I've read something good about WalMart. They reduced the rate of inflation in the 90s by one eighth (if you know nothing of economics, you will probably fail to grasp the extent to which this has benefited everyone in America). They have provided a higher living standard for millions of Americans who cannot shop at the expensive ma and pa stores so advocated by millions of antiproletariat middle-class Americans. They have vastly increased the efficiency of the retail industry, both from internal operations and from pressure created for their competitors to improve.
Well-reasoned. I agree that technology will ultimately render a legislative decision on copyright irrelevant--even if your #3 option, lawsuits, occurs, new filesharing technologies that encrypt content and hide identities will remove negative incentives to share and consequently repopularize it. #2 is unlikely since filesharing is a relatively small part of the infrastructural significance of the current Internet (universities, government, and business relying on current technology would be displeased to overhaul everything for some CD sales). So the industry will shrink in size.
How much it will do so is an interesting topic. There is some cost to those downloading music illegally--a morality cost, so to speak, that is demonstrated by a preference to legal ownership rather than illegal, holding all else the same. It's just that for many that cost is less than the typical sale price of a CD, or $15. Universal sees that logic and reduced prices so that CDs can be sold for less than $10. Will that be less than the 'morality cost' for a significant number of people? Maybe--we'll see soon enough. If it is, it will mean that the industry will not have to shrink dramatically, just somewhat substantially.
Frankly, I'm surprised that there have not been more attempts at adding value to retail CDs that can't be matched by downloading. Currently there's the morality cost, a jewel case, and a flimsy CD for added value. Not a whole lot. Maybe record companies could combat P2P by just making retail sales both cheaper and packed with higher value--booklets about the band's history, small discounts to concerts, or something else worthy. There's been noticeably little experimentation here.
Supposing that the morality cost is low, and that there are no viable value-added 'gimmicks' for retail CDs, I find your economic model for bands compelling. Record companies invest in their artists to sell CDs, so why shouldn't Pepsi invest in artists to sell bottles of Pepsi? Just like an artist's music is an intrinsic part of the worth of the CD, the artist's affiliation becomes an intrinsic worth of the Pepsi can. Combine it with gimmickry such as what you mention and that intrinsic worth only grows.
Or take it really far--securitize the pop star. Create an asset whose worth is determined by cash flow from brand sales. The artists start the band, so they initially receive 100% ownership. They may then sell shares of this asset for cash, much like a company. If the artist becomes popular, a market maker attracted by bid-ask spreads makes a market for the security.
In a world with nullified music copyright, record companies exist only to rent equipment and studios, financed by investors in the artists. However, their equivalent might surface as companies emerge whose main business is identifying promising artists and buying portions, reaping the cash flow. Below them, angel investors and VCs may invest in less-known regional artists in the hope of stardom.
There are, of course, big problems with this. Unlike normal companies, artists compete in a zero-sum game--there's only so much 'popularity' to distribute to different stars. Popularity is in itself extremely fickle and difficult to manage, creating huge risks for investors and therefore lowering prices on these securities. And, like today, most wealth would be concentrated at the top, since replication is free and consumers demand only a few top performers. But it would be a neat way to finance music while extricating today's recording industry. Your Pepsi example is similar to this, except for the multiple-owner securitization aspect.
Even if this were viable for music, though, it would be unlikely to work as well for movies, and would be completely nonoperative for authors. Movies involve many actors, creating an agent coordination problem among investors in actors, and with directors and the like it all becomes fairly messy. Authors on the other hand can't sell their affiliation because their affiliation has little value.
This is called economic rent. Typically, when consumers demand only the best (i.e., they want only the most famous pop diva music), and it is very inexpensive to duplicate the work of the best producer (TV, radio, CDs, etc), we see concentration of income among a few of the best and little for anyone else.
This is why most baseball players earn very little, except for a few who make millions, and why most actors make next to nothing except for a few making millions. In contrast, the best plumbers do not make extraordinarily more than mediocre ones, because their product is not easily duplicated, and most people are satisfied with a good plumber instead of the very best.
I don't quite understand what you intend to do to force a flatter income distribution for these sorts of professions. The reason they exist is because of what consumers demand and the fundamental economics of the business. The one way to do it is to make musicians more like plumbers by disallowing royalties from cheaply-produced media and forcing them to take all their revenue from scarce resources such as live performances. But that to me requires scrapping the concept of copyright, which would undermine much of our economy (rights to books, research, etc). Should artists and writers be denied any right to the duplication of their work?
Even if that were done, there would still be a wildly uneven income distribution, because the economic rent spills into other areas, such as selling the top pop star's name to help sell goods (I suspect Spears generates more income from the sale of her affiliation than her CD sales).
A lot of people believe that tariffs are usually bad, except when foreign governments are engaging in dumping operations. But even in this case, it is best for the country receiving the dumped goods to pursue free trade. Why?
Suppose there is a chip that costs the Korean manufacturer $40 to produce and sell in America. However, they sell it for only $30 in America, collecting the $10 difference in subsidies from the Korean government. Two things happen. First, American suppliers of similar chips are priced out of the market. Second, there is a value transfer from Korea to the United States of $10 per chip. Essentially, Korean taxpayers are giving American citizens $10 per chip they sell! American consumers receive a $40 product with a $10 rebate from Korean taxpayers. The United States usurps value from Korea, enriching America. The excess consumer savings--$10 per chip--is then spent elsewhere in the economy, or invested.
In the short run, there are some discomforts due to domestic economic shifts toward more efficient operations, away from the dumped market. In the long run, the subsidization makes up for it.
