot.
Ugh - if some court wants to rule that I don't have to keep spamming the "NO" button every time I install one thing and it wants to give me 14 other things, more power to them...
They are expert buyers, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a conflict of interest.
Pharmaceutical companies are expert buyers too, but that doesn't mean that they are or ought to be allowed to stick random white powders in their vats without doing due diligence to ensure that it is what it is supposed to be. Baby formula and wood glue might both pass the assay, but they aren't equivalent.
I'm not even asking for new regulations here - this stuff is ALREADY law. The government simply has to enforce it.
Erm... What about aftermarket improvements to "part" designs???
I'm not talking a solid-fuel booster on a 747 but there are always things that can be improved. Think about the jobs this would "create!" Lots of people/companies improving on whatever they feel like trying to improve, a testing industry for quality assurance of the parts, a unit testing industry for assurance/specification of parts compatibility, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
I'm not an expert on FAA regs, but I imagine that aftermarket parts are completely legal - as long as you have the necessary documentation to show that the plane will be airworthy with them installed. In practice they probably don't exist in most cases since it is EXTREMELY expensive to certify this and you're not going to make enough money on some flap lever to warrant the expense, unless you are just going to prove equivalence to the OEM part (which isn't an improvement). The engines are probably one of the biggest exceptions to this - my understanding is that large aircraft engines are generally aftermarket, though they are installed by the manufacturer. Avionics are also something that tends to be customized - but those tend to be a package deal on really big things. In general aviation you can upgrade one radio or whatever since it isn't all integrated.
I don't believe in patents or copyright law. This "protection of..." whatever garbage is stupid.
Proper attribution of innovation/invention/authorship/credit-where-credit-due is a must. Enforceable (esp. by the gov.) monopolies? Fascism (well fascIST).
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with patents or copyrights, unless you're talking about "design patents" which I think are pretty bogus (just use trademarks for these things when legitimate - like a logo). I am fine with closing down sites that violate trademarks - but not ones which sell replicas that are clearly advertised as such. As long as you know you're buying a Sorny instead of a Sony it is all good in my eyes. Allowing trademark violations isn't good for anybody - would you like to buy a Hitachi hard drive from Newegg or whatever only to have it fail in two weeks and Hitachi tells you to get lost because they didn't make it and won't honor the warranty? That isn't in anybody's interest - I want companies to have incentive to not make junk and build a reputation.
Patents and copyrights are an entirely different matter. They are generally abused and should be reigned in, but I have yet to see a viable alternative to be proposed - unless you want to live in a world where nobody spends more than $200k to design anything.
"Not for profit" simply means that they don't pay dividends. You can still spend money like there is no tomorrow on your employees, or more likely spend lots of money on a few employees and send the rest of them off doing things that are unproductive.
Look up the salary of the head of the NCAA sometime and talk to me about "not for profit."
Well, in 2009 $60M went into development. But, the thing most PHBs don't get is that development isn't some machine that you put dollars into and get lines of code out of. Well, I guess you can do it that way, but there is no guarantee those lines of code will do anything more useful than eat CPU cycles.
I suspect Mozilla's problem is that they're spending lots of money paying developers to write code, but they aren't writing the right code.
To use an example from CS101, you can pay somebody $2M to write the most amazingly optimized bubble sort ever created and implementing it on an SIC, and yet you will find yourself completely outperformed by some guy who implemented a quicksort in an hour in VBA once your dataset has more than a few thousand elements. You can't fix a bad design with money, unless you're willing to fix the design.
I don't know that Firefox has a bad design, but only that for $60M/yr you can write a LOT of good software if you have top-notch developers. Of course, top-notch isn't easy to acquire and cultivate, and having a few genuinely good developers in management doesn't really help much.
Yeah, that is $123M per year. That is a LOT of money - most of the bigger community linux distros probably have donations of maybe 0.1% of that per year.
Sometimes throwing money at a problem makes it worse - an organization with that kind of income usually ends up with a lot of professional management.
I'm not sure how much money Google is spending on Chrome, but it wouldn't surprise me if the development budget is less than what they're spending to fund Firefox.
