Her job is not to force her views and values down the public's throat, but to interpret the law as closely as the writers had in mind while trying to close the huge loopholes.
I disagree fundamentally. Some framers were slave owners who certainly did not have black voters in mind, and many probably didn't have women voters in mind. Why would you want society to be stuck in the minds of people who lived 200+ years ago, however ahead of their time they were?
Surely a Justice of the Supreme Court has a higher responsibility (hint: it's right in the job title) than you suggested.
So while I'm not sure that providing vastly greater power for the same price counts as 'innovation', I'd hardly say that the PC market is stagnant.
It is stagnant in the sense that most people now buy replacement computers when the old one breaks, instead of buying new hardware and software to do new (presumably exciting) things, or buying a computer for the first time. Replacement level sales means no growth, which means Wall Street slaps you down, which means you can't easily raise capital to innovate, which forms a vicious cycle.
most corporations and many people will try to evade taxes no matter how low they are.
Undoubtedly true, but it's a double-whammy in the third world, because governments tend to be corrupt and ineffective, which makes even otherwise honest people unwilling to pay taxes.
Sell one time to ten corps at $1K a pop, or sign yearly $500 support contracts to 40 corps, your choice...
You forget to mention that the former business model has a significant NRE with minimal per-copy costs, while the latter model requires hiring support staff for each of the 40 customers. A single engineer might be able to do the former as a profitable sideline, while 40 customers paying $500 each requires full-time positions for several people living in poverty.
You are, however, ignoring one problem on the other end. Copyright infringement is so cheap that it's not easy for publishers to compete, even if they were to price it "fairly". The iTunes Music Store is a successful example, but it was selling most of its songs at US$0.99 or so, which is cheap enough to make piracy seem like too much trouble. A textbook, even when reasonably priced, is not likely ever to be priced at a trivial sum.
I think the bigger problem is that each textbook in question is a little monopoly in the class you have to attend, which allows the publisher of that textbook to charge high prices. If courses were required to designate at least two or three textbooks from different publishers as "official", then we might see some price competition. Or, if professors were banned from unnecessarily requiring the newest edition, competition from earlier editions would serve a similar role in the market.
Ah, you're quite right, thanks for the correction. Somehow I misremembered that STCG was a lower rate. It still
irks my sense of fair play that they are equal, though.
Better yet, tax the earnings as gambling winnings, not capital gains. Unless they're actually investing (taking significant risks with capital) in the real economy, I don't see why we should reward them with a tax rate below normal income taxes from sweat-of-the-brow work.
There's a third option: I don't enjoy it, dickhead. I hate the language and since I have no pressing need to learn it or use it (other than a mild interest in Mac programming) I haven't bothered.
That's not a third option, that's the first possibility I mentioned: you didn't try very hard.
It's not that I don't understand it.
...which contradicts your "I just can't do it" statement. You can, in fact, do it. You just chose not to, which is not a moral judgement against you, so please dispense with the foul language.
Put another way, what I was trying to say is that if you wanted it more, you'd have figured it out, unless you're a lousy programmer. Objective C took me a few weeks of spare time to figure out, and it's much like any other tool.
The fact that Apple calls its lead tech PR staff, "Evangelists" is creepy on so many levels. . !
A quick search on linkedin.com shows me people working for Rovi, Sybase, OgilvyInteractive, Gryphon, Elgato, Adobe, Addictive Mobility, Microsoft, Prezi, Nokia, AOL, Mozilla, IBM, HP, and as you point out, Apple, with that word in their job titles. Perhaps you just don't get out much?
How many copies are there in the world of your 100-year-old books? What's the percentage of books published 100 years ago that have surviving copies to this day? One intriguing prospect of e-books is that storage is so cheap that we may not have to lose a substantial portion of our written culture because of the natural loss of paper books. We probably have the technology today to make a million back-ups of every book on Project Gutenberg with unused disk space.
DRM is certainly annoying, but in 100 years, I'm going to guess that it'll be trivially broken. I think students of history in 2110 would be appreciative of the volumes we can save for them by not putting our thoughts only on paper.
I have tried multiple times to get into Objective-C and Cocoa. I just can't do it and Objective-C is why. It's a shitty language with an even shittier syntax.
That just means you didn't try very hard, or worse, are just not a good programmer. Look, there are some 200,000 apps in Apple's store, most or all of which have at least some Objective C. I'm going to guess that this means tens of thousands of developers have been able to write and ship an app in Objective C.