In summary, we ought to encourage dumping operations as much as possible. What more could we ask for than fools willing to subsidize a product for our consumption, putting money in our wallets?
I absolutely agree. Like you, when I was younger, I was reasonably good with Unix. Not as good as some, but reasonably good. For a long time, I thought that due to my abilities with computers, I'd go into a career of computer engineering. As it turned out, a little while before I was accepted at Northwestern I gave that up and decided I preferred investment management, something that requires a high ability to think well ( = a liberal arts education) rather than specific knowledge, since that specific knowledge is usually gained through a combination of an MBA and experience. Investment management draws on a huge, broad swath of knowledge--everything from economics, history, philosophy, political science, and more.
Do I still like to toy with computers? Absolutely. But not enough to toil away at, day after day. Part of the reason I loved investing was that the ineptitude of others translated into opportunities for you (via mispricing), whereas in the computer field, the ineptitude of others merely makes your life difficult with buggy software and the like. Besides, the psyche of the human mind that controls the market seems more interesting to me than spending long hours typing thousands of lines of code, but that's just me.
In any case, many above-average people get interested in computers, and then fall into the trap that that's the field they ought to go into. The truth is that many bright people have a plethora of career choices that would make them happy, and it frequently is not computer engineering--even if that were their first love. Many of those combine computers and some other field--whether it be law, business, medicine, or others--to create a field that combines the pure logic of computers with the human psychology in the other fields.
RB:What that means is if you have 100 workers and 100 jobs, at any given moment 6 of them will be unemployed (going to school, bumming around Europe, dropping a kid, "finding themselves", or just jerking off).
bun: Any economist will also tell you that people going to school or bumming around Europe are not considered "unemployed."
autopr0n: No shit, dumbass. If they were the unemployment rate in this country would be about 55% Not 6. Notice the person you are replying to said 'workers' not 'people'
People who are "bumming around Europe," "going to school," "dropping a kid," "finding themselves," or "just jerking off," are typically not looking for full time work. Therefore, the majority of them would not be included in government unemployment statistics. Calling them "workers" was probably an error on behalf of Robber--not a major one, but an error nonetheless. Those unemployed but looking for work, as another poster noted, are not frolicking about in Europe. They are spending day in and day out beating the streets for a job.
Having said that, I'm not sure I understand your rabid frothing at the mouth. Mature a little and learn to treat people with dignity, because if you don't, you won't get any.
the capital system is, by definition, and efficient market. all company news is built into the current stock price, therefore what you are really paying for when buying a stock is the expectation that the company will prosper in the future.
That system is called the Efficient Market Theory. The strong version--which says that the stock price includes all information that is knowable about the company--is dead wrong. It's utter bullshit from some economic academics with their noses shoved too far into their books to look at what's actually happening. In fact, there's this little investment strategy used by some well known people--Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham--that depends on that theory being wrong. That is, that the current price of a security does not match its intrinsic value. It is called value investing. The basic strategy is that of buying companies (or parts thereof) for less than they are worth. It tends to work quite well. It's a strategy that people understand when going to garage sales, but they for some reason cannot apply the same idea to the sale of corporate stock.
Those who are agnostic are not afraid of hell. They recognize what they cannot know. In some ways, the atheists are just as dogmatic as the religious folk; the difference being that their story is less complex, and, given a total lack of evidence, probably more correct. But not proven correct.
Probably, there is no invisible guy who knows what I do all the time. But I cannot conclusively know that--so I am agnostic, but ask me about probabilities between, say, the Christian belief and the Atheist belief, and I'll say that the Atheist belief has a much higher chance of being correct. But I can't know that.
Same with evolution. I don't know that evolution is completely correct, but it looks a hell of a lot more credible than any theory, and, in my opinion, has a much higher probability of being correct. I cannot know, since this emergent phenomena cannot be conclusively proven. I'd wager a bet that it's good though, and that's what a lot of science is about.
So, no, agnosticism is not hedging bets. It's an admission of ignorance--ignorance that both the atheists and Xtians by necessity have (no conclusive proof either way) but refuse to admit. Going beyond generic labels, though, most agnostics will tell you that they'd bet a week's paycheck on the theory that there's some invisible guy up there is incorrect. The alternative is highly unlikely.
There's nothing wrong with not knowing something. That doesn't prohibit educated guessing, but one should be aware of what one does and does not conclusively know. Most social decisions--such as whether to teach evolution--should be based on educated guessing (probabilities) given that society is inherently unquantifiable. The rational probabilities are that evolution is correct, after looking at the alternative "theories" and the supporting evidence behind evolution, and, given those high probabilities, should be taught in schools along with the theory of gravity.
" "2) hiring someone is a longer-term commitment, and it's not necessarily clear yet that the economy has picked up for good."
shit, what world/drug are you on?"
Exactly what don't you understand about what he said? If it's about the uncertainty regarding whether the economy has any more shoes to drop, you are not a very good student of economic history. Many recessions have a mild initial dip, such as this one, then recover a bit as inventory is depleted and manufacturing starts, and then demand falls out and the real recession begins. Most of the time few people had a clue that a "double dip" would happen, and many at the point of recovery from the first dip predicted that there would be no more economic trouble for a while.
The reason patents increase the wealth of the corporate patent holder is that it excludes competitors from using the same method. It creates a temporary monopoly on the method, thus allowing the patent holder to increase prices to the point of revenue maximization instead of cost + profit margin typical of the industry.
As per reverse engineering, it is usually significantly less expensive to reverse engineer an item and produce it cheaply rather than develop it on one's own. See pharmaceutical drugs, and chips. I guarantee you it is easier (cheaper) to crack open a chip and pull out an atomic microscope and figure out how it is done than to develop the chip yourself.