So, if you're the CEO of Google do you want to give $123M to some other company and then try to persuade them to accommodate your needs and face the risk that at anytime you could get out-bid by Bing and lose your prominent position? Or, would you rather just spend that money in-house to have a browser that is always aligned to your vision and which will never make Bing the default and once Firefox is at 0.01% market share you don't really care what MS is offering them. If you're going to spend that kind of money you might as well spend it where you'll get results, and it isn't like writing web-oriented software is outside of Google's expertise.
So, what is the court going to do - rule that Google has to PAY Mozilla to develop a competing browser?
They paid them to advertise their search engine. If they don't want to pay them to do that then I don't really see the issue. Chrome isn't bundled with anything other than Chrome OS, and Chrome OS is FAR from being a monopoly product - it makes Ubuntu look universal. Chrome and Mozilla are really on equal footing in the market as far as access goes - this is competition pure and simple.
I think Mozilla's problem here is being SO dependent on a single source of revenue. $100M/yr is a LOT of money to count on from one particular source. It is easy when you have that kind of money coming in to become loose with funds and then if you have to go cold turkey it is VERY painful. Plus, FOSS tends to be volunteer driven and making a transition from a paid world to a volunteer world is a LOT harder than going the other way.
The part about them lowering prices to keep consumers and advertising those lower prices aggressively is perfectly fine. That's free market capitalism at its best. If they want to argue that their supply chains are safer or whatever they can do that too (assuming they can back that up with facts).
Forging exclusive deals should be illegal - it breaks the patent deal. The patent deal is that we appreciate you developing the cure for the common cold and agree to let you charge us $5/pill for a decade, but after that anybody can benefit from your R&D and make your product. I think that deal needs a little adjustment, but overall it is still a win for society since it promotes discovery and eventually everybody benefits from it.
Unfortunately, companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
Early in the 2000s some pharma companies actually went on the record against practices like these - at the time patents in general were under fire and they were taking a stand of wanting a more fair balance. Maybe it was even principled at the time. However, it seems like the trend is now towards trying to find loopholes and game the system, and that should be punished harshly. Yes, I know the industry has been having a hard time, but the solution to that isn't gaming the system - figure out a way to make a new drug and quit milking the ones that have been around and rightfully should be dirt cheap and affordable by all.
Yeah, but the issue is that by using Kindle's DRM you cause your customers to build up a library of Kindle-only books.
Amazon had a monospony (from the publisher's standpoint) on physical books because they carried a huge catalog at low prices, and they execute REALLY well. That isn't nearly as entrenched - if they get lazy or try to seek rent they could easily get overtaken by somebody else. However, DRM changes that equation, since it lets them seek rent on the people who are locked in.
Your box office revenues peaking in 2001/2002 seem to line up fairly well with the general peak in the economy around then. Seems like everybody has a lot less money to spend these days, and when you lose your job the $12/each movie theater tickets are probably the first things to go.
I can see the relevance of downloading an mp3 vs buying an album. The two provide nearly identical experiences. It is hard to see how the ability to download DVDs online is really going to impact box office sales - it is hard to compare the two experiences in the same way as you can with music. I think economics have more to do with that.
And, I think as others have pointed out, the move to per-track pricing is probably a big driver for music industry losses. It used to be that one song cost $20 (since that was the only way to get it), and now it costs 99 cents. A publisher can't just take 10 good songs and spread them across 7 albums like they used to.
In any case, I do want entertainers to get paid - the problem is finding a model that doesn't involve $50k lawsuits over a couple of songs.
How can you have one without the other, unless the vendors agree to share their keys with anybody who asks except the person who bought the book?
Once I buy a book from one vendor, then that vendor is the only one who holds the keys (pretending that the whole fundamental problem of DRM doesn't exist). That vendor will always have control over that book. Now, maybe Amazon and B&N get together and promise each other to trust each other's readers, but then some new company comes along and they need to forge their own relationships with everybody to get the same treatment. Or you get a cartel like the DVD consortium, and that just becomes a "super-vendor" that has its own lock-in - since you can't make a DVD-compatible player without their buy-in.
