Jurisdiction is purely a practical matter - your ability to issue orders and have them obeyed depends on your ability to make life unpleasant for those who choose not to obey.
US courts give judges incredible amounts of power to enforce their decisions. Usually they don't bother, but this guy could do things like:
1. Order the state police to nap Google executives if they are spotted within the state. 2. Order any Google-owned assets in the state to be seized. 3. Issue warrants that other states may or may not enforce. 4. Perhaps go after people who do business with Google.
If you don't do any business in Nevada then there isn't much the guy can do but mail you nasty letters, or mail nasty letters to your own government asking them to do something bad to you. However, the ability of even state governments in the US to project force is fairly considerable.
Well, according to Frontline the airlines have been cutting costs on maintenance and there is a serious problem with counterfeit parts. The government seems pretty content NOT to crack down on such things, but to focus instead on making sure that people who pay $1000 for a purse can rest assured that nobody else with a similar-looking purse can get theirs for $25.
As long as the products are advertised as "replicas" there is no harm to the consumer - only to certain executives.
Actually, Zuckerberg is wrong now. Facebook never made any mistakes - their actions have been proven to be good business decisions.
They assured their customers that their data was safe, thus helping to grow their market share. Then, years later when they're the most dominant company in their field the FTC tells them not to do it again, and they agree to not do it again. However, due to the network effect they don't have to do it, and raising the bar legally just helps to keep out smaller competitors.
How is any of this a "mistake?" In this case "I'm sorry" is nothing more than a platitude - they have nothing to be sorry about since it all turned out quite nicely for them.
I saw one of these firsthand - my father was telling me some of the stories he heard, and then he had trouble inserting the battery in his charger. Then all the sudden he drops the battery as it had apparently gotten quite hot - then its packaging starts distending into a more round shape. I clearly was not thinking quickly enough because I should have turned my eyes away. Fortunately it did not explode - we placed a big pot or something else that was handy over it and let it cool down.
Turns out that during the manipulations trying to connect it to the charger the connectors had gotten stuck on the charger and ripped off, exposing the leads leading into the battery. Then when pushing the battery back into the charger the leads had shorted.
We have a new appreciation for the power of batteries.
The problem with things like RC helicopters is that they push the power-to-weight ratio quite a bit so the batteries tend to be engineered a little aggressively. They need to generate considerable amounts of current, but they have to be really light so the case has to be pretty thin/etc.
Now, just imagine what will happen if supercapacitors take off!
My point is that you were arguing about who was right. The US legal system is more about a process and that process will cost you a fortune regardless of whether you are "right." The only way a case is going to be cheap is if you get a very early dismissal, which you aren't going to get over something like this since there is something to argue here.
However, if it makes you happier, why don't you try registering Merck on Google+ and selling your pills or whatever and see how that goes.
Yup. If these pundits were around 20 years ago they would be talking about how computers are obsolete because nobody under the age of 20 uses them to communicate - they chat on the phone for hours at a time or pass handwritten notes when the teacher isn't looking.
Perhaps the communications requirements of a corporate employee and a teenager aren't the same, so their preferred mediums of communication are different as well?
The purpose of texting and IM in a teenager's life is to reassure themselves every 45 seconds that they still have friends. Oh wait, maybe they hate me now - oh, no, Susan is using the toilet and still likes me - thank goodness! Oh wait, what about Joe - he hasn't texted me in three hours! If my kids go 8 hours without taking to a friend they start bouncing off the ceilings. After a 48 hour confinement to the cold tank they start to turn into normal people until they get their next dose. Most adults are happy to talk to friends every few weeks or whatever and not worry about whether they're the subject of the gossip chain or whatever.
Agreed. Even voicemails require me to basically take notes and generate what would have been a perfectly good email before replying. Oh, except half the time the voicemail says "I've got a problem - can you give me a call?" When I get those voicemails I tend to send an email saying "I hear you are having a problem - can you send me the details?"
Often spoken word is required to fully resolve the issue. However, if people at least email me the short version I can do some research and be in a position to actually solve their problem when I meet with them. Otherwise we end up spending a meeting defining the issue, and then time goes by, and we meet again to actually have the meeting that was really necessary.