In your example, it is highly unlikely that IBM would sell the information that would create competitors. That's bad business. Instead, more "trade secrets" would be created instead of patents.
The country was not created to "make everyone's life a little easer," but freedom as mentioned was part of it.
"But once the initial investment has been recovered it should be released so that the technology can grow and become cheaper."
Several problems: 1) accounting for the amount of the initial investment; 2) it severely limits profitability of the investment. A profit margin of 2%, resulting from its near elimination after the patent is eliminated and manufacturing costs reside just below selling costs, is not good enough for businesses. If it cannot fetch a profit margin of at least 15-20%, they will invest it elsewhere--and not in research.
I shouldn't be too hard on them though. Tyco, who has nothing to do with the dot-com bubble, and nothing to do with energy trading, and makes and sells actual products rather than just having intellectual property, has dropped in value by 30 BILLION dollars in the last 2 weeks. Think about that: 30 billion dollars that used to belong to stockholders has EVAPORATED in the last 14 days.
I always get annoyed at the terminology of "30 billion dollars evaporating" from market capitalizations. Is the current company's market cap $30 billion less than it was? Yes. Is the company worth $30 billion less? Hell no. Company analysis reveals that (except some more debt than would be nice, though it is serviceable by cash flows) the company is fairly healthy with some short term problems. Using discounted cash flows, the company is probably worth more like $35-40 per share. That's significantly above the $17-$20 it trades at now. That's why a lot of good fund managers have been buying it recently (Bill Miller & the Clipper Fund analysts).
Remember that the company's value may at times have little to do with their price. That's how you make money in the market--buying companies that are worth more than their price, with value being defined as the discounted future earnings of the company (or cash flows if you're pedantic).
So when a big company's price goes down a bit, but the basic business is more or less the same value, it isn't a bad thing for shareholders. If anything, it's a good thing. It provides an opportunity to purchase more shares at a discounted price, before the business's price increases again.
Sometimes, of course, the company's price may decrease for a good reason, if the company is becoming increasingly unhealthy and is unlikely to recover for more than 5 years or perhaps never.
Enron has committed many crimes. By no standard have they acted legally in the past decade (and beyond).
One example: Enron would treat the volume of a trade as pure revenue. For example, if they bought a resource for $90, and then sold it for $100, they counted the $100 as revenue instead of the difference of $10. That's blatantly illegal; it violates GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and therefore SEC regulations.
But furthermore, the company created contracts with subsidiaries in which a loss by the subsidiary would require that the subsidiary pay Enron an amount equal to the loss; however, if the subsidiary had positive earnings, then Enron would count it in their corporate financial data. Very, very illegal.
Enron has had a rich history, full of illegal business transactions and financial deals. Enron did indeed push the law, but it was pushed so hard it shattered. Several times. Mach 3 sonic shock kind of shattered. Enron and its executives had no respect for the law.
Sure, Windows does the job, I run it at home; but if this article proves that End User X, dumb as a post, doesn't mind KDE (I'd use it daily if my audio-apps ran in *nix), force it on em!
Many professions suffer from extreme arrogance--doctors, lawyers, and computer programmers alike. They assume that because they have the knowledge, those that don't must therefore be less intelligent.
Personally, I'd like to see arrogant schmucks like you take on the work that these second-class citizens you so often denigrate perform. Experience is the best remedy for those too close-minded to understand the viewpoint of another human being in another profession.
Instead of insulting the value of a fellow human's mind, perhaps you intended to point out KDE's proficiency as an interface for those lacking hours of spare time to learn an interface inside and out. That would be very valid sentiment.
Instead, you take it upon yourself to liken the other person's intelligence to that of a post. I wonder if this is merely an attempt to differentiate yourself from the populace that uses Windows just like you do, to proclaim that you are with the small group proficient in Linux and this somehow demonstrates superiority. I don't know what it is, and I won't spend significant amounts of time contemplating what your (and many others') problem is, but what I have figured out is that it sure doesn't help out the computing profession's image.
You tarnish the image as badly as a hypocritical, arrogant lawyer lambasting the peasants of the world for their misunderstandings of the law's intricate structure.
The problem is not the fact that Microsoft is bundling, as evidenced by the acceptance of RH et al.'s approach. The problem is in who makes the software that is bundled. Ask yourself that and you'll end up with two different questions depending on which company is considered.
In one, the OS is leveraged to promote the same company's products in an anticompetitive (see Jackson's upheld FOF and COL) method. In the other, the distribution is leveraged to promote software made by someone else, which violates nothing and in total amounts to slightly less than BFD.
The vast majority of security vulnerabilities are buffer overflows. This latest vulnerability extends this status quo. There are technologies out there that prevent this, however, almost all of these technologies slow down the system in some way or another. Examples include languages that allow dynamically sized arrays and other preventative measures.
CPU speed is growing such that it would appear that we could take a speed hit for increased security. Is it coming down to the fact that various organizations would rather market a fast webserver at the expense of a secure one? The $64,000 question is why the industry has not moved towards safer technologies that prevent these security holes.
Not that Microsoft is incredibly innovative on the security front, but they're hardly the only culprit. Many others rely on unsafe languages and techniques that allow these vulnerabilities to leak through.
Last weekend, most of the team gathered at the horse pasture in northern Montgomery County lent by veteran aviator Beecher Butts, 88, whose charity has prompted the modelers to name their plane "The Spirit of Butts Farm."
FreeBSD on the other hand aims to be a full featured Unix just like Linux does. So the question is, what does FreeBSD do better than Linux? Is it faster, more stable, better under high loads?