Now, the whole thing is silly since the reality is that the vendor gives physical possession of the key to the consumer anyway, but they just make it hard for them to access it (with varying degrees of success).
DRM seems to be pretty ineffective for actual content protection - it seems like the main thing it actually gets used for is vendor lock-in (ensuring that the DVD consortium gets its nickel for every DVD player made, and all that).
I don't know; maybe they can't. I just know I laugh when I see those numbers breakdowns, and I've seen them from official sources multiple times, in which publishers swear to God they only make a 1% profit.
Well, that last bit is probably a combination of bloat and hollywood accounting. Maybe the publisher pays $34 to print a $35 book, but their printer is owned by the guy who owns the publishing house, and it only costs him $2/book to print it. So, the publisher makes very little money, but the owner of the publisher makes plenty of money.
And bloat is just the result of employing lots of dead weight. Maybe 10 people are drawing $1M/yr as VPs and the're the cousins of the owner or whatever. If the company is public, then it is managed for the benefit of the decision-makers, with lip-service paid to the shareholders.:)
Well, I can at least see some of the rationale with video games or other software.
The distribution is cheap, but the original creation of such a work is actually fairly expensive - especially with the big titles that have lots of polish.
Now, arguably they're still overpriced but nobody would put that much money into a game if it was only going to sell for $5/copy. The kinds of games that sell at that price don't have a lot of expensive actors, polish, etc.
With books the situation is a bit difference. The original creation costs are much lower since almost all the work is done by one person. For paper the distribution costs are considerable in comparison, but for ebooks they are not. There is no reason really why an ebook should be MORE expensive than the paper version. They still need to cost more than just the disk space and bandwidth since the author needs to be paid, but I agree that things are seriously out of whack.
Since slashdot loves its car analogies... a drone flying in civilian airspace is like a car with no side-view mirrors and a 100%-obstructed rear window driving on the highway. Dangerous and illegal for darn good reason!
Couldn't you just as easily amend this to say that a general aviation aircraft with no transponder or TCAS equipment is like a car painted black with no windows at all driving on the highway? Dangerous, and perhaps soon to be illegal for darn good reason!
On the other hand, I think the cost of safety avionics is way higher than it needs to be - often due to liability reasons (as well as the market being what it is). It seems to me that the government should simply make aircraft safety equipment like this available at nominal cost and require their use. It can source the avionics commercially and get a good price by giving a liability shield, but regulating the product to keep it safe.
I've never bought anything from Lord and Taylor. However, if I could be assured that I had an authenticated connection to a website they own I wouldn't have any concerns with buying something from them - because they have a real-world reputation that they have obtained over many years.
I don't think the solution to the trust problem is to just pretend that nobody needs to trust anybody.
All that said - reducing the need to trust people would certainly be good. Many of the problems with e-commerce stem from some weaknesses in our banking/payment system:
1. The only practical and universal way to submit a payment to somebody online relies on giving them a 16-20 digit number that they can then use to impersonate you. 2. The only way to prove your own identity (so as to obtain credit) is to give somebody information that they can then use to impersonate you. 3. The credit card system is the closest we have come to some kind of universal escrow system, and it isn't very good. It provides little assurance to either party that they will prevail if they are in the right.
I can think of some fixes, though some would be controversial:
1. Require credit card companies to use hardware tokens to authenticate transactions. The necessary keys to authenticate a transaction should ONLY exist on the token, and should never leave the token. The token should not trust any digital input it receives from the outside world, and should assume any output will be tampered with. The only trusted interface should be a small display and keypad used to verify the card owner is present and approves the transaction.
2. Have the government issue ID cards to everybody. They should include hardware tokens with keys that never leave them to make it virtually impossible to copy them. I haven't thought as much about the implementation of these, but they should obviously have a trust chain and a revocation list. They should probably provide some ability to apply digital signatures to arbitrary statements - perhaps with an embedded display and a PIN pad. Again, they should not trust any external hardware, and should assume that any output will be tampered with.