This fact is itself not a defense of Objective C, by the way, as these tens of thousands may all hate it for all I know. The point, however, is that if you "just can't do it" while tens of thousands somehow manage, don't blame the tool just yet.
Cell phones can mess with ground towers due to the speeds at which the planes are moving
The other reason is that frequencies are reused, so that geographically-separate cells can assign the same frequency to different phone calls. When you're on a plane and your phone's transmission can be received in many cells, you risk interfering with another call if the frequency assigned to you is also concurrently assigned by another cell to another phone.
In many cases, you can run away from a knife fight, or fight back effectively with even just a good stick. Even if you fail, you're still more likely to create a crime scene with plenty of useful evidence to point to your killer. It's often useful and a sign of intelligence to think in the abstract ("everything is a weapon"), but once in a while you need to drop back to reality ("a gun is an excellent weapon, a can of soup not so much") when considering appropriate social policy. Similarly, not even defenders of the Second Amendment seem okay with not being able to own personal nuclear weapons, although it arguably falls under "arms", because degree matters.
Which is also why gun analogies for cell phones are inherently poor. Cell phones are very useful daily tools, while a gun might be a hobby or an occasional need (say, to defend yourself). So even if cell phones and guns somehow cause the same murder rate, we should still be more reluctant to ban cell phones than guns. Again, a question of degree.
Replacing copyrights with per-sale contracts is counterproductive. Instead of standard rights and violations, you'll have subtly different contract terms for each item of music, movie, or software that you buy. Maybe this movie cannot be played more than 10 times. Maybe that software can only be resold to non-profit organizations. Why would that be any better?
They're not a few random nutcases. They passed Proposition 8 in California to ban gay marriages. It's clear that the part of the country that wants to enforce its morals on other people is a big powerful chunk, and this chunk shouldn't get to call themselves "conservative".
Do look up what "permanent" and "self-sustained" actually means, when you get a minute. What would your intrepid colonists do when (not if) the solar panels break? If the answer is "order parts from Earth", then you fail at the exercise. My entire point is that "small" and "permanent, self-sustaining" are contradictory goals.
The colony could be thriving in 100 years without hundreds of billions thrown at it.
The Constellation program was projected by NASA to cost $230 billion through 2025, if we're still talking about "small, permanent, self-sustained human outpost on the Moon or Mars with technologies currently available". Even if we make the laughable premise that the projection is accurate, that's already hundreds of billions for the first quarter of your 100 years.
At the very least I'd plant a robotic greenhouse dome on Mars with wind turbines and solar panels to power it, let the robots gather CO2 Ice and Water Ice, and tend crops for a few seasons, watch the air scrubbers and water filters for problems remotely and if it all works send some bodies along to live there. They need a machine shop, underground living quarters.
Sounds like the first thing we need to do is build some smart robots that are tough enough to work on Mars, doesn't it?
I could argue that putting a small, permanent, self-sustained human outpost on the Moon or Mars is possible with technologies currently available.
By "self-sustained" do you mean the astronauts would be mining for fuel to keep the lights on? Even if they take along a nuclear reactor, that's going to run out at some point, too. Fact is, we're at the stage where we can put a few people in a small box on the Moon or on Mars at great expense, but they'll be reliant on the mother planet for energy and possibly even food.
Starting this year, insurance companies would be barred from denying coverage to children because of pre-existing conditions. Effective when the bill is signed, they will also be prevented from placing lifetime caps on policies, or from dropping a patient's insurance if he or she gets sick.
In the next three months, "high risk pools" will be established for those who who have pre-existing conditions, to provide safeguards until all the provisions are fully enacted.
Also this year, insurance companies would be required to cover preventive services, which includes such medical procedures as vaccines that are recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
By 2014, insurance companies will be prohibited from denying coverage to adult patients with pre-existing medical conditions or charging them more because of these conditions.
In a move that has made many college students and young Americans happy, the health care bill allows parents to keep their children on their insurance plan until the age of 26. That provision takes effect this year.
We're one natural disaster away from complete annhilation of our race. I'd kinda like to have at least a few people offworld just in case.
You're in fantasy land. How many people would you need off-Earth to sustain a viable human bloodline? All these people would need to be self-sustaining (because Earth would be destroyed in your scenario) on an alien planet, which means they have to grow food, mine for fuel, fix sophisticated tools, do everything all by themselves. Oh, and breathe air, so exactly which planet did you have in mind?
Oh, you don't have another planet yet. Maybe we should send out a lot of cheap probes to find a suitable planet, huh?