The truth is I don't know how things are now, but I do know that as time goes by Linux will pull ahead in these areas because it is where most people are putting their attention. Companies like IBM, SGI, HP, etc. are all working on Linux, making it better. The pace of development will only increase as Linux further penetrates various markets.
And then:
Religion stops a thinking mind.
A disjunct between two suffering minds inhabiting the same small head?
GNOME can be made to run on anything: Linux, BSD, commercial UNIX, even Windows.
GTK runs on Windows, Gnome does not.
But it's gonna be GNOME.
GNOME and KDE are both far from consistently innovative. Maybe one day one of the two projects will churn out something that is different, something that hasn't been done before or something that combines a lot of old ideas into a fresh one. An idea that lets the user work faster, an idea that makes the developer sit in their chair and ponder why they hadn't thought of that before. Not that the two projects aren't of high quality; they just aren't particularly innovative. Neither is Microsoft. GNOME and KDE mostly seem to be decent copies of a mediocre copy. Note how KDE/GNOME implementation isn't even as advanced as NextStep was ten years ago. For some reason, the innovative companies always seem to be in financial trouble. Something about creative manic depression in the foundation of the company, instability reverberating throughout the company's Benjamins. They die frequently, or, like Apple, are merely predicted to die frequently.
The former Mac developers at Eazel are working to make a GNOME environment every bit as slick and polished as an Apple environment.
Eazel is dead.
Both of the main desktop environment projects depress me because of their ignorance of fundamental rules of UI design; e.g. Fitz's Law. Not that they aren't alone, it seems most commercial software ignores it as well.
One reason I appreciate projects like GnuStep is that they chose to copy something that was actually really cool.
I'd rather not be entirely pessimistic, though. For example, I think KDE's kio system is advanced--such as Konqueror's ability to view a POP3 mailbox with minimum additional hassle, just through the use of an existing kio method for POP3. Gnome has other noteworthy features. They aren't totally stagnant--while I feel they are somewhat stagnant on pure UI stuff, as far as architecture both projects conduct some interesting experiments and demonstrate advances.
Commercial software, when done by bright and dedicated people and managed by people with a clue, tends to produce software that explores new ideas more commonly than OSS does. If nothing else, OSS provides a more robust implementation of said creativity.
Bush should actually be putting more money towards deficate, not tax cuts, and keep the money flowing to science research.
Whoah there. That's phonetically similar to something you probably didn't intend. Are you implying that Dubya is going to cause the almight dung to hit the proverbial fan?
Though I can agree that the nation could use a few more nuclear public bathrooms.
Internet Explorer 5 is probably the most standards compliant browser ever made. Mozilla is doing a fine job, however it may still be debatable which one supports the standard more fully (after Moz is out of beta, of course).
Not all Microsoft products are susceptible to slight breakage in standards compliance. Their browser is exactly opposite of that.
Thanks for both the posters above me for showing this. It has widened my view of what programming languages are all about, although I didn't really consider myself close-minded before (I never ruthlessly advocated one language for no apparent reason). It has also shown me language options that I had not even considered before, and that quite possibly are more important than the language I'd actually use if for no other reason than to understand the other paradigms of computer language.
Either compare two engine's emissions, or compare the entire industry consumption related to the manufacture of the fuel the engines need, but do not compare on one hand the energy cost of an internal combustion engine and on the other hand the entire industry cost of electric motor-based engines.
The calculations done that supposedly demonstrate a five-fold decrease of efficiency in electric motors would turn out very differently had both the electric motor and the engine been compared fairly - that is, compare the power plants, transmission etc. of the electric engine against not only the gasoline engine but also the entire industry that supports it. This includes the gargantuan Alaskan pipeline that consumes massive resources to keep it active, it includes the large refineries that work twenty-four hours a day to provide refined fuel, it includes the massive ships that carry the petroleum across the seas, and it includes the ground transportation of this fuel to consumer-usable sites (ie, gas stations). All of the costs in manufacturing this fuel must be included if it is included with the electric alternative. Although I cannot provide numbers, I would suspect that this comparison would be much less impressive, perhaps even impressive the other way, when the comparison is modified to provide a fair view of both sides of the industry, as well as the engine itself.
Those figures would provide a more accurate view of reality.
What, you think that Intel doesn't charge for USB? That only Apple does these things? Sorry, the only main
opponent of Firewire was Intel, because Intel likes escaping royalty charges with the Not Invented Here syndrome.
Everybody else pays similar royalty fees whether it comes from Apple or Intel.
That thing about ownership is just marketing FUD put out by Intel.
When it breaks, however, it produces enough energy to not only repair itself, but also to provide the battery with even more power. This works beautifully as long as it wasn't the battery that broke. I asked the salesman about the physical impossibility of this, and he replied that the extra energy came from ground thermals. I don't go to that dealership anymore.
Aside from the obvious environmental benefits, as well as the benefits you've outlined above, there are some benefits that the typical go-fast guy would like. Namely, electric motors can generate a lotof torque at low RPM speeds. Take the Toyota Prius, a hybrid that runs mostly on electricity, as an example. At some low RPM (sorry, can't remember the number), it generates around 240 ft-lbs of torque. That is about as much as the Toyota Camry, and that class of vehicles, but with a drastically smaller engine in a smaller car. As a result, that thing moves at low speed acceleration.
I've heard, however, that it's not quite as eager at higher RPM speeds (eg freeway). I'm sure that could be remedied in future designs, with better technology, but today's Prius is quite a nice little machine. Perfect city vehicle, it gets better MPG (around 55) in city driving than on the highway. It also uses flywheels to store energy garnered from regenerative breaking. Mmm.