3. Have a good legal framework around payments/identity in general. If the government incorrectly issues ID then the government will both insure people against innocent losses as a result of trusting those IDs, and nail to the wall the people who misused them. Banks should be responsible for verifying identities of anybody they do business with, and should be responsible for reimbursing consumers for any loss if a merchant defrauds them on a payment they process (they can then go after the business, and would have incentive to vet merchants as a result).
If the whole electronic payment/identity thing worked properly, then I wouldn't care if Joe's Auto Parts is legit or not, because I don't stand to lose anything if they aren't. No doubt the bank would make them jump through hoops, and if they felt they didn't have enough property to seize they might require bonds. Since Joe likely only has a relationship with one bank, but potentially millions of customers, it makes sense to put the burden of vetting him on the bank.
Some warlord in Somalia can issue a court order requiring me to do something. If I intend to ignore it then if I ever go to Somalia bad things could happen to me, and if the guy is ticked enough bad things might happen to me here.
Likewise some judge in Nevada can order me to do something, and if I just ignore it they might be able to make bad things happen to me. On the other hand, I might be able to appeal to some other judge with more power to protect me (for example, if I don't live in Nevada then an appeal to the local government will prevent them from shipping me there).
Our situation is not unlike that of a serf. If some noble in the other town feels slighted by us then your only recourse in practice is to appeal to your own local noble for protection (and that "protection" was not unlike what the mob offers today). Most likely the local noble isn't going to want to start a war over you, but they will insist that they be the ones to administer the punishment since that asserts their authority over their land. Perhaps to further assert their authority they might reduce the sentence a little as well. The bottom line, however, is none of these people are really looking out for you - you're just a pawn in a game that is more about the power/relationships at the top.
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I tend to agree, assuming the explanation is correct. Dark matter started out as a way to explain galactic rotation.
I think that once a theory starts to gain acceptance it tends to get applied more broadly. Perhaps if the original purpose of the theory of dark matter no longer applies we might find other explanations for other things.
There are a lot of ways you can try to explain things - and obviously scientists try to explain everything with the smallest number of theories. Once dark matter is an accepted tool in the toolbox we'll tend to apply it anywhere we can make it fit. If that tool starts looking not so useful, perhaps we'll find that it isn't actually needed in many other areas where it is currently used.
Or we might find that dark matter does exist, but that it isn't responsible for rotation curves, etc.
Well, by that logic general relativity is just a hypothesis, since it is irreconcilable with quantum mechanics, and for that matter with large-scale gravitational observations like the ones that are the subject of this paper.
In fact, the whole point of this paper is to suggest that general relativity actually works better than we think it does, and obviously relativity itself is a pretty solid theory.
I think the real controversy is that it suggests that Einstein was actually right when people have been steadily becoming more convinced that he was wrong about it.
I think another thing to consider is the scale. From my limited understanding this new work is talking about galactic rotation, and the bullet cluster is talking about extremely rarefied intergalactic gas in a gargantuan structure. It is entirely possible that both results are right for different reasons.
Gotta agree with Discovery/History/etc.
Does Discovery even show anything but video of cute animals these days? It might as well be Animal Planet.
History is a lot better, but you are right that half of it is sensationalized.
I don't mind actually learning something on TV. Maybe they could team up with the Teaching Company and bring some of their content to their network or something? I'm fine if they improve the visualization and make it less lecture-format, but if I can enjoy listening to just audio of a lecture I think I can handle something more cerebral than hunting for bigfoot or ghosts. Storm Chasers actually isn't half bad in concept, but maybe cut the length by 75% and get rid of all the hype. I can be impressed by a tornado without listening to Reed scream into the microphone.
How is it "expensive as hell?" It's $20 for an indoor antenna, and the cost of electricity to run it.
I think he was referring to the broadcast side. If it is expensive to get your show out to everybody, then only certain types of shows will be made available and they'll be loaded with ads.
Contrast that with the web where I can run a website for little marginal cost beyond what it costs to consume content. That means I can afford to blog about my runny nose ad-free and you're free to read it.