My other problem is that on half of the email chains I get there aren't more than two people in the same building on it. To try to TALK to all of those people at the same time would require a teleconference. That means killing three days waiting for an appropriate moment, and then again having twice as much discussion as required since everybody is walking in cold.
When people suggest to me that emails aren't effective and that meetings are better I try to point out that often half the people on the email chains are already in meetings together for 8 hours every week already, and the purpose of the emails is to deal with simpler issues so that we don't have to be in 12 hours of meetings a week (on top of whatever it is that we're supposed to be doing in our normal jobs).
What is really scary is that in order to come up with a standard format for sending data to printers somebody decided to invent a turing-complete language. That means you can't even examine a set of data being sent to the printer and determine whether it will ever print anything without actually running it.
Not convinced? Try printing some of the files on this page.
That's pretty-much how courts tend to work things out. Usually the judge views a compromise as the best solution. The problem is that if one party really is right and the other really is wrong than a compromise isn't really justice, and the costs of litigation are an additional affront to the party who is right.
Why don't you try doing that, and see how it works out for you?
Register merckpharma.com or whatever and put a note at the top saying "we're not Merck" and try selling pills on it. Win or lose you'll be broke with your legal bills in a month unless you cave in.
Facebook is going to look at it like this:
1. We get paid $x/month to let some company buy a page from us. Yah! 2. We are very likely to get sued for $x*1000/month because some other company doesn't like it. Ugh. 3. Either way the company suing us has deep pockets and a big team of corporage lawyers. Ugh. 4. After we spend $x*100 fighting in court we might luck out and get a ruling that says that we can keep getting paid $x/month. Whoop-de-doo. 5. At that point there would just be an appeal and we're back at #2. Why are we doing this again? 6. Once we're done resolving this in the US Supreme court and we comply with whatever they hand down, we then get to watch all our subsidiaries get sued as the issue is re-litigated globally. Then we get fined by some court somewhere no matter what we do as they all reach different conclusions.
Or, we could just give up the $x/month for now and tell the companies that they can try to get the courts of half the countries on the planet to agree on something and maybe our great grandkids can make $x/month if there is still a Facebook.
Yeah, moral culpability for WWI is about as clear as mud - it resembles the kinds of decision-making that led to wars back in the days where some duke liked the view from some count's castle. But, I'm not a scholar on such things so contrary opinions are welcome.
The only thing that is clear from WWI is who the winners and the losers were. And Germany (and its corporations) was DEFINITELY the loser.
Well, this isn't nearly as "The US Is Evil" as you make it out to be. The fact is that both companies have legal restrictions on their use of the name "Merck" in various parts of the world.
Basically once upon a time there was one Merck. Then there was this little incident in Europe where lots of people ended up dead and that caused lots of consequences including German companies losing ownership of their foreign subsidiaries. So, now there are two Mercks.
The final settlement (I have no idea how it was reached), is that the US-based Merck can use the name Merck in North America, and the German one can use the name Merck in the rest of the world. This settlement predates Facebook by decades, so internet domains and such weren't really in scope. No doubt they could litigate it and I suspect the outcome will depend on what court system has more power to make Facebook's life difficult (which is basically how the German Merck lost all its US-based holdings in the first place - they weren't exactly in a position to do anything about it at the time).
Absent litigation I suspect that your point about first claims is the best way to handle this. After all, the US-based Merck got its domain name and a class A subnet in this way.
Plus, most of the debate over evolution isn't whether it happens, but whether it is responsible for the diversity of life that exists today. In some sense differentiating between the two might be a biological equivalent of solipsism, but from a practical standpoint it really doesn't make much of a difference. Suppose I believe that the universe was created 30 seconds ago by the spaghetti monster in its present state following all the currently understood laws of physics. I can predict the outcome of future experiments just as accurately as anybody else, and you can't shoot any holes in my belief since it isn't falsifiable. Other than causing some people to scratch their heads, can any harm come from giving me a license to "practice physics?"
This is why I'm not a fan of litmus tests - one day it is evolution, the next day it is AGW, and after that it is cell phones cause cancer or whatever. It is better to focus on practical results than statements of faith. I think far more people die every year because specialists don't talk to each other or primary providers than because somebody happens to disagree with Darwin.
What they also don't grasp is the downward spiral that will surely ensue after the layoffs. Not understanding the abstraction means you will not comprehend the consequences thereof. This is why we have such a huge problem with inefficient software.