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I've read something good about WalMart. They reduced the rate of inflation in the 90s by one eighth (if you know nothing of economics, you will probably fail to grasp the extent to which this has benefited everyone in America). They have provided a higher living standard for millions of Americans who cannot shop at the expensive ma and pa stores so advocated by millions of antiproletariat middle-class Americans. They have vastly increased the efficiency of the retail industry, both from internal operations and from pressure created for their competitors to improve.
Well-reasoned. I agree that technology will ultimately render a legislative decision on copyright irrelevant--even if your #3 option, lawsuits, occurs, new filesharing technologies that encrypt content and hide identities will remove negative incentives to share and consequently repopularize it. #2 is unlikely since filesharing is a relatively small part of the infrastructural significance of the current Internet (universities, government, and business relying on current technology would be displeased to overhaul everything for some CD sales). So the industry will shrink in size.
How much it will do so is an interesting topic. There is some cost to those downloading music illegally--a morality cost, so to speak, that is demonstrated by a preference to legal ownership rather than illegal, holding all else the same. It's just that for many that cost is less than the typical sale price of a CD, or $15. Universal sees that logic and reduced prices so that CDs can be sold for less than $10. Will that be less than the 'morality cost' for a significant number of people? Maybe--we'll see soon enough. If it is, it will mean that the industry will not have to shrink dramatically, just somewhat substantially.
Frankly, I'm surprised that there have not been more attempts at adding value to retail CDs that can't be matched by downloading. Currently there's the morality cost, a jewel case, and a flimsy CD for added value. Not a whole lot. Maybe record companies could combat P2P by just making retail sales both cheaper and packed with higher value--booklets about the band's history, small discounts to concerts, or something else worthy. There's been noticeably little experimentation here.
Supposing that the morality cost is low, and that there are no viable value-added 'gimmicks' for retail CDs, I find your economic model for bands compelling. Record companies invest in their artists to sell CDs, so why shouldn't Pepsi invest in artists to sell bottles of Pepsi? Just like an artist's music is an intrinsic part of the worth of the CD, the artist's affiliation becomes an intrinsic worth of the Pepsi can. Combine it with gimmickry such as what you mention and that intrinsic worth only grows.
Or take it really far--securitize the pop star. Create an asset whose worth is determined by cash flow from brand sales. The artists start the band, so they initially receive 100% ownership. They may then sell shares of this asset for cash, much like a company. If the artist becomes popular, a market maker attracted by bid-ask spreads makes a market for the security.
In a world with nullified music copyright, record companies exist only to rent equipment and studios, financed by investors in the artists. However, their equivalent might surface as companies emerge whose main business is identifying promising artists and buying portions, reaping the cash flow. Below them, angel investors and VCs may invest in less-known regional artists in the hope of stardom.
There are, of course, big problems with this. Unlike normal companies, artists compete in a zero-sum game--there's only so much 'popularity' to distribute to different stars. Popularity is in itself extremely fickle and difficult to manage, creating huge risks for investors and therefore lowering prices on these securities. And, like today, most wealth would be concentrated at the top, since replication is free and consumers demand only a few top performers. But it would be a neat way to finance music while extricating today's recording industry. Your Pepsi example is similar to this, except for the multiple-owner securitization aspect.
Even if this were viable for music, though, it would be unlikely to work as well for movies, and would be completely nonoperative for authors. Movies involve many actors, creating an agent coordination problem among investors in actors, and with directors and the like it all becomes fairly messy. Authors on the other hand can't sell their affiliation because their affiliation has little value.
This is called economic rent. Typically, when consumers demand only the best (i.e., they want only the most famous pop diva music), and it is very inexpensive to duplicate the work of the best producer (TV, radio, CDs, etc), we see concentration of income among a few of the best and little for anyone else.
This is why most baseball players earn very little, except for a few who make millions, and why most actors make next to nothing except for a few making millions. In contrast, the best plumbers do not make extraordinarily more than mediocre ones, because their product is not easily duplicated, and most people are satisfied with a good plumber instead of the very best.
I don't quite understand what you intend to do to force a flatter income distribution for these sorts of professions. The reason they exist is because of what consumers demand and the fundamental economics of the business. The one way to do it is to make musicians more like plumbers by disallowing royalties from cheaply-produced media and forcing them to take all their revenue from scarce resources such as live performances. But that to me requires scrapping the concept of copyright, which would undermine much of our economy (rights to books, research, etc). Should artists and writers be denied any right to the duplication of their work?
Even if that were done, there would still be a wildly uneven income distribution, because the economic rent spills into other areas, such as selling the top pop star's name to help sell goods (I suspect Spears generates more income from the sale of her affiliation than her CD sales).
A lot of people believe that tariffs are usually bad, except when foreign governments are engaging in dumping operations. But even in this case, it is best for the country receiving the dumped goods to pursue free trade. Why?
Suppose there is a chip that costs the Korean manufacturer $40 to produce and sell in America. However, they sell it for only $30 in America, collecting the $10 difference in subsidies from the Korean government. Two things happen. First, American suppliers of similar chips are priced out of the market. Second, there is a value transfer from Korea to the United States of $10 per chip. Essentially, Korean taxpayers are giving American citizens $10 per chip they sell! American consumers receive a $40 product with a $10 rebate from Korean taxpayers. The United States usurps value from Korea, enriching America. The excess consumer savings--$10 per chip--is then spent elsewhere in the economy, or invested.