Sincere endorsement: You have not experienced Shakespeare until you heard it from the voice of an elcor.
We could start building a super-Orion pulsed nuke generation ship now and complete it in maybe 100 years.
Usually these kinds of plans are HIGHLY grandiose (colony ships and all that). I wonder what could be done if we scaled the thing down and only sent a robotic probe.
A robotic probe eliminates many of the shielding issues (sure, it needs it, but not nearly as much), and almost all of the logistical issues. You would need to make the software REALLY good - it can't rely on any kind of interactive communications with Earth. If you keep the mass down you can accelerate much more quickly, and you could treat it as disposable once it gets there. If you're willing to do a flyby (seems like a waste) then you can get there much faster as well. Hmm, wonder what the math works out to on shielding for solar/planetary aerobraking vs powered deceleration (at those speeds you'd need a lot of shielding, but you need a lot of fuel also - the idea of pluging into a photosphere to slow down sounds really neat though).
Well, there was a post a little while back about somebody actually making an antenna resonant at visible light wavelengths, as a possible future solar collector. If you attached an oscillator to it the antenna would emit light - in theory.
The problem is that visible light has a frequency in the hundreds of terahertz, and wavelengths in the hundreds of nanometers.
Antenna design already starts getting tricky in the microwave regions - where you often are using things like waveguides and such since ordinary wiring doesn't work so well. Creating an oscillator or a rectifier that works in the range of visible light will be a serious challenge. Once you do, then direct conversion of electrical/light energy would become possible.
Read up on terahertz technology sometime. In a nutshell optical technology has been moving further and further into the infrared, and radio technology has been moving steadily up the frequency ladder, and the Terahertz region is where they're starting to collide.
Well, only they know what they're thinking. Maybe they figured they could make the web experience better if they controlled it end-to-end. As long as their browser remains standards-compliant I won't complain.
I mentioned in another post that the other big issue here is quality. Spending lots of money doesn't guarantee good quality. I think Google has demonstrated with Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, Gmail, and Google Docs that they're very capable of doing big software projects well.
I've seen less popular software sold that has hundreds of developers that was inferior to stuff created by a dozen guys.
To use an analogy from another post - you can spend millions building the world's greatest bubble sort, and it won't change the fact that it is a bubble sort. Design matters a lot.
Ugh - if some court wants to rule that I don't have to keep spamming the "NO" button every time I install one thing and it wants to give me 14 other things, more power to them...
They are expert buyers, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a conflict of interest.
Pharmaceutical companies are expert buyers too, but that doesn't mean that they are or ought to be allowed to stick random white powders in their vats without doing due diligence to ensure that it is what it is supposed to be. Baby formula and wood glue might both pass the assay, but they aren't equivalent.
I'm not even asking for new regulations here - this stuff is ALREADY law. The government simply has to enforce it.
Erm... What about aftermarket improvements to "part" designs???
I'm not talking a solid-fuel booster on a 747 but there are always things that can be improved. Think about the jobs this would "create!" Lots of people/companies improving on whatever they feel like trying to improve, a testing industry for quality assurance of the parts, a unit testing industry for assurance/specification of parts compatibility, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
I'm not an expert on FAA regs, but I imagine that aftermarket parts are completely legal - as long as you have the necessary documentation to show that the plane will be airworthy with them installed. In practice they probably don't exist in most cases since it is EXTREMELY expensive to certify this and you're not going to make enough money on some flap lever to warrant the expense, unless you are just going to prove equivalence to the OEM part (which isn't an improvement). The engines are probably one of the biggest exceptions to this - my understanding is that large aircraft engines are generally aftermarket, though they are installed by the manufacturer. Avionics are also something that tends to be customized - but those tend to be a package deal on really big things. In general aviation you can upgrade one radio or whatever since it isn't all integrated.
I don't believe in patents or copyright law. This "protection of ..." whatever garbage is stupid.
Proper attribution of innovation/invention/authorship/credit-where-credit-due is a must. Enforceable (esp. by the gov.) monopolies? Fascism (well fascIST).