That really depends. Efficiency is relative - if you're "good enough" but cheaper, then your company will rake in tons of cash selling "inefficient" software. Likewise, if your less-efficient software is on store shelves six months ahead of the competition then you'll make a killing selling against older versions of other products.
The goal of a corporation isn't to give a good product to its consumers - it is to make money. Sometimes you can make more money selling a substandard product.
And yes, this is a good synopsis of why our world is in the shape it is in...
I think that absorption is a problem when you get even into the 100GHz range or so. The atmosphere is relatively transparent to radiation below a few GHz, and to the range that contains visible light (probably the reason we can see that range), but it is fairly opaque to everything else.
Water and oxygen and various other molecules absorb energy across a huge range of the spectrum. That's why telescopes outside of the more traditional radio and visible wavelengths need to be located at high altitude.
Yes, the guys who designed the CPU that runs the interpreter that parses that code need to understand tons of stuff about computer theory. The guy who writes the program really doesn't need to. In fact, with increasing levels of abstraction if anything modern programmers need to understand it less than their predecessor. I can sort a collection with one line of code, and I don't have to understand the various O(n log n) algorithms to do it.
When my employer lays off half of its IT department I doubt they're worried that their replacements might not have a good grasp of the principles of finite state automata.
Doctors don't model epidemics - at least not 99% of them.
I think the problem is that we have one degree that is used by the guys working at the NIH/CDC, and the guy sticking a thermometer in your child's butt and placing them on a scale.
Then again, the same problem exists in most other college degree programs. Colleges are well-suited to preparing people for their future career as a college professor.
Suppose somebody wants to get a job as an electrician. Does it really matter if they understand Maxwell's theories? Does it matter if maybe they think Maxwell wasn't such a bright guy? Does it matter that they've most likely never heard of him? As long as they correctly wire my house I could care less. They aren't going to be able to design nano-scale transistors in a CPU without knowledge of first principles, but that has little to do with using the right gauge of wire and making sure the hot wire is the switched one.
Doctors are technicians. It doesn't matter how antibiotics are discovered, they merely need to know that they cure TB, and when they aren't working here is what you do. Doctors aren't supposed to be experimenting on their patients.
I'm not a big believer in litmus tests in general. If you want to make sure your surgeons don't panic when something goes wrong I'd consider that completely appropriate. However, let's leave signed confessions of faith to the kinds of people who work in seminaries and such.
But, why does a medical doctor need to understand evolution anyway? A doctor probably needs to have a good understanding of evolution in the same way that an auto mechanic needs to have a good understanding of metallurgy, and the kids doing the 20-minute oil changes down the street need to have a good understanding of organic chemistry.
I think this is half the problem with medicine. We don't have enough doctors, and we spend our money training people to be medical researchers and not doctors. Your family doctor doesn't need to be qualified to uncover the cure for cancer - they need to know how to diagnose a problem and treat it. Maybe we'd have more healthcare providers if we used a tiered system much like is used in any other field dominated by technicians (which is what doctors basically are).
And none of this is meant to knock doctors - there are aspects of biology they clearly need to understand and they need to be smart people. Pilots need to be smart and able to quickly resolve problems, but we don't make people take 4 years of aeronautical engineering to become one, because flying a plane has little to do with being able to design a wing.
Apologies - I misunderstood the point you were making.
I agree this perception gap is the source of many issues. Finding your way to a plane is easy, making sure that a tour group all boards a plane on time is hard, and so on.
Yup. I was involved in an IT project coincident with a number of business changes, and I spoke to our VP about the fact that the business didn't seem to really be ready for their side of the changes. He said that senior management within the business was aware of that and while they were trying to push that change down from the top they were looking to IT to help force the change to happen - that sometimes people don't really get with the program until you rip the rug out from under them.
That has been my experience with IT-buiness realations. Often the people at the bottom dislike IT, and the people one or two levels about them REALLY dislike IT, but the people one or two levels above them love it. Some manager making $180k/yr is used to getting his own way and gets really upset when IT tells him no. However, often IT is simply following the dictate of the manager making $800k/yr two levels senior to the manager who is grumbling. At work the business approves everything we do - but often at a level MUCH higher than the people directly impacted.