In the short run, there are some discomforts due to domestic economic shifts toward more efficient operations, away from the dumped market. In the long run, the subsidization makes up for it.
In summary, we ought to encourage dumping operations as much as possible. What more could we ask for than fools willing to subsidize a product for our consumption, putting money in our wallets?
I absolutely agree. Like you, when I was younger, I was reasonably good with Unix. Not as good as some, but reasonably good. For a long time, I thought that due to my abilities with computers, I'd go into a career of computer engineering. As it turned out, a little while before I was accepted at Northwestern I gave that up and decided I preferred investment management, something that requires a high ability to think well ( = a liberal arts education) rather than specific knowledge, since that specific knowledge is usually gained through a combination of an MBA and experience. Investment management draws on a huge, broad swath of knowledge--everything from economics, history, philosophy, political science, and more.
Do I still like to toy with computers? Absolutely. But not enough to toil away at, day after day. Part of the reason I loved investing was that the ineptitude of others translated into opportunities for you (via mispricing), whereas in the computer field, the ineptitude of others merely makes your life difficult with buggy software and the like. Besides, the psyche of the human mind that controls the market seems more interesting to me than spending long hours typing thousands of lines of code, but that's just me.
In any case, many above-average people get interested in computers, and then fall into the trap that that's the field they ought to go into. The truth is that many bright people have a plethora of career choices that would make them happy, and it frequently is not computer engineering--even if that were their first love. Many of those combine computers and some other field--whether it be law, business, medicine, or others--to create a field that combines the pure logic of computers with the human psychology in the other fields.
RB:What that means is if you have 100 workers and 100 jobs, at any given moment 6 of them will be unemployed (going to school, bumming around Europe, dropping a kid, "finding themselves", or just jerking off).
bun: Any economist will also tell you that people going to school or bumming around Europe are not considered "unemployed."
autopr0n: No shit, dumbass. If they were the unemployment rate in this country would be about 55% Not 6. Notice the person you are replying to said 'workers' not 'people'
People who are "bumming around Europe," "going to school," "dropping a kid," "finding themselves," or "just jerking off," are typically not looking for full time work. Therefore, the majority of them would not be included in government unemployment statistics. Calling them "workers" was probably an error on behalf of Robber--not a major one, but an error nonetheless. Those unemployed but looking for work, as another poster noted, are not frolicking about in Europe. They are spending day in and day out beating the streets for a job.
Having said that, I'm not sure I understand your rabid frothing at the mouth. Mature a little and learn to treat people with dignity, because if you don't, you won't get any.
the capital system is, by definition, and efficient market. all company news is built into the current stock price, therefore what you are really paying for when buying a stock is the expectation that the company will prosper in the future.
That system is called the Efficient Market Theory. The strong version--which says that the stock price includes all information that is knowable about the company--is dead wrong. It's utter bullshit from some economic academics with their noses shoved too far into their books to look at what's actually happening. In fact, there's this little investment strategy used by some well known people--Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham--that depends on that theory being wrong. That is, that the current price of a security does not match its intrinsic value. It is called value investing. The basic strategy is that of buying companies (or parts thereof) for less than they are worth. It tends to work quite well. It's a strategy that people understand when going to garage sales, but they for some reason cannot apply the same idea to the sale of corporate stock.
Those who are agnostic are not afraid of hell. They recognize what they cannot know. In some ways, the atheists are just as dogmatic as the religious folk; the difference being that their story is less complex, and, given a total lack of evidence, probably more correct. But not proven correct.
Probably, there is no invisible guy who knows what I do all the time. But I cannot conclusively know that--so I am agnostic, but ask me about probabilities between, say, the Christian belief and the Atheist belief, and I'll say that the Atheist belief has a much higher chance of being correct. But I can't know that.
Same with evolution. I don't know that evolution is completely correct, but it looks a hell of a lot more credible than any theory, and, in my opinion, has a much higher probability of being correct. I cannot know, since this emergent phenomena cannot be conclusively proven. I'd wager a bet that it's good though, and that's what a lot of science is about.
So, no, agnosticism is not hedging bets. It's an admission of ignorance--ignorance that both the atheists and Xtians by necessity have (no conclusive proof either way) but refuse to admit. Going beyond generic labels, though, most agnostics will tell you that they'd bet a week's paycheck on the theory that there's some invisible guy up there is incorrect. The alternative is highly unlikely.
There's nothing wrong with not knowing something. That doesn't prohibit educated guessing, but one should be aware of what one does and does not conclusively know. Most social decisions--such as whether to teach evolution--should be based on educated guessing (probabilities) given that society is inherently unquantifiable. The rational probabilities are that evolution is correct, after looking at the alternative "theories" and the supporting evidence behind evolution, and, given those high probabilities, should be taught in schools along with the theory of gravity.
" "2) hiring someone is a longer-term commitment, and it's not necessarily clear yet that the economy has picked up for good."
shit, what world/drug are you on?"
Exactly what don't you understand about what he said? If it's about the uncertainty regarding whether the economy has any more shoes to drop, you are not a very good student of economic history. Many recessions have a mild initial dip, such as this one, then recover a bit as inventory is depleted and manufacturing starts, and then demand falls out and the real recession begins. Most of the time few people had a clue that a "double dip" would happen, and many at the point of recovery from the first dip predicted that there would be no more economic trouble for a while.
Read up before you lash out.
The reason patents increase the wealth of the corporate patent holder is that it excludes competitors from using the same method. It creates a temporary monopoly on the method, thus allowing the patent holder to increase prices to the point of revenue maximization instead of cost + profit margin typical of the industry.