All this talk of "Unmanned missions are just as good!" is pretty unconvincing
Do you see any humans walking around on Mars? No? Well, the unmanned missions are already better. The total cost of the mission, including five extensions, comes to under a billion dollars. In contrast, NASA estimates the Constellation program to require $230 billion, and I'm sure you know how accurate such estimates are.
Now, I'm a supporter of manned missions, but I'm not interested in trophy missions that plant a flag and do little else. I agree that human flexibility on these missions are useful and important (especially if we're able to send experts like scientists instead of just pilots), but we're at the stage where we will end up expending all our resources just on a trophy mission to Mars, and I'd rather spend the money on building up science.
Oh, quite right. I had looked only at the "FACTS" you listed, and missed the steps. Indeed Alice would own copyright to the parts she wrote outside Bob's employment. Sorry for the distraction.
No, Alice owns nothing in your scenario, and has no standing to sue. Claire's copyright was violated if Bob distributes it outside GPL terms, so she can sue.
CDMA is only the better standard if the same geographic area didn't have to be covered with GSM as well. As it is, we're trying to cover the US with two incompatible standards, a horrible waste of precious spectrum and money.
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I disagree fundamentally. Some framers were slave owners who certainly did not have black voters in mind, and many probably didn't have women voters in mind. Why would you want society to be stuck in the minds of people who lived 200+ years ago, however ahead of their time they were?
Surely a Justice of the Supreme Court has a higher responsibility (hint: it's right in the job title) than you suggested.
It is stagnant in the sense that most people now buy replacement computers when the old one breaks, instead of buying new hardware and software to do new (presumably exciting) things, or buying a computer for the first time. Replacement level sales means no growth, which means Wall Street slaps you down, which means you can't easily raise capital to innovate, which forms a vicious cycle.
How would you compete with Google's own phone, then?
Undoubtedly true, but it's a double-whammy in the third world, because governments tend to be corrupt and ineffective, which makes even otherwise honest people unwilling to pay taxes.
You forget to mention that the former business model has a significant NRE with minimal per-copy costs, while the latter model requires hiring support staff for each of the 40 customers. A single engineer might be able to do the former as a profitable sideline, while 40 customers paying $500 each requires full-time positions for several people living in poverty.
You are, however, ignoring one problem on the other end. Copyright infringement is so cheap that it's not easy for publishers to compete, even if they were to price it "fairly". The iTunes Music Store is a successful example, but it was selling most of its songs at US$0.99 or so, which is cheap enough to make piracy seem like too much trouble. A textbook, even when reasonably priced, is not likely ever to be priced at a trivial sum.
I think the bigger problem is that each textbook in question is a little monopoly in the class you have to attend, which allows the publisher of that textbook to charge high prices. If courses were required to designate at least two or three textbooks from different publishers as "official", then we might see some price competition. Or, if professors were banned from unnecessarily requiring the newest edition, competition from earlier editions would serve a similar role in the market.
Ah, you're quite right, thanks for the correction. Somehow I misremembered that STCG was a lower rate. It still irks my sense of fair play that they are equal, though.
Better yet, tax the earnings as gambling winnings, not capital gains. Unless they're actually investing (taking significant risks with capital) in the real economy, I don't see why we should reward them with a tax rate below normal income taxes from sweat-of-the-brow work.
That's not a third option, that's the first possibility I mentioned: you didn't try very hard.
...which contradicts your "I just can't do it" statement. You can, in fact, do it. You just chose not to, which is not a moral judgement against you, so please dispense with the foul language.
Put another way, what I was trying to say is that if you wanted it more, you'd have figured it out, unless you're a lousy programmer. Objective C took me a few weeks of spare time to figure out, and it's much like any other tool.
A quick search on linkedin.com shows me people working for Rovi, Sybase, OgilvyInteractive, Gryphon, Elgato, Adobe, Addictive Mobility, Microsoft, Prezi, Nokia, AOL, Mozilla, IBM, HP, and as you point out, Apple, with that word in their job titles. Perhaps you just don't get out much?
How many copies are there in the world of your 100-year-old books? What's the percentage of books published 100 years ago that have surviving copies to this day? One intriguing prospect of e-books is that storage is so cheap that we may not have to lose a substantial portion of our written culture because of the natural loss of paper books. We probably have the technology today to make a million back-ups of every book on Project Gutenberg with unused disk space.
DRM is certainly annoying, but in 100 years, I'm going to guess that it'll be trivially broken. I think students of history in 2110 would be appreciative of the volumes we can save for them by not putting our thoughts only on paper.
