The skillsets to be both seem conflicting - businessmen need a Machiavellical sense of brutal realism, while scientists are pursuing truths in the gentler idealic realm of Plato.
Ken Thompson, one of the inventors of Unix, forked out $12,000 to fly on a Mig29
Oracle playboy Larry Ellison is "multi-talented, not only is he an acute business but he is also a jet pilot, marketing genius, sports enthusiast and world champion yacht racer"
Nietzsche once said people who aspire to lofty ideas ( like "help inspire today's youth to dream big" ) often have very simple, direct, greedy drives that propel them. A scientist might say he's out to prove the hardest theorem, but perhaps all he wants is fame ( eg. Dr. Watson says in his book on decoding DNA that he simply wanted to beat the competitors & become famous ). A philosopher might set out to "find the truth", but perhaps all he wants is tenure at some ivy league institution.
Looks to me like Dr. Gregory Olsen simply wants good PR for his firm with this stunt...claiming to inspire American youth seems outlandish.
Rob Glaser of RealNetworks claims that not opening the iPod to other formats is a real mistake. "I can't run.RM files on iPod. What is this, the Soviet Union ?"
Bill Gates of Microsoft claims that not opening emacs to other formats is a real mistake. "I can't edit.DOC files on emacs. What is this, the Soviet Union ?"
Howard Stern of Loudmouth Inc claims not opening the airwaves on ClearChannel is a real mistake. "I can't say F*** on radio ! What is this, the Soviet Union ?"
Janet Jackson of Boob Inc. claims not opening her bra on public television is a real mistake. "I can't expose my nipples ! What is this, the Soviet Union ?"
Science vs engineering 2 days in a row ?
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"while vast sums are being spent on manned space flight missions, a little money will be diverted to real science...Whenever NASA runs into trouble, it is science that is likely to be sacrificed first.
Engineering will always happen when theory needs to be monetized. Why do we need the state to push for that with taxpayer money - let investors push for space travel thru private ventures - it is after all, a speculative venture.
Seriously people, in the evolution of humanity, it is always fundamental science that is responsible for those huge leaps in progress. All engineering does is verification. eg. You can theorize and "prove" conclusively that space travel is feasible. Actually travelling in space is simply verifying that theorem.
People need a course in hard math, you know, third order differential equations & stuff of that nature, to appreciate that distinction. Most of what makes Computer Science so effective today - - those rigorous algorithms - were invented in the 60s & 70s. But geeks take more pride in Moore's law & chipspeeds & RAM size & so on. That's just engineering, its not that hard ( comparitively speaking ).
If I had a billion dollars to burn, rather than fund a pipedream like putting humans on Mars, I'd spend 900 million on eradicating malaria & smallpox & things like that which kill millions in Africa even today...who can think of space when real people around you are dying ? And I'd use 100 million to fund 10,000 scientists under 25, for research in Fundamental Sciences - math, physics, theoretical CS, that kind of stuff.
Remember - Engineering will always happen when theory needs to be monetized.
what is taught in comp-sci these days is not so great. There is a tendency to focus on algorithms (get them out of a book) rather than how to contribute to building large projects that work.
Its very sad you feel that way. I graduated with a Masters in Computer Science and the most valuable thing I took away from there was Algorithm Design.
You say - get them out of a book.
Lemme ask you, how do they get into the book in the first place ?
See, that's what Computer "Science" is really about. Ask Dr. Knuth - the father of Computer Science, whether algorithms are important or software engineering is ? He's written 3 tomes on algorithms, none on software building.
Making large projects work should technically not even be in Computer Science. Its mostly a management skill ( soft-skill ), so put that in "Information Management", "Software Engineering", "Information Technology" or several other related ( but different ) majors. Leave the science ie. algorithms, in computer science.
In "The Monk and the Riddle, Virtual CEO Randy Komisar ( Valley insider, kickstarted TiVO, WebTV, orchestrated the sale of Lucas's Pixar to Steve Jobs,... ) describes the 2-step process that governs the life of the vast majority -
The Deferred Life Plan
Do what you have to do
Do what you want to do
Randy claims the above plan is a surefire recipe for unhappiness, because Step 2, the happy part, will seldom be reached. Step 1 will almost always take up all your lifespan.
Like most geeks, I started out in IT because I thought I was on step 2. Over time, it got so boring & bland I was certain I was on step 1. When I finally realized I was never going to get to step 2 again, I quit. Now, I'm living the "Whole Life Plan" -"Do what you want to do".