As per reverse engineering, it is usually significantly less expensive to reverse engineer an item and produce it cheaply rather than develop it on one's own. See pharmaceutical drugs, and chips. I guarantee you it is easier (cheaper) to crack open a chip and pull out an atomic microscope and figure out how it is done than to develop the chip yourself.
In your example, it is highly unlikely that IBM would sell the information that would create competitors. That's bad business. Instead, more "trade secrets" would be created instead of patents.
The country was not created to "make everyone's life a little easer," but freedom as mentioned was part of it.
"But once the initial investment has been recovered it should be released so that the technology can grow and become cheaper."
Several problems: 1) accounting for the amount of the initial investment; 2) it severely limits profitability of the investment. A profit margin of 2%, resulting from its near elimination after the patent is eliminated and manufacturing costs reside just below selling costs, is not good enough for businesses. If it cannot fetch a profit margin of at least 15-20%, they will invest it elsewhere--and not in research.
I always get annoyed at the terminology of "30 billion dollars evaporating" from market capitalizations. Is the current company's market cap $30 billion less than it was? Yes. Is the company worth $30 billion less? Hell no. Company analysis reveals that (except some more debt than would be nice, though it is serviceable by cash flows) the company is fairly healthy with some short term problems. Using discounted cash flows, the company is probably worth more like $35-40 per share. That's significantly above the $17-$20 it trades at now. That's why a lot of good fund managers have been buying it recently (Bill Miller & the Clipper Fund analysts).
Remember that the company's value may at times have little to do with their price. That's how you make money in the market--buying companies that are worth more than their price, with value being defined as the discounted future earnings of the company (or cash flows if you're pedantic).
So when a big company's price goes down a bit, but the basic business is more or less the same value, it isn't a bad thing for shareholders. If anything, it's a good thing. It provides an opportunity to purchase more shares at a discounted price, before the business's price increases again.
Sometimes, of course, the company's price may decrease for a good reason, if the company is becoming increasingly unhealthy and is unlikely to recover for more than 5 years or perhaps never.
Enron has committed many crimes. By no standard have they acted legally in the past decade (and beyond).
One example: Enron would treat the volume of a trade as pure revenue. For example, if they bought a resource for $90, and then sold it for $100, they counted the $100 as revenue instead of the difference of $10. That's blatantly illegal; it violates GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and therefore SEC regulations.
But furthermore, the company created contracts with subsidiaries in which a loss by the subsidiary would require that the subsidiary pay Enron an amount equal to the loss; however, if the subsidiary had positive earnings, then Enron would count it in their corporate financial data. Very, very illegal.
Enron has had a rich history, full of illegal business transactions and financial deals. Enron did indeed push the law, but it was pushed so hard it shattered. Several times. Mach 3 sonic shock kind of shattered. Enron and its executives had no respect for the law.
Sure, Windows does the job, I run it at home; but if this article proves that End User X, dumb as a post, doesn't mind KDE (I'd use it daily if my audio-apps ran in *nix), force it on em!
Many professions suffer from extreme arrogance--doctors, lawyers, and computer programmers alike. They assume that because they have the knowledge, those that don't must therefore be less intelligent.
Personally, I'd like to see arrogant schmucks like you take on the work that these second-class citizens you so often denigrate perform. Experience is the best remedy for those too close-minded to understand the viewpoint of another human being in another profession.
Instead of insulting the value of a fellow human's mind, perhaps you intended to point out KDE's proficiency as an interface for those lacking hours of spare time to learn an interface inside and out. That would be very valid sentiment.
Instead, you take it upon yourself to liken the other person's intelligence to that of a post. I wonder if this is merely an attempt to differentiate yourself from the populace that uses Windows just like you do, to proclaim that you are with the small group proficient in Linux and this somehow demonstrates superiority. I don't know what it is, and I won't spend significant amounts of time contemplating what your (and many others') problem is, but what I have figured out is that it sure doesn't help out the computing profession's image.
You tarnish the image as badly as a hypocritical, arrogant lawyer lambasting the peasants of the world for their misunderstandings of the law's intricate structure.
The problem is not the fact that Microsoft is bundling, as evidenced by the acceptance of RH et al.'s approach. The problem is in who makes the software that is bundled. Ask yourself that and you'll end up with two different questions depending on which company is considered.
In one, the OS is leveraged to promote the same company's products in an anticompetitive (see Jackson's upheld FOF and COL) method. In the other, the distribution is leveraged to promote software made by someone else, which violates nothing and in total amounts to slightly less than BFD.
The vast majority of security vulnerabilities are buffer overflows. This latest vulnerability extends this status quo. There are technologies out there that prevent this, however, almost all of these technologies slow down the system in some way or another. Examples include languages that allow dynamically sized arrays and other preventative measures.
CPU speed is growing such that it would appear that we could take a speed hit for increased security. Is it coming down to the fact that various organizations would rather market a fast webserver at the expense of a secure one? The $64,000 question is why the industry has not moved towards safer technologies that prevent these security holes.
Not that Microsoft is incredibly innovative on the security front, but they're hardly the only culprit. Many others rely on unsafe languages and techniques that allow these vulnerabilities to leak through.
When will it end? Is there any incentive to end?
Last weekend, most of the team gathered at the horse pasture in northern Montgomery County lent by veteran aviator Beecher Butts, 88, whose charity has prompted the modelers to name their plane "The Spirit of Butts Farm."
Hope the wind's aroma isn't too frightening!
FreeBSD on the other hand aims to be a full featured Unix just like Linux does. So the question is, what does FreeBSD do better than Linux? Is it faster, more stable, better under high loads?
