But, if you want to save $2K and achieve the same result...
1. Put Lance in an envelope with the sender's address as "Space Station, Earh Orbit" 2. Mail him to your own address 3. Refuse to accept him and send him back to the post office 4. The PO will send the mail back to the original sender, i.e. the Space Station
Re:Market morphology?
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yesterday's news about Dell seems relevant to your point.
An excerpt from the above link:
In particular, Dell appears to be part of the explanation for the recent poor performance by Sun, the leading provider of network servers. For years, the company's systems -- running a proprietary version of Unix -- have been the market leader, but lately servers from Dell and others running Windows or open-source Linux have been eating into Sun's market. Dell said its server shipments rose by 28 per cent, more than five times the growth experienced by the server market overall.
Although it's true that Dell had an exceptional quarter and most of its growth came from non-server related services, the continuoous erosion of the Sun's hold on the server market is indicated by Dell's (and others') stronger performance in the same sector. But, hey, if Cringley is right, Sun still has five more years to recapture their market share and introduce technological innovations other than Java.
I Am Not An Economist, so the second chapter was challenging for me, I must confess. However, I think I get the gist of the paper's argument. And, if I do, I admit I am (pleasantly) shocked by its "innovative" argument, which opened my eyes somewhat. Of particular interest to the slashdot audience, I believe, is probably the section titled, "The First-Mover Advantage" on pages 24-28 of the second chapter. These first-mover advantages, which the current patent law intends to secure through the granting of temporary monopoly to innovators, all apply in the absence of the IP law.
the de facto monopoly of the innovation for a time -- at least until reprodcution by competition
the economic advantage of being the only one to anticipate the impact of the innovation, e.g. stock trade, captial investment, etc.
the consumers' preference for the original work
the sale of advertising space in the innovation, e.g. Linus Torvalds and Transmeta, the Bond movies, etc.
In other words, absent the present incentive model of temporary monopoly to an innovation, innovators will continue to innovate, given that they can recoup the "sunken cost" of initial research. Am I convinced that the above conditions exist for innovators as "first-movers"? Yes. And, as the paper points out, there might be other ingenious ways to take advantage of new ideas in the absence of the IP law.
However, I do see the abolition of the current IP law having a radical impact on the way the society functions. First off, product-placement in "copyright" works will increase dramatically, until indeed another innovative method of extracting the initial investment cost is found. Imagine each and every single song you hear on the radio having some kind of reference to Pepsi or Marlboro. What a trade-off! Secondly, related to the first point, the advertising industry will come to exert an even greater control over musicians, software programmers, writers than they do now. In other words, if you want to make money off your work, you better do what the advertisers say. Ugh, Gator comes to mind here...
I was going to go on about the fantasy list of impacts the abolition of the IP law would have on our world, but I just remembered a question that I had and the paper didn't answer. So I will just finish this post by posing that question and, hopefully, engage some of you in a debate of sort about it as well. My question is this: in the entertainment industry (publishing, music, film, etc.) wouldn't the initial impulse to control the distribution/reproduction channel be too great to ignore? This is happening to some extent already (AOL Time, invasive P2P software) and, were the proposal of the paper to be adopted, we may see the privatization/regulation of the Internet along the line of what China is doing or the cable TV industry. This, to me, would be equally bad as (if not even worse than) the ridiculuous extension of copyright to Disney.
Man, I haven't been this excited about the IP law in a while. I didn't really think of a way to get around the economic incentive argument for the IP law before tonight...
You said: "NAW, the aliens just like fields with tracks and the symmetry of aligned patterns!"
Well, the modern day farmers do too, you know. With irrigation and tractors, as you noted, there will always be such symmetrical tracks on any given field of crops. Try finding one without such tracks.
But you are right. The pranksters might be using them as "the ingress and reference point". But the tracks' presence doesn't add much evidence to either the skeptic's case or the believer's.
I hate to be a typical liberal with the "nothing's as simple as that" message, but I can't help it.:)
My take on this current "crisis" is that North Korea's been building nukes (or trying to build nukes, depending on whether you buy CIA's report) largely for defensive purposes. Let's indulge the following for a minute.