Computers are essentially maintenance free these days. I mean what maintenance does a computer require these days? Security updates? They apply automagically, on my computer while I'm asleep.
Domain policy to enable updates, check. Domain policy to block the end-user's ability to disable these updates, check. Local software install to periodically scan computer to ensure all updates are being installed, check. User complaints when they can't do something due to all of those domain policies and the fact that the scanning slows down their boot or whatever, check.
Security updates are automagic when you own two computers at home. When you own 10k computers they're not - since you get in trouble if only 3 of them get viruses.
Software updates, pretty much all automatically.
Uh, what software are you talking about? Maybe on iOS or Android, but on Windows very few software packages reliably update themselves. Certainly ManageMyVatOfChemicals v12.5 doesn't auto-update. Oh wait, you're working in some corporation that doesn't use anything but MS Office?
Now one could argue the complication of building it and setting it up. But this too is trivial. Your average teenager can assemble a computer, and your average grandma can run a windows setup.
Sure, but will they apply every one of those policies correctly so that all your machines are identical? Will the backup software be properly configured so that when an employee drops their laptop the company isn't out more than just the cost of the hardware? Will the full-disk encryption software be properly configured so that when they lose it your company isn't on the front page of the Times?
My girlfriend just bought a new laptop. $700. Runs like a rocket, much faster than my $2000 pc of the day. Computers are cheap, disposable, and even the cheapest ones are fast enough to satisfy the demands of probably more than 95% of the users.
Will it run some web-based time reporting system that is IE6-only? Will it run some Java business applet that requires enhanced permissions, but not let the user agree to give enhanced permissions to some random java app on the web? Will it connect to the corporate VPN? Will it run your Citrix-based inventory app?
Like it or not, computers these days are consumer toys.
Maybe in the world of secretaries and more senior managers, this is true. In the world of people who actually do work, there are a lot of things that can still go wrong.
Also, things that "just work" often don't work well enough to trust them to manage your fleet of 10k computers. If somebody wipes out their home PC by mistake they bear the punishment for their own mistakes. If they do the same at work then that is lost productivity.
I'd love to see things more to an app store model where apps are jailed and systems are encrypted out of the box and generally suitable for corporate use. However, we're not quite there yet. If you are a senior manager or an attorney chances are you can play with an iPad and be a lot more productive. However, if you're the guy creating all those documents the managers are consuming, or if you actually create something other than documents then chances are you don't have that solution available yet.
Is the entertainment you get from movies worth the loss of freedom all around that the movie industry buys?
While I support reform I too think that a complete absence of copyright would basically mean the end of the movie industry.
I'm not sure that is really the outcome we want - can't we have our cake and eat it too?
If you don't think that movies are worth the loss of freedom, then simply don't watch them or distribute them. If you don't copy movies, then copyright law won't apply to you anyway. Granted, that won't solve the problem of false accusations and the whole judge-jury-executioner model the MPAA is pushing for, but it would avoid most of the legal problems.
If you want to copy movies legally, then you need to start with a world where there are actually movies to copy.
A sane copyright system would allow for a reasonable profit on new works, but not with so many restrictions on how they are used, and for a much shorter period of time. The good thing about copyright is that it allows companies to raise the capital needed to make movies, but it doesn't force people to pay for them if they don't want to watch them. Systems like voluntary donations generally don't raise much capital (or they don't give good incentives to actually make a decent movie since the profts are guaranteed and not at risk). Systems like government grants are arbitrary (how do you decide if a movie is worth rewarding), and they force people to pay for movies they don't care about.
I don't think that IP law is worth completely abandoning. It just needs a LOT of reform. The simplest reform is to curtail the durations across the board, and set them up by type of work and industry such that they generally allow for a reasonable profit to be made without decades of exclusive control.
The thing that concerns me most here is that the domains are being siezed without a trial.
If there were a trial and a jury awarded the domains to the RIAA or whatever, I could at least see the due process in that. However, these are being handled as administrative matters where people are being deprived of property without a trial. My feeling is that a jury should be required to issue a verdict before ANY kind of government seizure. I can see seizing evidence with a warrant temporarily, but temporarily has to mean for a SHORT period of time - not for years. In fact, when things like computers are seized they should just duplicate the drives and return the originals within a week.
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Jurisdiction is purely a practical matter - your ability to issue orders and have them obeyed depends on your ability to make life unpleasant for those who choose not to obey.