The truth is I don't know how things are now, but I do know that as time goes by Linux will pull ahead in these areas because it is where most people are putting their attention. Companies like IBM, SGI, HP, etc. are all working on Linux, making it better. The pace of development will only increase as Linux further penetrates various markets.
And then:
Religion stops a thinking mind.
A disjunct between two suffering minds inhabiting the same small head?
GNOME can be made to run on anything: Linux, BSD, commercial UNIX, even Windows.
GTK runs on Windows, Gnome does not.
But it's gonna be GNOME.
GNOME and KDE are both far from consistently innovative. Maybe one day one of the two projects will churn out something that is different, something that hasn't been done before or something that combines a lot of old ideas into a fresh one. An idea that lets the user work faster, an idea that makes the developer sit in their chair and ponder why they hadn't thought of that before. Not that the two projects aren't of high quality; they just aren't particularly innovative. Neither is Microsoft. GNOME and KDE mostly seem to be decent copies of a mediocre copy. Note how KDE/GNOME implementation isn't even as advanced as NextStep was ten years ago. For some reason, the innovative companies always seem to be in financial trouble. Something about creative manic depression in the foundation of the company, instability reverberating throughout the company's Benjamins. They die frequently, or, like Apple, are merely predicted to die frequently.
The former Mac developers at Eazel are working to make a GNOME environment every bit as slick and polished as an Apple environment.
Eazel is dead.
Both of the main desktop environment projects depress me because of their ignorance of fundamental rules of UI design; e.g. Fitz's Law. Not that they aren't alone, it seems most commercial software ignores it as well.
One reason I appreciate projects like GnuStep is that they chose to copy something that was actually really cool.
I'd rather not be entirely pessimistic, though. For example, I think KDE's kio system is advanced--such as Konqueror's ability to view a POP3 mailbox with minimum additional hassle, just through the use of an existing kio method for POP3. Gnome has other noteworthy features. They aren't totally stagnant--while I feel they are somewhat stagnant on pure UI stuff, as far as architecture both projects conduct some interesting experiments and demonstrate advances.
Commercial software, when done by bright and dedicated people and managed by people with a clue, tends to produce software that explores new ideas more commonly than OSS does. If nothing else, OSS provides a more robust implementation of said creativity.
Bush should actually be putting more money towards deficate, not tax cuts, and keep the money flowing to science research.
Whoah there. That's phonetically similar to something you probably didn't intend. Are you implying that Dubya is going to cause the almight dung to hit the proverbial fan?
Though I can agree that the nation could use a few more nuclear public bathrooms.
Internet Explorer 5 is probably the most standards compliant browser ever made. Mozilla is doing a fine job, however it may still be debatable which one supports the standard more fully (after Moz is out of beta, of course).
Not all Microsoft products are susceptible to slight breakage in standards compliance. Their browser is exactly opposite of that.
Thanks for both the posters above me for showing this. It has widened my view of what programming languages are all about, although I didn't really consider myself close-minded before (I never ruthlessly advocated one language for no apparent reason). It has also shown me language options that I had not even considered before, and that quite possibly are more important than the language I'd actually use if for no other reason than to understand the other paradigms of computer language.
Either compare two engine's emissions, or compare the entire industry consumption related to the manufacture of the fuel the engines need, but do not compare on one hand the energy cost of an internal combustion engine and on the other hand the entire industry cost of electric motor-based engines.
The calculations done that supposedly demonstrate a five-fold decrease of efficiency in electric motors would turn out very differently had both the electric motor and the engine been compared fairly - that is, compare the power plants, transmission etc. of the electric engine against not only the gasoline engine but also the entire industry that supports it. This includes the gargantuan Alaskan pipeline that consumes massive resources to keep it active, it includes the large refineries that work twenty-four hours a day to provide refined fuel, it includes the massive ships that carry the petroleum across the seas, and it includes the ground transportation of this fuel to consumer-usable sites (ie, gas stations). All of the costs in manufacturing this fuel must be included if it is included with the electric alternative. Although I cannot provide numbers, I would suspect that this comparison would be much less impressive, perhaps even impressive the other way, when the comparison is modified to provide a fair view of both sides of the industry, as well as the engine itself.
Those figures would provide a more accurate view of reality.
What, you think that Intel doesn't charge for USB? That only Apple does these things? Sorry, the only main opponent of Firewire was Intel, because Intel likes escaping royalty charges with the Not Invented Here syndrome. Everybody else pays similar royalty fees whether it comes from Apple or Intel.
That thing about ownership is just marketing FUD put out by Intel.
When it breaks, however, it produces enough energy to not only repair itself, but also to provide the battery with even more power. This works beautifully as long as it wasn't the battery that broke. I asked the salesman about the physical impossibility of this, and he replied that the extra energy came from ground thermals. I don't go to that dealership anymore.
Aside from the obvious environmental benefits, as well as the benefits you've outlined above, there are some benefits that the typical go-fast guy would like. Namely, electric motors can generate a lotof torque at low RPM speeds. Take the Toyota Prius, a hybrid that runs mostly on electricity, as an example. At some low RPM (sorry, can't remember the number), it generates around 240 ft-lbs of torque. That is about as much as the Toyota Camry, and that class of vehicles, but with a drastically smaller engine in a smaller car. As a result, that thing moves at low speed acceleration.
I've heard, however, that it's not quite as eager at higher RPM speeds (eg freeway). I'm sure that could be remedied in future designs, with better technology, but today's Prius is quite a nice little machine. Perfect city vehicle, it gets better MPG (around 55) in city driving than on the highway. It also uses flywheels to store energy garnered from regenerative breaking. Mmm.