The joint Team Spirit exercise by South Korean and US forces between 1976 and 1993 was halted in 1994 in an effort to dissuade North Korea from continuing its nuclear development. During these 17 years, however, North Korea had to *annually* find itself in the cross-hair of the most advanced military weapons in the world. Though no real aggression was done, you have to wonder what psychological damage these "excercises" wreaked on North Korean sense of its security. Given the receding Chinese military support for its security, North Korea understandably (albeit dangerously) wants some form of military safeguard against the perceived threat from the US and South Korea. The 37,000 US troops stationed in Seoul doesn't help the situation from their perspective, I'm sure.
I'm not defending either Kim Jong-Il's ill treatment of his critics or his dogmatic insistence on sticking to failed policies of communism. I merely want to point out the complexity of the current situation. As long as North Korea perceives the US as a potential aggressor (which the US's past actions somewhat justify) it cannot help but divert a large portion of its limited resources into maintaining its armed forces while simultaneously persuing the only guarantee against the *perceived* American nuclear threat, i.e. its own nuclear program. Given its already meager resources, there's no way they can have a productive economy of any kind under these circumstances...
South Korea's prosperity came at the heavy price of decades of US-friendly military dictatorship, and I'm much more prone to credit South Korea's "fortune" in allying itself with the US, its economy, and its powerful military forces than South Korea's commitment to capitalism and foreign trade. Of course, South Koreans worked hard to get where they are. I'm not denying that. At the same time, one cannot overlook the geo-political fortune that their alliance with the US and the Western world has afforded them. In the same vein, neither can we overlook the geo-political misfortune that got North Korean into this paranoid *Cold-War* arms race with which few other countries are still engaged. If they didn't see the need to maintain one-million-strong army and their nuclear program(s), North Koreans might have some resources left over to feed their people and develop their economy. In fact, that's exactly what they appear to want out of the US at the moment. And they have also been on the track to some semblance of economic recovery through their "special economic zones" initiative in Shinuiju and Kaesong.
Yeah, I'm rambling now... But I worry that a rather simplistic "good vs. evil" global paradigm that seems to dominate much of the current American foreign policy might create more problems than solve them.
Instead of repeating, I will add to (and disagree in part with) what Zathrus said. Sure, legalese serves a need, the need to be precise. But precision and intelligibility (i.e. clarity) are not mutually exclusive. This is the meat of my argument. They *are* compatible, and one must not be sacrificed for the sake of the other in legal documents. Without much further ado in this regard, let me simply offer you a much better argument already made by someone else.
As for my disagreement with Zathrus, I don't think that the evil conspiracy by selfish (and insecure) lawyers is behind the use of legalese. The need for precision *and* the lawyers' laziness seem more likely reasons to me. Plain and simple, it would take more time for the American Airline's team of lawyers to come up with more intelligible yet equally precise EULA. They chose not to spend that extra time, and that's what bothers me.
Actually, they probably cannot enforce that, if it comes to it. For a reference, see the recent ruling for Comb v. PayPal. Basically, you cannot make end users give up their basic legal rights through EULA, etc., if I understand the ruling correctly. But, hey, IANAL.
Somewhat off-topic, it really bothers me that EULAs and most legal documents are, well, written in abstruse legalese. Is anyone aware of a movement in the US to limit the use of complex legalese in favor of plain engligh? I have found the following sites on google, but they are mostly for other countries -- except one that refers to the Michigan Bar effort.
UK: www.plainenglish.co.uk/law.html
India: http://www.globallawreview.com/lr8.html
Michigan Bar: http://www.michbar.org/committees/penglish/columns/131.html
From the landmark Sony case: Thus, although every commercial use of copyrighted material is presumptively an unfair exploitation of the monopoly privilege that belongs to the owner of the copyright, noncommercial uses are a different matter. A challenge to a noncommercial use of a copyrighted work requires proof either that the particular use is harmful, or that if it should become widespread, it would adversely affect the potential market for the copyrighted work. Actual present harm need not be shown; such a requirement would leave the copyright holder with no defense against predictable damage. Nor is it necessary to show with certainty that future harm will result. What is necessary is a showing by a preponderance of the evidence that some meaningful likelihood of future harm exists. If the intended use is for commercial gain, that likelihood may be presumed. But if it is for a noncommercial purpose, the likelihood must be demonstrated 464 U.S. 417
IANAL, so I'm probably completely mistaken... but here it goes. It seems to me that demonstrating that P2P technology is "for commercial gain" would be quite difficult. Then, assuming that P2P falls under "not for commercial purpose" case of the above ruling, **AA indeed bears the responsibility to show "by a preponderance of the evidence that some meaningful likelihood of future harm exists". This sounds like a MIGHTY ambiguous requirement... BUT I believe the above requirement falls just short of the demand you put on **AA. They don't have to show that filesharing "deinitely" hurts sales. They merely have to show "by a preponderance of the evidence" that there can be a substantial harm to their business in the future. And some people's "gut feeling" when supported by "a preponderance of evidence" (BY WHOSE F**KING STANDARD!?!?...sorry) would indeed be enough to enact and enforce laws... And, of course, since IANAL, I must be wrong, right?