US courts give judges incredible amounts of power to enforce their decisions. Usually they don't bother, but this guy could do things like:
1. Order the state police to nap Google executives if they are spotted within the state.
2. Order any Google-owned assets in the state to be seized.
3. Issue warrants that other states may or may not enforce.
4. Perhaps go after people who do business with Google.
If you don't do any business in Nevada then there isn't much the guy can do but mail you nasty letters, or mail nasty letters to your own government asking them to do something bad to you. However, the ability of even state governments in the US to project force is fairly considerable.
Well, according to Frontline the airlines have been cutting costs on maintenance and there is a serious problem with counterfeit parts. The government seems pretty content NOT to crack down on such things, but to focus instead on making sure that people who pay $1000 for a purse can rest assured that nobody else with a similar-looking purse can get theirs for $25.
As long as the products are advertised as "replicas" there is no harm to the consumer - only to certain executives.
Actually, Zuckerberg is wrong now. Facebook never made any mistakes - their actions have been proven to be good business decisions.
They assured their customers that their data was safe, thus helping to grow their market share. Then, years later when they're the most dominant company in their field the FTC tells them not to do it again, and they agree to not do it again. However, due to the network effect they don't have to do it, and raising the bar legally just helps to keep out smaller competitors.
How is any of this a "mistake?" In this case "I'm sorry" is nothing more than a platitude - they have nothing to be sorry about since it all turned out quite nicely for them.
I saw one of these firsthand - my father was telling me some of the stories he heard, and then he had trouble inserting the battery in his charger. Then all the sudden he drops the battery as it had apparently gotten quite hot - then its packaging starts distending into a more round shape. I clearly was not thinking quickly enough because I should have turned my eyes away. Fortunately it did not explode - we placed a big pot or something else that was handy over it and let it cool down.
Turns out that during the manipulations trying to connect it to the charger the connectors had gotten stuck on the charger and ripped off, exposing the leads leading into the battery. Then when pushing the battery back into the charger the leads had shorted.
We have a new appreciation for the power of batteries.
The problem with things like RC helicopters is that they push the power-to-weight ratio quite a bit so the batteries tend to be engineered a little aggressively. They need to generate considerable amounts of current, but they have to be really light so the case has to be pretty thin/etc.
Now, just imagine what will happen if supercapacitors take off!
My point is that you were arguing about who was right. The US legal system is more about a process and that process will cost you a fortune regardless of whether you are "right." The only way a case is going to be cheap is if you get a very early dismissal, which you aren't going to get over something like this since there is something to argue here.
However, if it makes you happier, why don't you try registering Merck on Google+ and selling your pills or whatever and see how that goes.
Yup. If these pundits were around 20 years ago they would be talking about how computers are obsolete because nobody under the age of 20 uses them to communicate - they chat on the phone for hours at a time or pass handwritten notes when the teacher isn't looking.
Perhaps the communications requirements of a corporate employee and a teenager aren't the same, so their preferred mediums of communication are different as well?
The purpose of texting and IM in a teenager's life is to reassure themselves every 45 seconds that they still have friends. Oh wait, maybe they hate me now - oh, no, Susan is using the toilet and still likes me - thank goodness! Oh wait, what about Joe - he hasn't texted me in three hours! If my kids go 8 hours without taking to a friend they start bouncing off the ceilings. After a 48 hour confinement to the cold tank they start to turn into normal people until they get their next dose. Most adults are happy to talk to friends every few weeks or whatever and not worry about whether they're the subject of the gossip chain or whatever.
Agreed. Even voicemails require me to basically take notes and generate what would have been a perfectly good email before replying. Oh, except half the time the voicemail says "I've got a problem - can you give me a call?" When I get those voicemails I tend to send an email saying "I hear you are having a problem - can you send me the details?"
Often spoken word is required to fully resolve the issue. However, if people at least email me the short version I can do some research and be in a position to actually solve their problem when I meet with them. Otherwise we end up spending a meeting defining the issue, and then time goes by, and we meet again to actually have the meeting that was really necessary.
My other problem is that on half of the email chains I get there aren't more than two people in the same building on it. To try to TALK to all of those people at the same time would require a teleconference. That means killing three days waiting for an appropriate moment, and then again having twice as much discussion as required since everybody is walking in cold.