At those prices, we'll probably see a large number of early adopters
I'm one of those early adopters ( bought the 6x DVD-R Pioneer drives right after it debuted ). IMO, it is unwise to splurge on this. The early versions produce few good DVDs & a large proportion of coasters. It took 2-3 months for Pioneer to resolve all the errors & issue a firmware patch, & in a few more months, the 8X drive was out, cheaper than 6x, but with problems of its own:)
Best to wait.
Robert Moore, Founder and President of 321 Studios. "There is no difference between making a copy of a music CD for personal use and making a backup of a DVD movie for personal use."
DVDXCopy was presumably one of the biggest consumer application for these DVD recorders. People made backups of their existing DVD collection using that software, and why shouldn't they ?
But 321Studios was found guilty of violating the DMCA, and today we have the hardware to make copies legally available, getting cheaper & faster, while the software remains illegal.
It's a shame Microsoft has chosen for it to not be compatible with the #1 portable player or #1 music download service.
Starting a new business is about the future vision, not the present reality.
Who cares what today's "#1 portable player" or "#1 music download service" is ? What matters is tomorrow's #1.
1600s - Tulip mania 1920s - Florida real estate boom 1959-62 - "tronics" boom 2000s - xml,b2b, the internet bubble 2003-4 - the music bubble
"There was a time when every oil company went out and bought a fertilizer company, for no good reason. It was as if what was good for Standard Oil was good for Exxon, and so soon all the fertilizer companies were gobbled up" - Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet's right hand man in Berkshire Hathaway.
Why should everybody start selling music all of a sudden ? Napster started it, then Apple did it far better, then Real Networks jumped in, then that great equalizer of America - Walmart, now the ultimate monopoly - Microsoft. What do all these tech companies have to do with music ? Perhaps nothing, but then oil giants did't exactly mix with fertilizer either. Such is the madness of crowds.
No way! Howard would never sign on with XM. Clear Channel booted Howard out in the first place, and Clear Channel owns a 30% stake in XM. In every other show, Howard has consistently spoken against censorship by Clear Channel & the FCC. He has also dropped subtle hints that he'll sign on with Sirius - he even visited Sirius's offices in NYC this week. So Howard and Sirius - the beginning of a long relationship.
The entire article failed to mention the implications of what would happen from here on. Here's what me & a million other shareholders are thinking - Howard Stern will ask Clear Channel to f*** off and sign on with Sirius. FCC can't regulate subscriber based sat radio, so Sirius would skyrocket, and so would I...my entire 50 grand portfolio is composed of 1 stock - SIRI. Yeah I know that's a boneheaded move, but I'm going to keep my fingers crossed...
These guys should be using dedicated image processors, like SGI boxes. They're just using souped up PCs & Macs. Sure you can have dual Xeons with gigabytes of RAM, but I still think an SGI can beat the pants off the harware these guys are using.
Whoever modded the grandparent a troll simply doesn't get it.
See, the last outfit I worked for, a private brokerage company, had 15,000+ employees scattered across a dozen cities. They wanted to do the SAME EXACT thing - "build and manage an OSS software repository". Same spiel - "We are using OSS all over the place, but each department has its own variant & version, so lets get together & pool our resources, build an internal repository of OSS & then manage it ourselves".
Guess what ? After a few months & a few hundred thousand dollars, the thing simply fell apart. The "department to build & manage OSS repository" was disbanded & people moved on.
Why ? Because folks in insurance wanted functionality that folks in mortgage didn't want that compliance wanted that legal didn't want that sysadmins wanted that webmasters didn't want that Perl hackers wanted that Java developers didn't want that....you get my point.
Different versions and variants exist because different people want different things. Trying to come up with a common software repository is just a pipedream.
Now, all the above happened in a PRIVATE company, where there are things like profit margins & paychecks - real incentive to make things happen. Imagine a government trying to "build and manage an OSS repository", with umpteen departments, terrific bereaucracy, and absolutely no commercial incentive. The mind boggles...
Look at the hurdles I'd face if I want to sign up -
Must sign a contract
Must use only stuff already in the repository
Can't ever make money - prohibited by diktat - so what's my incentive ?
Furthermore, how do you enforce these things ? If the repository is public, I could very easily take bits & pieces & repackage it as proprietary software & sell it, thus making money off products developed by the commonwealth using taxpayer money. If the repository is not public, then how is it open source ?