due to someone perhaps being in public schools reading this I dare not say Heaven
Excuse my hostility, but comments like this annoy me. When will people realize that shoving God down one's throat is exactly like prohibiting public mention of God?
Freedom of speech goes both ways. Do not force one to speak or not speak. Say Heaven or God or whatever strikes your fancy, but don't force others to say it with you. Is that such a hard concept to grasp?
A couple of other people suggested tcwo.com, and I tend to agree. After an extensive research done about a week ago, I came up with the following result for my needs. By the way, they don't charge for shipping or tax, so what you see is what you get. on their web site. In the end, when you factor shipping and fax into the equation, tcwo.com beats newegg.com on nearly every single price.
TOTAL (w/ tax and shipping, w/o any software): $1943.63 (as of June, 17 2002)
I couldn't find what I wanted for CDRW and monitor on tcwo.com. Also, GPUs are a lot cheaper (up to %50) on some other sites, such as www.essencompu.com and compuplus.com.
*Dislaimer: I'm not affilicated in any way with tcwo.com, nor do I make any claim for accuracy of the prices listed above. Check them out yourself. That's why I linked them to actual price pages.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think this is? A joke?
But, if you want to save $2K and achieve the same result...
1. Put Lance in an envelope with the sender's address as "Space Station, Earh Orbit"
2. Mail him to your own address
3. Refuse to accept him and send him back to the post office
4. The PO will send the mail back to the original sender, i.e. the Space Station
Yesterday's news about Dell seems relevant to your point.
An excerpt from the above link:
In particular, Dell appears to be part of the explanation for the recent poor performance by Sun, the leading provider of network servers. For years, the company's systems -- running a proprietary version of Unix -- have been the market leader, but lately servers from Dell and others running Windows or open-source Linux have been eating into Sun's market. Dell said its server shipments rose by 28 per cent, more than five times the growth experienced by the server market overall.
Although it's true that Dell had an exceptional quarter and most of its growth came from non-server related services, the continuoous erosion of the Sun's hold on the server market is indicated by Dell's (and others') stronger performance in the same sector. But, hey, if Cringley is right, Sun still has five more years to recapture their market share and introduce technological innovations other than Java.
I Am Not An Economist, so the second chapter was challenging for me, I must confess. However, I think I get the gist of the paper's argument. And, if I do, I admit I am (pleasantly) shocked by its "innovative" argument, which opened my eyes somewhat. Of particular interest to the slashdot audience, I believe, is probably the section titled, "The First-Mover Advantage" on pages 24-28 of the second chapter. These first-mover advantages, which the current patent law intends to secure through the granting of temporary monopoly to innovators, all apply in the absence of the IP law.
In other words, absent the present incentive model of temporary monopoly to an innovation, innovators will continue to innovate, given that they can recoup the "sunken cost" of initial research. Am I convinced that the above conditions exist for innovators as "first-movers"? Yes. And, as the paper points out, there might be other ingenious ways to take advantage of new ideas in the absence of the IP law.
However, I do see the abolition of the current IP law having a radical impact on the way the society functions. First off, product-placement in "copyright" works will increase dramatically, until indeed another innovative method of extracting the initial investment cost is found. Imagine each and every single song you hear on the radio having some kind of reference to Pepsi or Marlboro. What a trade-off! Secondly, related to the first point, the advertising industry will come to exert an even greater control over musicians, software programmers, writers than they do now. In other words, if you want to make money off your work, you better do what the advertisers say. Ugh, Gator comes to mind here...