When people suggest to me that emails aren't effective and that meetings are better I try to point out that often half the people on the email chains are already in meetings together for 8 hours every week already, and the purpose of the emails is to deal with simpler issues so that we don't have to be in 12 hours of meetings a week (on top of whatever it is that we're supposed to be doing in our normal jobs).
What is really scary is that in order to come up with a standard format for sending data to printers somebody decided to invent a turing-complete language. That means you can't even examine a set of data being sent to the printer and determine whether it will ever print anything without actually running it.
Not convinced? Try printing some of the files on this page.
That's pretty-much how courts tend to work things out. Usually the judge views a compromise as the best solution. The problem is that if one party really is right and the other really is wrong than a compromise isn't really justice, and the costs of litigation are an additional affront to the party who is right.
Why don't you try doing that, and see how it works out for you?
Register merckpharma.com or whatever and put a note at the top saying "we're not Merck" and try selling pills on it. Win or lose you'll be broke with your legal bills in a month unless you cave in.
Facebook is going to look at it like this:
1. We get paid $x/month to let some company buy a page from us. Yah!
2. We are very likely to get sued for $x*1000/month because some other company doesn't like it. Ugh.
3. Either way the company suing us has deep pockets and a big team of corporage lawyers. Ugh.
4. After we spend $x*100 fighting in court we might luck out and get a ruling that says that we can keep getting paid $x/month. Whoop-de-doo.
5. At that point there would just be an appeal and we're back at #2. Why are we doing this again?
6. Once we're done resolving this in the US Supreme court and we comply with whatever they hand down, we then get to watch all our subsidiaries get sued as the issue is re-litigated globally. Then we get fined by some court somewhere no matter what we do as they all reach different conclusions.
Or, we could just give up the $x/month for now and tell the companies that they can try to get the courts of half the countries on the planet to agree on something and maybe our great grandkids can make $x/month if there is still a Facebook.
Yeah, moral culpability for WWI is about as clear as mud - it resembles the kinds of decision-making that led to wars back in the days where some duke liked the view from some count's castle. But, I'm not a scholar on such things so contrary opinions are welcome.
The only thing that is clear from WWI is who the winners and the losers were. And Germany (and its corporations) was DEFINITELY the loser.
Well, this isn't nearly as "The US Is Evil" as you make it out to be. The fact is that both companies have legal restrictions on their use of the name "Merck" in various parts of the world.
Basically once upon a time there was one Merck. Then there was this little incident in Europe where lots of people ended up dead and that caused lots of consequences including German companies losing ownership of their foreign subsidiaries. So, now there are two Mercks.
The final settlement (I have no idea how it was reached), is that the US-based Merck can use the name Merck in North America, and the German one can use the name Merck in the rest of the world. This settlement predates Facebook by decades, so internet domains and such weren't really in scope. No doubt they could litigate it and I suspect the outcome will depend on what court system has more power to make Facebook's life difficult (which is basically how the German Merck lost all its US-based holdings in the first place - they weren't exactly in a position to do anything about it at the time).
Absent litigation I suspect that your point about first claims is the best way to handle this. After all, the US-based Merck got its domain name and a class A subnet in this way.
Sure, but does it really matter?
Plus, most of the debate over evolution isn't whether it happens, but whether it is responsible for the diversity of life that exists today. In some sense differentiating between the two might be a biological equivalent of solipsism, but from a practical standpoint it really doesn't make much of a difference. Suppose I believe that the universe was created 30 seconds ago by the spaghetti monster in its present state following all the currently understood laws of physics. I can predict the outcome of future experiments just as accurately as anybody else, and you can't shoot any holes in my belief since it isn't falsifiable. Other than causing some people to scratch their heads, can any harm come from giving me a license to "practice physics?"
This is why I'm not a fan of litmus tests - one day it is evolution, the next day it is AGW, and after that it is cell phones cause cancer or whatever. It is better to focus on practical results than statements of faith. I think far more people die every year because specialists don't talk to each other or primary providers than because somebody happens to disagree with Darwin.
What they also don't grasp is the downward spiral that will surely ensue after the layoffs. Not understanding the abstraction means you will not comprehend the consequences thereof. This is why we have such a huge problem with inefficient software.