Seems overly complicated. Why doesn't the government of MA simply provide monetary incentives for programmers to contribute to existing repositories like sourceforge ? You could get things moving so much faster that way...or am I missing something here ?
Government managing something, anything, almost always results in inefficiency and bereaucracy. I'd hate the state government managing OSS or anything else. Let them build roads & such...
Would there have been a Linux if the Government of Finland stepped in, instead of Linus & his bunch of highly caffeinated sharpshooters ?
I don't have a problem with government embracing OSS that is privately built using legions of programmers, because the programmers then have the incentive - fame ( in the OSS community), fortune ( ok, takes much longer to go IPO these days), hopefully both. But government managing OSS, where's the incentive ?
Not too long ago, Soviet Russia embarked on a long hard social experiment, called communism...:)
See, the problem with social experiments is, you have to get the buy-in from society. Can I go to the local girl's school and start looking under people's skirts and claim I'm just doing a social experiment...I'd be arrested in an instant.
Here's what you are really doing -
Malone: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I'm saying is, what are you prepared to do?
Eliot Ness: Anything and everything in my power.
Malone: You wanna know how you do it? Here's how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send on of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone! Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?
You are using the same means software pirates use to get back at them, Mr. Malone. Now, unless you are Sean Connery in The Untouchables, that ain't legal.
From the article -
programs have circulated disguised as activation key generators and cracks for Unreal Tournament 2004, Pinnacle Studio 9, Norton Antivirus, TurboTax
IANAL, but this is certainly illegal.
It is akin to a sting operation, like when you open your car door for the hooker on the street and it turns out she's really a cop and you are arrested for soliciting & prostitution.
You can't drop dollar bills on the road & then arrest citizens for stealing when they pick them up.
Using temptation to get at potential thieves does not constitute law enforcement, unless I guess you are the FBI or somesuch.
nice feature list
I was thinking the same thing. Sort of like, the virus-newbie was this assigned this task by his virus-master - Design the perfect virus with following features and deploy under 24 hours...
Some of the hits in above search ( Hoboken,NJ & New York,NY ) require you to either
a. Take a train, $3 ticket
b. Take a ferry, $5 ticket
c. Take the Hudson tunnel, $6 toll
Costwise, these hits ( from NYC ) should be ranked way below any hits within the state of NJ, since you could drive from Jersey City,NJ to most anywhere else in NJ and not pay a buck ( unless you take the NJ turnpike, even then you'd pay atmost $5 to reach Delaware )
Google could spit out a two-column table which lists distance AND cost to get there. Or have a algorithm that assigns a weight to distance, a weight to cost & compute the distance-cost-factor...we did this way back in grad school, CS 301.
I've been using Ulead DVD Workshop under Win2K, and I would heartily recommend it. Has customizable menus, buttons, text placement anywhere...works like a charm. Burned 50+ DVDs so far. Burns VCDs & SVCDs too.
Cost - I got it free when I purchased my Pioneer DVR-A06 burner, maybe the cost is factored in the h/w.
Dunno about easter eggs, I'm sure there must be a bunch of catholic folk at Ulead who can cater to that department:)
The real technical hurdle search engines will have to face lie in India, not China.
Chinese Dialects - http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/dialectmap.htm
Indian languages - http://www.sanyal.com/india/indlang.html
With a handful of dialects & Mandarin being the mainstream language, a Chinese search engine will have a comparitively smaller problem sifting through the problem space than an Indian search engine that would have to deal with content in 325 distinct languages ( not dialects...India has 1000s of dialects! ) with atleast 100+ different scripts.
Ofcourse, IT tends to penetrate the English speaking population first & foremost, so most search engines, as a first cut, focus on content written in English & ignore the rest.
Porn is that perfect equilibrium point on the chart that economic theorists dream about - the ultimate cash nexus, where the supply demand curves collide in ecstatic harmony.
Consider - there is enough technical info on the internet to perform nuclear fusion, harness solar energy to power your homes, run your car on biofuel from corn instead of gasoline, create immense wealth from freely available portfolio management techniques, crack the genetic code, break RSA crypto, find the next largest Mersenne prime, or maybe just find a new home, repair your microwave, hawk your old CDs.....or even build yourself an H-bomb & blow up this planet to bits.
Yet, what is the most sought after commodity on the net ? Porn !