That just means you didn't try very hard, or worse, are just not a good programmer. Look, there are some 200,000 apps in Apple's store, most or all of which have at least some Objective C. I'm going to guess that this means tens of thousands of developers have been able to write and ship an app in Objective C.
This fact is itself not a defense of Objective C, by the way, as these tens of thousands may all hate it for all I know. The point, however, is that if you "just can't do it" while tens of thousands somehow manage, don't blame the tool just yet.
The other reason is that frequencies are reused, so that geographically-separate cells can assign the same frequency to different phone calls. When you're on a plane and your phone's transmission can be received in many cells, you risk interfering with another call if the frequency assigned to you is also concurrently assigned by another cell to another phone.
In many cases, you can run away from a knife fight, or fight back effectively with even just a good stick. Even if you fail, you're still more likely to create a crime scene with plenty of useful evidence to point to your killer. It's often useful and a sign of intelligence to think in the abstract ("everything is a weapon"), but once in a while you need to drop back to reality ("a gun is an excellent weapon, a can of soup not so much") when considering appropriate social policy. Similarly, not even defenders of the Second Amendment seem okay with not being able to own personal nuclear weapons, although it arguably falls under "arms", because degree matters.
Which is also why gun analogies for cell phones are inherently poor. Cell phones are very useful daily tools, while a gun might be a hobby or an occasional need (say, to defend yourself). So even if cell phones and guns somehow cause the same murder rate, we should still be more reluctant to ban cell phones than guns. Again, a question of degree.
Replacing copyrights with per-sale contracts is counterproductive. Instead of standard rights and violations, you'll have subtly different contract terms for each item of music, movie, or software that you buy. Maybe this movie cannot be played more than 10 times. Maybe that software can only be resold to non-profit organizations. Why would that be any better?
They're not a few random nutcases. They passed Proposition 8 in California to ban gay marriages. It's clear that the part of the country that wants to enforce its morals on other people is a big powerful chunk, and this chunk shouldn't get to call themselves "conservative".
The truly ironic thing is that, in Soviet Russia, politics also trumped expertise.
Do look up what "permanent" and "self-sustained" actually means, when you get a minute. What would your intrepid colonists do when (not if) the solar panels break? If the answer is "order parts from Earth", then you fail at the exercise. My entire point is that "small" and "permanent, self-sustaining" are contradictory goals.
The Constellation program was projected by NASA to cost $230 billion through 2025, if we're still talking about "small, permanent, self-sustained human outpost on the Moon or Mars with technologies currently available". Even if we make the laughable premise that the projection is accurate, that's already hundreds of billions for the first quarter of your 100 years.
Sounds like the first thing we need to do is build some smart robots that are tough enough to work on Mars, doesn't it?
By "self-sustained" do you mean the astronauts would be mining for fuel to keep the lights on? Even if they take along a nuclear reactor, that's going to run out at some point, too. Fact is, we're at the stage where we can put a few people in a small box on the Moon or on Mars at great expense, but they'll be reliant on the mother planet for energy and possibly even food.
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
You're in fantasy land. How many people would you need off-Earth to sustain a viable human bloodline? All these people would need to be self-sustaining (because Earth would be destroyed in your scenario) on an alien planet, which means they have to grow food, mine for fuel, fix sophisticated tools, do everything all by themselves. Oh, and breathe air, so exactly which planet did you have in mind?
Oh, you don't have another planet yet. Maybe we should send out a lot of cheap probes to find a suitable planet, huh?
Do you see any humans walking around on Mars? No? Well, the unmanned missions are already better. The total cost of the mission, including five extensions, comes to under a billion dollars. In contrast, NASA estimates the Constellation program to require $230 billion, and I'm sure you know how accurate such estimates are.
Now, I'm a supporter of manned missions, but I'm not interested in trophy missions that plant a flag and do little else. I agree that human flexibility on these missions are useful and important (especially if we're able to send experts like scientists instead of just pilots), but we're at the stage where we will end up expending all our resources just on a trophy mission to Mars, and I'd rather spend the money on building up science.
Oh, quite right. I had looked only at the "FACTS" you listed, and missed the steps. Indeed Alice would own copyright to the parts she wrote outside Bob's employment. Sorry for the distraction.
No, Alice owns nothing in your scenario, and has no standing to sue. Claire's copyright was violated if Bob distributes it outside GPL terms, so she can sue.
CDMA is only the better standard if the same geographic area didn't have to be covered with GSM as well. As it is, we're trying to cover the US with two incompatible standards, a horrible waste of precious spectrum and money.