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with patents or copyrights, unless you're talking about "design patents" which I think are pretty bogus (just use trademarks for these things when legitimate - like a logo). I am fine with closing down sites that violate trademarks - but not ones which sell replicas that are clearly advertised as such. As long as you know you're buying a Sorny instead of a Sony it is all good in my eyes. Allowing trademark violations isn't good for anybody - would you like to buy a Hitachi hard drive from Newegg or whatever only to have it fail in two weeks and Hitachi tells you to get lost because they didn't make it and won't honor the warranty? That isn't in anybody's interest - I want companies to have incentive to not make junk and build a reputation.
Patents and copyrights are an entirely different matter. They are generally abused and should be reigned in, but I have yet to see a viable alternative to be proposed - unless you want to live in a world where nobody spends more than $200k to design anything.
"Not for profit" simply means that they don't pay dividends. You can still spend money like there is no tomorrow on your employees, or more likely spend lots of money on a few employees and send the rest of them off doing things that are unproductive.
Look up the salary of the head of the NCAA sometime and talk to me about "not for profit."
Well, in 2009 $60M went into development. But, the thing most PHBs don't get is that development isn't some machine that you put dollars into and get lines of code out of. Well, I guess you can do it that way, but there is no guarantee those lines of code will do anything more useful than eat CPU cycles.
I suspect Mozilla's problem is that they're spending lots of money paying developers to write code, but they aren't writing the right code.
To use an example from CS101, you can pay somebody $2M to write the most amazingly optimized bubble sort ever created and implementing it on an SIC, and yet you will find yourself completely outperformed by some guy who implemented a quicksort in an hour in VBA once your dataset has more than a few thousand elements. You can't fix a bad design with money, unless you're willing to fix the design.
I don't know that Firefox has a bad design, but only that for $60M/yr you can write a LOT of good software if you have top-notch developers. Of course, top-notch isn't easy to acquire and cultivate, and having a few genuinely good developers in management doesn't really help much.
Yeah, that is $123M per year. That is a LOT of money - most of the bigger community linux distros probably have donations of maybe 0.1% of that per year.
Sometimes throwing money at a problem makes it worse - an organization with that kind of income usually ends up with a lot of professional management.
I'm not sure how much money Google is spending on Chrome, but it wouldn't surprise me if the development budget is less than what they're spending to fund Firefox.
So, if you're the CEO of Google do you want to give $123M to some other company and then try to persuade them to accommodate your needs and face the risk that at anytime you could get out-bid by Bing and lose your prominent position? Or, would you rather just spend that money in-house to have a browser that is always aligned to your vision and which will never make Bing the default and once Firefox is at 0.01% market share you don't really care what MS is offering them. If you're going to spend that kind of money you might as well spend it where you'll get results, and it isn't like writing web-oriented software is outside of Google's expertise.
So, what is the court going to do - rule that Google has to PAY Mozilla to develop a competing browser?
They paid them to advertise their search engine. If they don't want to pay them to do that then I don't really see the issue. Chrome isn't bundled with anything other than Chrome OS, and Chrome OS is FAR from being a monopoly product - it makes Ubuntu look universal. Chrome and Mozilla are really on equal footing in the market as far as access goes - this is competition pure and simple.
I think Mozilla's problem here is being SO dependent on a single source of revenue. $100M/yr is a LOT of money to count on from one particular source. It is easy when you have that kind of money coming in to become loose with funds and then if you have to go cold turkey it is VERY painful. Plus, FOSS tends to be volunteer driven and making a transition from a paid world to a volunteer world is a LOT harder than going the other way.
I agree.
The part about them lowering prices to keep consumers and advertising those lower prices aggressively is perfectly fine. That's free market capitalism at its best. If they want to argue that their supply chains are safer or whatever they can do that too (assuming they can back that up with facts).
Forging exclusive deals should be illegal - it breaks the patent deal. The patent deal is that we appreciate you developing the cure for the common cold and agree to let you charge us $5/pill for a decade, but after that anybody can benefit from your R&D and make your product. I think that deal needs a little adjustment, but overall it is still a win for society since it promotes discovery and eventually everybody benefits from it.