Why is that ? In "The Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith explains the "Diamond-Water paradox". The most useful, valuable, life-sustaining entity on the planet is water - yet, it has practically no price, since supply is free ( it rains ! ). The least useful frivilous commodity is the diamond, but it has enormous, immense value in the eyes of man.
So, Smith says, an economist must never attempt to tie value with price, since they don't have much of a relationship. Porn on the net is much more valuable than all the useful techie manuals & MIT courseware put together, because Porn is the ultimate diamond.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how you would classify Edison, with 1368 patents to his name but no formal scientific pedagogy.
A lot of scientists incorporate & turn into businessman/scientist - eg Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Stephen Wolfram ( Founder of Mathematica ), Dr. R & Dr. A ( invented the RSA cryptographic scheme, Carl Sagan, and a whole lot of people in biotech.
The skillsets to be both seem conflicting - businessmen need a Machiavellical sense of brutal realism, while scientists are pursuing truths in the gentler idealic realm of Plato.
Oracle playboy Larry Ellison is "multi-talented, not only is he an acute business but he is also a jet pilot, marketing genius, sports enthusiast and world champion yacht racer"
Nietzsche once said people who aspire to lofty ideas ( like "help inspire today's youth to dream big" ) often have very simple, direct, greedy drives that propel them. A scientist might say he's out to prove the hardest theorem, but perhaps all he wants is fame ( eg. Dr. Watson says in his book on decoding DNA that he simply wanted to beat the competitors & become famous ). A philosopher might set out to "find the truth", but perhaps all he wants is tenure at some ivy league institution. Looks to me like Dr. Gregory Olsen simply wants good PR for his firm with this stunt...claiming to inspire American youth seems outlandish.
Rob Glaser of RealNetworks claims that not opening the iPod to other formats is a real mistake. "I can't run .RM files on iPod. What is this, the Soviet Union ?"
Bill Gates of Microsoft claims that not opening emacs to other formats is a real mistake. "I can't edit .DOC files on emacs. What is this, the Soviet Union ?"
Howard Stern of Loudmouth Inc claims not opening the airwaves on ClearChannel is a real mistake. "I can't say F*** on radio ! What is this, the Soviet Union ?"
Janet Jackson of Boob Inc. claims not opening her bra on public television is a real mistake. "I can't expose my nipples ! What is this, the Soviet Union ?"
Algorithms vs Software Engineering
Engineering will always happen when theory needs to be monetized. Why do we need the state to push for that with taxpayer money - let investors push for space travel thru private ventures - it is after all, a speculative venture.
Seriously people, in the evolution of humanity, it is always fundamental science that is responsible for those huge leaps in progress. All engineering does is verification. eg. You can theorize and "prove" conclusively that space travel is feasible. Actually travelling in space is simply verifying that theorem.
People need a course in hard math, you know, third order differential equations & stuff of that nature, to appreciate that distinction. Most of what makes Computer Science so effective today - - those rigorous algorithms - were invented in the 60s & 70s. But geeks take more pride in Moore's law & chipspeeds & RAM size & so on. That's just engineering, its not that hard ( comparitively speaking ).
If I had a billion dollars to burn, rather than fund a pipedream like putting humans on Mars, I'd spend 900 million on eradicating malaria & smallpox & things like that which kill millions in Africa even today...who can think of space when real people around you are dying ? And I'd use 100 million to fund 10,000 scientists under 25, for research in Fundamental Sciences - math, physics, theoretical CS, that kind of stuff.
Remember - Engineering will always happen when theory needs to be monetized.
Its very sad you feel that way. I graduated with a Masters in Computer Science and the most valuable thing I took away from there was Algorithm Design.
You say - get them out of a book.
Lemme ask you, how do they get into the book in the first place ?
See, that's what Computer "Science" is really about. Ask Dr. Knuth - the father of Computer Science, whether algorithms are important or software engineering is ? He's written 3 tomes on algorithms, none on software building.
Making large projects work should technically not even be in Computer Science. Its mostly a management skill ( soft-skill ), so put that in "Information Management", "Software Engineering", "Information Technology" or several other related ( but different ) majors. Leave the science ie. algorithms, in computer science.
The Deferred Life Plan
Randy claims the above plan is a surefire recipe for unhappiness, because Step 2, the happy part, will seldom be reached. Step 1 will almost always take up all your lifespan.
Like most geeks, I started out in IT because I thought I was on step 2. Over time, it got so boring & bland I was certain I was on step 1. When I finally realized I was never going to get to step 2 again, I quit. Now, I'm living the "Whole Life Plan" -"Do what you want to do".