I was going to go on about the fantasy list of impacts the abolition of the IP law would have on our world, but I just remembered a question that I had and the paper didn't answer. So I will just finish this post by posing that question and, hopefully, engage some of you in a debate of sort about it as well. My question is this: in the entertainment industry (publishing, music, film, etc.) wouldn't the initial impulse to control the distribution/reproduction channel be too great to ignore? This is happening to some extent already (AOL Time, invasive P2P software) and, were the proposal of the paper to be adopted, we may see the privatization/regulation of the Internet along the line of what China is doing or the cable TV industry. This, to me, would be equally bad as (if not even worse than) the ridiculuous extension of copyright to Disney.
Man, I haven't been this excited about the IP law in a while. I didn't really think of a way to get around the economic incentive argument for the IP law before tonight...
You said: "NAW, the aliens just like fields with tracks and the symmetry of aligned patterns!"
Well, the modern day farmers do too, you know. With irrigation and tractors, as you noted, there will always be such symmetrical tracks on any given field of crops. Try finding one without such tracks.
But you are right. The pranksters might be using them as "the ingress and reference point". But the tracks' presence doesn't add much evidence to either the skeptic's case or the believer's.
DISCLAIMER: *DEFINITELY* offtopic
:)
I hate to be a typical liberal with the "nothing's as simple as that" message, but I can't help it.
My take on this current "crisis" is that North Korea's been building nukes (or trying to build nukes, depending on whether you buy CIA's report) largely for defensive purposes. Let's indulge the following for a minute.
The joint Team Spirit exercise by South Korean and US forces between 1976 and 1993 was halted in 1994 in an effort to dissuade North Korea from continuing its nuclear development. During these 17 years, however, North Korea had to *annually* find itself in the cross-hair of the most advanced military weapons in the world. Though no real aggression was done, you have to wonder what psychological damage these "excercises" wreaked on North Korean sense of its security. Given the receding Chinese military support for its security, North Korea understandably (albeit dangerously) wants some form of military safeguard against the perceived threat from the US and South Korea. The 37,000 US troops stationed in Seoul doesn't help the situation from their perspective, I'm sure.
I'm not defending either Kim Jong-Il's ill treatment of his critics or his dogmatic insistence on sticking to failed policies of communism. I merely want to point out the complexity of the current situation. As long as North Korea perceives the US as a potential aggressor (which the US's past actions somewhat justify) it cannot help but divert a large portion of its limited resources into maintaining its armed forces while simultaneously persuing the only guarantee against the *perceived* American nuclear threat, i.e. its own nuclear program. Given its already meager resources, there's no way they can have a productive economy of any kind under these circumstances...
South Korea's prosperity came at the heavy price of decades of US-friendly military dictatorship, and I'm much more prone to credit South Korea's "fortune" in allying itself with the US, its economy, and its powerful military forces than South Korea's commitment to capitalism and foreign trade. Of course, South Koreans worked hard to get where they are. I'm not denying that. At the same time, one cannot overlook the geo-political fortune that their alliance with the US and the Western world has afforded them. In the same vein, neither can we overlook the geo-political misfortune that got North Korean into this paranoid *Cold-War* arms race with which few other countries are still engaged. If they didn't see the need to maintain one-million-strong army and their nuclear program(s), North Koreans might have some resources left over to feed their people and develop their economy. In fact, that's exactly what they appear to want out of the US at the moment. And they have also been on the track to some semblance of economic recovery through their "special economic zones" initiative in Shinuiju and Kaesong.
Yeah, I'm rambling now... But I worry that a rather simplistic "good vs. evil" global paradigm that seems to dominate much of the current American foreign policy might create more problems than solve them.
Instead of repeating, I will add to (and disagree in part with) what Zathrus said. Sure, legalese serves a need, the need to be precise. But precision and intelligibility (i.e. clarity) are not mutually exclusive. This is the meat of my argument. They *are* compatible, and one must not be sacrificed for the sake of the other in legal documents. Without much further ado in this regard, let me simply offer you a much better argument already made by someone else.