That really depends. Efficiency is relative - if you're "good enough" but cheaper, then your company will rake in tons of cash selling "inefficient" software. Likewise, if your less-efficient software is on store shelves six months ahead of the competition then you'll make a killing selling against older versions of other products.
The goal of a corporation isn't to give a good product to its consumers - it is to make money. Sometimes you can make more money selling a substandard product.
And yes, this is a good synopsis of why our world is in the shape it is in...
I think that absorption is a problem when you get even into the 100GHz range or so. The atmosphere is relatively transparent to radiation below a few GHz, and to the range that contains visible light (probably the reason we can see that range), but it is fairly opaque to everything else.
Water and oxygen and various other molecules absorb energy across a huge range of the spectrum. That's why telescopes outside of the more traditional radio and visible wavelengths need to be located at high altitude.
10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10
Yes, the guys who designed the CPU that runs the interpreter that parses that code need to understand tons of stuff about computer theory. The guy who writes the program really doesn't need to. In fact, with increasing levels of abstraction if anything modern programmers need to understand it less than their predecessor. I can sort a collection with one line of code, and I don't have to understand the various O(n log n) algorithms to do it.
When my employer lays off half of its IT department I doubt they're worried that their replacements might not have a good grasp of the principles of finite state automata.
Doctors don't model epidemics - at least not 99% of them.
I think the problem is that we have one degree that is used by the guys working at the NIH/CDC, and the guy sticking a thermometer in your child's butt and placing them on a scale.
Then again, the same problem exists in most other college degree programs. Colleges are well-suited to preparing people for their future career as a college professor.
I don't see how your argument is relevant.
Suppose somebody wants to get a job as an electrician. Does it really matter if they understand Maxwell's theories? Does it matter if maybe they think Maxwell wasn't such a bright guy? Does it matter that they've most likely never heard of him? As long as they correctly wire my house I could care less. They aren't going to be able to design nano-scale transistors in a CPU without knowledge of first principles, but that has little to do with using the right gauge of wire and making sure the hot wire is the switched one.
Doctors are technicians. It doesn't matter how antibiotics are discovered, they merely need to know that they cure TB, and when they aren't working here is what you do. Doctors aren't supposed to be experimenting on their patients.
I'm not a big believer in litmus tests in general. If you want to make sure your surgeons don't panic when something goes wrong I'd consider that completely appropriate. However, let's leave signed confessions of faith to the kinds of people who work in seminaries and such.
Look, they're nuts. I get it.
But, why does a medical doctor need to understand evolution anyway? A doctor probably needs to have a good understanding of evolution in the same way that an auto mechanic needs to have a good understanding of metallurgy, and the kids doing the 20-minute oil changes down the street need to have a good understanding of organic chemistry.
I think this is half the problem with medicine. We don't have enough doctors, and we spend our money training people to be medical researchers and not doctors. Your family doctor doesn't need to be qualified to uncover the cure for cancer - they need to know how to diagnose a problem and treat it. Maybe we'd have more healthcare providers if we used a tiered system much like is used in any other field dominated by technicians (which is what doctors basically are).
And none of this is meant to knock doctors - there are aspects of biology they clearly need to understand and they need to be smart people. Pilots need to be smart and able to quickly resolve problems, but we don't make people take 4 years of aeronautical engineering to become one, because flying a plane has little to do with being able to design a wing.
Apologies - I misunderstood the point you were making.
I agree this perception gap is the source of many issues. Finding your way to a plane is easy, making sure that a tour group all boards a plane on time is hard, and so on.
Yup. I was involved in an IT project coincident with a number of business changes, and I spoke to our VP about the fact that the business didn't seem to really be ready for their side of the changes. He said that senior management within the business was aware of that and while they were trying to push that change down from the top they were looking to IT to help force the change to happen - that sometimes people don't really get with the program until you rip the rug out from under them.
That has been my experience with IT-buiness realations. Often the people at the bottom dislike IT, and the people one or two levels about them REALLY dislike IT, but the people one or two levels above them love it. Some manager making $180k/yr is used to getting his own way and gets really upset when IT tells him no. However, often IT is simply following the dictate of the manager making $800k/yr two levels senior to the manager who is grumbling. At work the business approves everything we do - but often at a level MUCH higher than the people directly impacted.