I'm one of those early adopters ( bought the 6x DVD-R Pioneer drives right after it debuted ). IMO, it is unwise to splurge on this. The early versions produce few good DVDs & a large proportion of coasters. It took 2-3 months for Pioneer to resolve all the errors & issue a firmware patch, & in a few more months, the 8X drive was out, cheaper than 6x, but with problems of its own :)
Best to wait.
DVDXCopy was presumably one of the biggest consumer application for these DVD recorders. People made backups of their existing DVD collection using that software, and why shouldn't they ?
But 321Studios was found guilty of violating the DMCA, and today we have the hardware to make copies legally available, getting cheaper & faster, while the software remains illegal.
It's a shame Microsoft has chosen for it to not be compatible with the #1 portable player or #1 music download service.
Starting a new business is about the future vision, not the present reality. Who cares what today's "#1 portable player" or "#1 music download service" is ? What matters is tomorrow's #1.
1600s - Tulip mania
1920s - Florida real estate boom
1959-62 - "tronics" boom
2000s - xml,b2b, the internet bubble
2003-4 - the music bubble
"There was a time when every oil company went out and bought a fertilizer company, for no good reason. It was as if what was good for Standard Oil was good for Exxon, and so soon all the fertilizer companies were gobbled up" - Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet's right hand man in Berkshire Hathaway.
Why should everybody start selling music all of a sudden ? Napster started it, then Apple did it far better, then Real Networks jumped in, then that great equalizer of America - Walmart, now the ultimate monopoly - Microsoft. What do all these tech companies have to do with music ? Perhaps nothing, but then oil giants did't exactly mix with fertilizer either. Such is the madness of crowds.
So all Howard Stern has to do is go on XM
No way! Howard would never sign on with XM. Clear Channel booted Howard out in the first place, and Clear Channel owns a 30% stake in XM. In every other show, Howard has consistently spoken against censorship by Clear Channel & the FCC. He has also dropped subtle hints that he'll sign on with Sirius - he even visited Sirius's offices in NYC this week. So Howard and Sirius - the beginning of a long relationship.
FCC - stern and sirius 1
FCC - Stern & Sirius 2
FCC - Stern and Sirius 3
These guys should be using dedicated image processors, like SGI boxes. They're just using souped up PCs & Macs. Sure you can have dual Xeons with gigabytes of RAM, but I still think an SGI can beat the pants off the harware these guys are using.
An image from the Mars Global Surveyor is said to be a gargantuan, glass-like worm
An apparent bit of spacecraft debris from the rover mission, photographed by Spirit, was dubbed a "bunny"
And Satan showed up on 9/11 too.
See, the last outfit I worked for, a private brokerage company, had 15,000+ employees scattered across a dozen cities. They wanted to do the SAME EXACT thing - "build and manage an OSS software repository". Same spiel - "We are using OSS all over the place, but each department has its own variant & version, so lets get together & pool our resources, build an internal repository of OSS & then manage it ourselves".
Guess what ? After a few months & a few hundred thousand dollars, the thing simply fell apart. The "department to build & manage OSS repository" was disbanded & people moved on.
Why ? Because folks in insurance wanted functionality that folks in mortgage didn't want that compliance wanted that legal didn't want that sysadmins wanted that webmasters didn't want that Perl hackers wanted that Java developers didn't want that....you get my point.
Different versions and variants exist because different people want different things. Trying to come up with a common software repository is just a pipedream.
Now, all the above happened in a PRIVATE company, where there are things like profit margins & paychecks - real incentive to make things happen. Imagine a government trying to "build and manage an OSS repository", with umpteen departments, terrific bereaucracy, and absolutely no commercial incentive. The mind boggles...
Must sign a contract
Must use only stuff already in the repository
Can't ever make money - prohibited by diktat - so what's my incentive ?
Furthermore, how do you enforce these things ? If the repository is public, I could very easily take bits & pieces & repackage it as proprietary software & sell it, thus making money off products developed by the commonwealth using taxpayer money. If the repository is not public, then how is it open source ?
Seems overly complicated. Why doesn't the government of MA simply provide monetary incentives for programmers to contribute to existing repositories like sourceforge ? You could get things moving so much faster that way...or am I missing something here ?
Would there have been a Linux if the Government of Finland stepped in, instead of Linus & his bunch of highly caffeinated sharpshooters ?