As for my disagreement with Zathrus, I don't think that the evil conspiracy by selfish (and insecure) lawyers is behind the use of legalese. The need for precision *and* the lawyers' laziness seem more likely reasons to me. Plain and simple, it would take more time for the American Airline's team of lawyers to come up with more intelligible yet equally precise EULA. They chose not to spend that extra time, and that's what bothers me.
From the landmark Sony case:
Thus, although every commercial use of copyrighted material is presumptively an unfair exploitation of the monopoly privilege that belongs to the owner of the copyright, noncommercial uses are a different matter. A challenge to a noncommercial use of a copyrighted work requires proof either that the particular use is harmful, or that if it should become widespread, it would adversely affect the potential market for the copyrighted work. Actual present harm need not be shown; such a requirement would leave the copyright holder with no defense against predictable damage. Nor is it necessary to show with certainty that future harm will result. What is necessary is a showing by a preponderance of the evidence that some meaningful likelihood of future harm exists. If the intended use is for commercial gain, that likelihood may be presumed. But if it is for a noncommercial purpose, the likelihood must be demonstrated 464 U.S. 417
IANAL, so I'm probably completely mistaken... but here it goes. It seems to me that demonstrating that P2P technology is "for commercial gain" would be quite difficult. Then, assuming that P2P falls under "not for commercial purpose" case of the above ruling, **AA indeed bears the responsibility to show "by a preponderance of the evidence that some meaningful likelihood of future harm exists". This sounds like a MIGHTY ambiguous requirement... BUT I believe the above requirement falls just short of the demand you put on **AA. They don't have to show that filesharing "deinitely" hurts sales. They merely have to show "by a preponderance of the evidence" that there can be a substantial harm to their business in the future. And some people's "gut feeling" when supported by "a preponderance of evidence" (BY WHOSE F**KING STANDARD!?!? ...sorry) would indeed be enough to enact and enforce laws... And, of course, since IANAL, I must be wrong, right?
due to someone perhaps being in public schools reading this I dare not say Heaven
Excuse my hostility, but comments like this annoy me. When will people realize that shoving God down one's throat is exactly like prohibiting public mention of God?
Freedom of speech goes both ways. Do not force one to speak or not speak. Say Heaven or God or whatever strikes your fancy, but don't force others to say it with you. Is that such a hard concept to grasp?
A couple of other people suggested tcwo.com, and I tend to agree. After an extensive research done about a week ago, I came up with the following result for my needs. By the way, they don't charge for shipping or tax, so what you see is what you get. on their web site. In the end, when you factor shipping and fax into the equation, tcwo.com beats newegg.com on nearly every single price.
- CPU: Intel P4 2.26 533MHz FSB $279.00
- Case: Antec Perf. Plus1080 430W Beige $146.00
- MOBO: Asus P4B533E i845e DDR S/R/L/U2 (NIC integrated, FireWire integrated) $205.00
- HDD: Maxtor 80GB U133 7200 2MB version $117.00
- RAM: 512MB PC2700 333MHz $116.00
- Monitor: Hansol 19IN/18V 1600X1200 96KHZ 25MM 920D OSD MPRII DYNAFLAT $289.68. provantage.com
- GPU: Visiontek XTASY GeForce4 TI4600 AGP 128MB DDR (VIVO) $392.00
- Sound: Creative Labs Audigy X-Gamer 5.1 $89.00
- DVD: Samsung 16X DVD Retail $59.00
- CDRW: TDK VEloCD 40X/12X/48X EDIDE $133.95. compuplus.com
- Input Logitech Cordless Optical Mse/KB $79.00
- floppy: Beige 1.44 FDD $14.00
- Voice/Fax/Modem : USR v.90 56k voice/fax winmodem $24.00
- FireWire : integrated with MOBO
- NIC : integrated with MOBO
TOTAL (w/ tax and shipping, w/o any software): $1943.63 (as of June, 17 2002)I couldn't find what I wanted for CDRW and monitor on tcwo.com. Also, GPUs are a lot cheaper (up to %50) on some other sites, such as www.essencompu.com and compuplus.com.
*Dislaimer: I'm not affilicated in any way with tcwo.com, nor do I make any claim for accuracy of the prices listed above. Check them out yourself. That's why I linked them to actual price pages.