Unfortunately, companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
Early in the 2000s some pharma companies actually went on the record against practices like these - at the time patents in general were under fire and they were taking a stand of wanting a more fair balance. Maybe it was even principled at the time. However, it seems like the trend is now towards trying to find loopholes and game the system, and that should be punished harshly. Yes, I know the industry has been having a hard time, but the solution to that isn't gaming the system - figure out a way to make a new drug and quit milking the ones that have been around and rightfully should be dirt cheap and affordable by all.
Yeah, but the issue is that by using Kindle's DRM you cause your customers to build up a library of Kindle-only books.
Amazon had a monospony (from the publisher's standpoint) on physical books because they carried a huge catalog at low prices, and they execute REALLY well. That isn't nearly as entrenched - if they get lazy or try to seek rent they could easily get overtaken by somebody else. However, DRM changes that equation, since it lets them seek rent on the people who are locked in.
Your box office revenues peaking in 2001/2002 seem to line up fairly well with the general peak in the economy around then. Seems like everybody has a lot less money to spend these days, and when you lose your job the $12/each movie theater tickets are probably the first things to go.
I can see the relevance of downloading an mp3 vs buying an album. The two provide nearly identical experiences. It is hard to see how the ability to download DVDs online is really going to impact box office sales - it is hard to compare the two experiences in the same way as you can with music. I think economics have more to do with that.
And, I think as others have pointed out, the move to per-track pricing is probably a big driver for music industry losses. It used to be that one song cost $20 (since that was the only way to get it), and now it costs 99 cents. A publisher can't just take 10 good songs and spread them across 7 albums like they used to.
In any case, I do want entertainers to get paid - the problem is finding a model that doesn't involve $50k lawsuits over a couple of songs.
How can you have one without the other, unless the vendors agree to share their keys with anybody who asks except the person who bought the book?
Once I buy a book from one vendor, then that vendor is the only one who holds the keys (pretending that the whole fundamental problem of DRM doesn't exist). That vendor will always have control over that book. Now, maybe Amazon and B&N get together and promise each other to trust each other's readers, but then some new company comes along and they need to forge their own relationships with everybody to get the same treatment. Or you get a cartel like the DVD consortium, and that just becomes a "super-vendor" that has its own lock-in - since you can't make a DVD-compatible player without their buy-in.
Now, the whole thing is silly since the reality is that the vendor gives physical possession of the key to the consumer anyway, but they just make it hard for them to access it (with varying degrees of success).
DRM seems to be pretty ineffective for actual content protection - it seems like the main thing it actually gets used for is vendor lock-in (ensuring that the DVD consortium gets its nickel for every DVD player made, and all that).
I don't know; maybe they can't. I just know I laugh when I see those numbers breakdowns, and I've seen them from official sources multiple times, in which publishers swear to God they only make a 1% profit.
Well, that last bit is probably a combination of bloat and hollywood accounting. Maybe the publisher pays $34 to print a $35 book, but their printer is owned by the guy who owns the publishing house, and it only costs him $2/book to print it. So, the publisher makes very little money, but the owner of the publisher makes plenty of money.
And bloat is just the result of employing lots of dead weight. Maybe 10 people are drawing $1M/yr as VPs and the're the cousins of the owner or whatever. If the company is public, then it is managed for the benefit of the decision-makers, with lip-service paid to the shareholders. :)
Well, I can at least see some of the rationale with video games or other software.
The distribution is cheap, but the original creation of such a work is actually fairly expensive - especially with the big titles that have lots of polish.
Now, arguably they're still overpriced but nobody would put that much money into a game if it was only going to sell for $5/copy. The kinds of games that sell at that price don't have a lot of expensive actors, polish, etc.
With books the situation is a bit difference. The original creation costs are much lower since almost all the work is done by one person. For paper the distribution costs are considerable in comparison, but for ebooks they are not. There is no reason really why an ebook should be MORE expensive than the paper version. They still need to cost more than just the disk space and bandwidth since the author needs to be paid, but I agree that things are seriously out of whack.