I don't have a problem with government embracing OSS that is privately built using legions of programmers, because the programmers then have the incentive - fame ( in the OSS community), fortune ( ok, takes much longer to go IPO these days), hopefully both. But government managing OSS, where's the incentive ?
Not too long ago, Soviet Russia embarked on a long hard social experiment, called communism...:)
See, the problem with social experiments is, you have to get the buy-in from society. Can I go to the local girl's school and start looking under people's skirts and claim I'm just doing a social experiment...I'd be arrested in an instant.
Here's what you are really doing -
Malone: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I'm saying is, what are you prepared to do?
Eliot Ness: Anything and everything in my power.
Malone: You wanna know how you do it? Here's how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send on of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone! Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?
You are using the same means software pirates use to get back at them, Mr. Malone. Now, unless you are Sean Connery in The Untouchables, that ain't legal.
IANAL, but this is certainly illegal. It is akin to a sting operation, like when you open your car door for the hooker on the street and it turns out she's really a cop and you are arrested for soliciting & prostitution.
You can't drop dollar bills on the road & then arrest citizens for stealing when they pick them up.
Using temptation to get at potential thieves does not constitute law enforcement, unless I guess you are the FBI or somesuch.
nice feature list
I was thinking the same thing. Sort of like, the virus-newbie was this assigned this task by his virus-master - Design the perfect virus with following features and deploy under 24 hours...
eg. coffee shops near Jersey City, NJ
Some of the hits in above search ( Hoboken,NJ & New York,NY ) require you to either
a. Take a train, $3 ticket
b. Take a ferry, $5 ticket
c. Take the Hudson tunnel, $6 toll
Costwise, these hits ( from NYC ) should be ranked way below any hits within the state of NJ, since you could drive from Jersey City,NJ to most anywhere else in NJ and not pay a buck ( unless you take the NJ turnpike, even then you'd pay atmost $5 to reach Delaware )
Google could spit out a two-column table which lists distance AND cost to get there. Or have a algorithm that assigns a weight to distance, a weight to cost & compute the distance-cost-factor...we did this way back in grad school, CS 301.
I've been using Ulead DVD Workshop under Win2K, and I would heartily recommend it. Has customizable menus, buttons, text placement anywhere...works like a charm. Burned 50+ DVDs so far. Burns VCDs & SVCDs too. Cost - I got it free when I purchased my Pioneer DVR-A06 burner, maybe the cost is factored in the h/w. Dunno about easter eggs, I'm sure there must be a bunch of catholic folk at Ulead who can cater to that department :)
The real technical hurdle search engines will have to face lie in India, not China.
Chinese Dialects -
http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/dialectmap.htm
Indian languages -
http://www.sanyal.com/india/indlang.html
With a handful of dialects & Mandarin being the mainstream language, a Chinese search engine will have a comparitively smaller problem sifting through the problem space than an Indian search engine that would have to deal with content in 325 distinct languages ( not dialects...India has 1000s of dialects! ) with atleast 100+ different scripts.
Ofcourse, IT tends to penetrate the English speaking population first & foremost, so most search engines, as a first cut, focus on content written in English & ignore the rest.
Porn is that perfect equilibrium point on the chart that economic theorists dream about - the ultimate cash nexus, where the supply demand curves collide in ecstatic harmony.
Consider - there is enough technical info on the internet to perform nuclear fusion, harness solar energy to power your homes, run your car on biofuel from corn instead of gasoline, create immense wealth from freely available portfolio management techniques, crack the genetic code, break RSA crypto, find the next largest Mersenne prime, or maybe just find a new home, repair your microwave, hawk your old CDs.....or even build yourself an H-bomb & blow up this planet to bits.
Yet, what is the most sought after commodity on the net ? Porn !
Why is that ?
In "The Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith explains the "Diamond-Water paradox". The most useful, valuable, life-sustaining entity on the planet is water - yet, it has practically no price, since supply is free ( it rains ! ). The least useful frivilous commodity is the diamond, but it has enormous, immense value in the eyes of man.
So, Smith says, an economist must never attempt to tie value with price, since they don't have much of a relationship. Porn on the net is much more valuable than all the useful techie manuals & MIT courseware put together, because Porn is the ultimate diamond.
>Wrong! Most of the shares are owned by individuals through:
>1. pension funds
>2. 401k plans
>3. mutual funds
And when I don't have a job, who is going to be putting money aside in my 401K ? You ??