Computers are essentially maintenance free these days. I mean what maintenance does a computer require these days? Security updates? They apply automagically, on my computer while I'm asleep.
Domain policy to enable updates, check. Domain policy to block the end-user's ability to disable these updates, check. Local software install to periodically scan computer to ensure all updates are being installed, check. User complaints when they can't do something due to all of those domain policies and the fact that the scanning slows down their boot or whatever, check.
Security updates are automagic when you own two computers at home. When you own 10k computers they're not - since you get in trouble if only 3 of them get viruses.
Software updates, pretty much all automatically.
Uh, what software are you talking about? Maybe on iOS or Android, but on Windows very few software packages reliably update themselves. Certainly ManageMyVatOfChemicals v12.5 doesn't auto-update. Oh wait, you're working in some corporation that doesn't use anything but MS Office?
Now one could argue the complication of building it and setting it up. But this too is trivial. Your average teenager can assemble a computer, and your average grandma can run a windows setup.
Sure, but will they apply every one of those policies correctly so that all your machines are identical? Will the backup software be properly configured so that when an employee drops their laptop the company isn't out more than just the cost of the hardware? Will the full-disk encryption software be properly configured so that when they lose it your company isn't on the front page of the Times?
My girlfriend just bought a new laptop. $700. Runs like a rocket, much faster than my $2000 pc of the day. Computers are cheap, disposable, and even the cheapest ones are fast enough to satisfy the demands of probably more than 95% of the users.
Will it run some web-based time reporting system that is IE6-only? Will it run some Java business applet that requires enhanced permissions, but not let the user agree to give enhanced permissions to some random java app on the web? Will it connect to the corporate VPN? Will it run your Citrix-based inventory app?
Like it or not, computers these days are consumer toys.
Maybe in the world of secretaries and more senior managers, this is true. In the world of people who actually do work, there are a lot of things that can still go wrong.
Also, things that "just work" often don't work well enough to trust them to manage your fleet of 10k computers. If somebody wipes out their home PC by mistake they bear the punishment for their own mistakes. If they do the same at work then that is lost productivity.
I'd love to see things more to an app store model where apps are jailed and systems are encrypted out of the box and generally suitable for corporate use. However, we're not quite there yet. If you are a senior manager or an attorney chances are you can play with an iPad and be a lot more productive. However, if you're the guy creating all those documents the managers are consuming, or if you actually create something other than documents then chances are you don't have that solution available yet.
Is the entertainment you get from movies worth the loss of freedom all around that the movie industry buys?
While I support reform I too think that a complete absence of copyright would basically mean the end of the movie industry.
I'm not sure that is really the outcome we want - can't we have our cake and eat it too?
If you don't think that movies are worth the loss of freedom, then simply don't watch them or distribute them. If you don't copy movies, then copyright law won't apply to you anyway. Granted, that won't solve the problem of false accusations and the whole judge-jury-executioner model the MPAA is pushing for, but it would avoid most of the legal problems.
If you want to copy movies legally, then you need to start with a world where there are actually movies to copy.
A sane copyright system would allow for a reasonable profit on new works, but not with so many restrictions on how they are used, and for a much shorter period of time. The good thing about copyright is that it allows companies to raise the capital needed to make movies, but it doesn't force people to pay for them if they don't want to watch them. Systems like voluntary donations generally don't raise much capital (or they don't give good incentives to actually make a decent movie since the profts are guaranteed and not at risk). Systems like government grants are arbitrary (how do you decide if a movie is worth rewarding), and they force people to pay for movies they don't care about.
I don't think that IP law is worth completely abandoning. It just needs a LOT of reform. The simplest reform is to curtail the durations across the board, and set them up by type of work and industry such that they generally allow for a reasonable profit to be made without decades of exclusive control.
The thing that concerns me most here is that the domains are being siezed without a trial.
If there were a trial and a jury awarded the domains to the RIAA or whatever, I could at least see the due process in that. However, these are being handled as administrative matters where people are being deprived of property without a trial. My feeling is that a jury should be required to issue a verdict before ANY kind of government seizure. I can see seizing evidence with a warrant temporarily, but temporarily has to mean for a SHORT period of time - not for years. In fact, when things like computers are seized they should just duplicate the drives and return the originals within a week.
TSA, at least, is part of the DHS. Seems like half of the Government is these days...