Since slashdot loves its car analogies ... a drone flying in civilian airspace is like a car with no side-view mirrors and a 100%-obstructed rear window driving on the highway. Dangerous and illegal for darn good reason!
Couldn't you just as easily amend this to say that a general aviation aircraft with no transponder or TCAS equipment is like a car painted black with no windows at all driving on the highway? Dangerous, and perhaps soon to be illegal for darn good reason!
On the other hand, I think the cost of safety avionics is way higher than it needs to be - often due to liability reasons (as well as the market being what it is). It seems to me that the government should simply make aircraft safety equipment like this available at nominal cost and require their use. It can source the avionics commercially and get a good price by giving a liability shield, but regulating the product to keep it safe.
I've never bought anything from Lord and Taylor. However, if I could be assured that I had an authenticated connection to a website they own I wouldn't have any concerns with buying something from them - because they have a real-world reputation that they have obtained over many years.
I don't think the solution to the trust problem is to just pretend that nobody needs to trust anybody.
All that said - reducing the need to trust people would certainly be good. Many of the problems with e-commerce stem from some weaknesses in our banking/payment system:
1. The only practical and universal way to submit a payment to somebody online relies on giving them a 16-20 digit number that they can then use to impersonate you.
2. The only way to prove your own identity (so as to obtain credit) is to give somebody information that they can then use to impersonate you.
3. The credit card system is the closest we have come to some kind of universal escrow system, and it isn't very good. It provides little assurance to either party that they will prevail if they are in the right.
I can think of some fixes, though some would be controversial:
1. Require credit card companies to use hardware tokens to authenticate transactions. The necessary keys to authenticate a transaction should ONLY exist on the token, and should never leave the token. The token should not trust any digital input it receives from the outside world, and should assume any output will be tampered with. The only trusted interface should be a small display and keypad used to verify the card owner is present and approves the transaction.
2. Have the government issue ID cards to everybody. They should include hardware tokens with keys that never leave them to make it virtually impossible to copy them. I haven't thought as much about the implementation of these, but they should obviously have a trust chain and a revocation list. They should probably provide some ability to apply digital signatures to arbitrary statements - perhaps with an embedded display and a PIN pad. Again, they should not trust any external hardware, and should assume that any output will be tampered with.
3. Have a good legal framework around payments/identity in general. If the government incorrectly issues ID then the government will both insure people against innocent losses as a result of trusting those IDs, and nail to the wall the people who misused them. Banks should be responsible for verifying identities of anybody they do business with, and should be responsible for reimbursing consumers for any loss if a merchant defrauds them on a payment they process (they can then go after the business, and would have incentive to vet merchants as a result).
If the whole electronic payment/identity thing worked properly, then I wouldn't care if Joe's Auto Parts is legit or not, because I don't stand to lose anything if they aren't. No doubt the bank would make them jump through hoops, and if they felt they didn't have enough property to seize they might require bonds. Since Joe likely only has a relationship with one bank, but potentially millions of customers, it makes sense to put the burden of vetting him on the bank.
Being bound or not is a practical matter.
Some warlord in Somalia can issue a court order requiring me to do something. If I intend to ignore it then if I ever go to Somalia bad things could happen to me, and if the guy is ticked enough bad things might happen to me here.
Likewise some judge in Nevada can order me to do something, and if I just ignore it they might be able to make bad things happen to me. On the other hand, I might be able to appeal to some other judge with more power to protect me (for example, if I don't live in Nevada then an appeal to the local government will prevent them from shipping me there).
Our situation is not unlike that of a serf. If some noble in the other town feels slighted by us then your only recourse in practice is to appeal to your own local noble for protection (and that "protection" was not unlike what the mob offers today). Most likely the local noble isn't going to want to start a war over you, but they will insist that they be the ones to administer the punishment since that asserts their authority over their land. Perhaps to further assert their authority they might reduce the sentence a little as well. The bottom line, however, is none of these people are really looking out for you - you're just a pawn in a game that is more about the power/relationships at the top.