There's already a company that's commercializing this - http://www.biofisica.com/.
They have some pretty interesting information on their site for anyone interested in more detail.
I'm not associated with them in anyway, just happened to see them present at an event once.
That's why you find the best programmers in small startups - where the hiring manager is the founder, and expects to be around long enough to get the benefit of hiring good people.
Nifty tool if you want to import your bookmarks from your browser:
http://www.julian-bez.de/delicious/
Makes short work of "seeding" your del.icio.us account.
Please tell me you are kidding - I'm no MSFT fan, but let's take a look up and down the balance sheet shall we?
According to MSFT's last balance sheet filing (3/31/04), they had current assets of 65 Billion. Now these are things that reasonably can be turned to cash if the need arose in fairly short order. So based on just that number, yes, they have about $6/share. However, the company also has about 25 Billion more in Long term assets (the building(s) they own, any longer term investments, etc).
Now balanced against that is about 19 Billion in liabilities, showing that the net assets of the company is about 70 Billion (also known as shareholder equity).
However, even using that value is a really bad idea for valuation. Unlike manufacturing companies, MSFT can't actually put its biggest asset on the balance sheet - it's intellectual property! GAAP say that only IP that is BOUGHT can be put on the balance sheet, and that which is internally developed cannot - take a look, and MSFT only has 600 MM in intangible assets. This means that the IP value of Windows, Office, etc, etc, etc, is nowhere on the sheet. Now, however much we may agree that they don't make the greatest software, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who thinks that having all that IP isn't worth some major bucks. Add all that back in, and the cost of MSFT stock doesn't look that bad at all. After all, do you think everyone who owns the stock is stupid?
Disclaimer- I do not own any MSFT stock, nor do I plan to buy any in the near future - index funds rock!
I've been using a pre release of WA 5 for about a week (came from WA3), and the one feature that made me love the video playback through winamp seems to be gone - the 30sec skip. Great for skipping through commercials on recorded shows! If i'm just a moron that didn't see the option, please somebody point it out to me!
I've seen this arguement a couple of times now, but isn't this a slightly skewed comparison? In shoplifting a CD, yes, you do actually have the theft of actual materials, but that one theft is the end of it. If you share, you are assumed to have infringed (I didn't say stolen!) the song in the first place, but you are also making it available for distribution - Seems to me the better comparison would be what happens if you were to make a bunch of copies of a CD (bought or stolen, doesn't matter), and then set up a road side stand advertising them (for free, to keep it as close a comparison as possible). And I'm pretty sure your free road side stand would get you a much bigger punishment than stealing that one CD from the store would.
I've done quite a bit of searching for MP3s in my time, and what I have found (Note: this is not a scientific analysis, just an observation) that few people had complete albums. Just about everybody had one or two songs from a given album. That pattern is suggestive of people hunting around for new music to try, not somebody out to save a few bucks.
Or, it is suggestive that most albums only have one or two decent songs on them.. which is why paying 17.99 for one is ridiculous.
All conservatives hate gays, minorities, and any other group that isn't like them.
Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? But that's the same type of generalization made when someone says
"And on the sweatshop thing-- the liberals hate sweatshops because they hate the poor."
I'm a liberal.. but that does NOT mean I'm not for a free market economy. Liberals come in all shapes and sizes, just like conservatives. Yes, I hate sweatshops, but I do realize the fact that they exist because there are no better alternatives for those people to go to. It's definitely Nike's right to hire whoever they want, for however much they want to pay them (as long as those rates don't violate any minimum wage laws). However, while Nike might have the right to say "Our factories are not sweatshops," the overall precedent of granting corporations the same free speech protections as individuals is dangerous (IMNSHO). Corporations are NOT people, and we should observe the difference between a statement made by an individual (such as a CEO making a statement in an interview) and those made by the Corporation as a whole (such as the pamphlet Nike put out). IANAL, but isn't there some way to differentiate the speech of the PEOPLE working for a corporation and the commercial speech of the corporation itself?
P.S. I got a degree in economics, and most of my professors were liberal.
What exactly do you measure the quality of life by?
Starting with the beginnings of the industrial age, where women and children were being forced to work in terrible conditions
But before the industrial age, didn't children work just as hard on farms just to get enough to eat for the family? Yes, I agree that during the beginning of the industrial age, the conditions were probably worse (e.g. more accidents in factories than on farms before), but I think we've moved past that now, and that children today are much better off than they were before the beginning of industrialization. Obviously in America this is true, but I believe it is true elsewhere in the world (although not to the same extent).
Second, keep in mind that in developing nations and developed nations alike, the infant mortality rate has dropped tremendously in that time. This has led to other problems, yes (overpopulation), but imagine not living past 6 month pre-industrialization, and tell me that actually surviving to become a grown human isn't better.
And, to top it all off, in the past 30 years or so, incidences of stress-related mental illness has increased by something like 500%
How much of this is a true increase in stress-related mental illness, and how much is an increase in our willingness to acknowledge it? 30 years ago, you were either normal, or nuts.. no real shades of gray. Now, we find new types of disorders around every corner. I'm not saying which are/aren't real, just that there's more attention paid to them now.
In fact, we have seen the opposite; the two-income family is so common that it has become difficult to be one-income anymore. The quality of life has decreased enough that the average two-income family now lives about the same as an average one-income family in the 1920's.
You hear this a lot these days, but with one exception (real estate) I think that people are measuring, not the quality of life in absolute terms, but the quality of life measured against those around them. I think this is not so much an effect of corporatized industrialization, as you put forth, but rather an increase in the level of competitiveness, and ambition of the American family. With the exception of housing costs, the percentage of per capita income spent on "fundamental needs" has decreased every decade last century (although the 30's we almost flat). We need to make more because we want to get more, and we measure our "quality of life" by where we are socio-economically (Upper Class, Lower Middle Class, etc). And as more and more families try to climb, the same rung of the socioeconomic scale has a MUCH higher quality of life than before.
Slashdot Mirror
There's already a company that's commercializing this - http://www.biofisica.com/. They have some pretty interesting information on their site for anyone interested in more detail. I'm not associated with them in anyway, just happened to see them present at an event once.
That's why you find the best programmers in small startups - where the hiring manager is the founder, and expects to be around long enough to get the benefit of hiring good people.
Nifty tool if you want to import your bookmarks from your browser: http://www.julian-bez.de/delicious/ Makes short work of "seeding" your del.icio.us account.
Please tell me you are kidding - I'm no MSFT fan, but let's take a look up and down the balance sheet shall we?
According to MSFT's last balance sheet filing (3/31/04), they had current assets of 65 Billion. Now these are things that reasonably can be turned to cash if the need arose in fairly short order. So based on just that number, yes, they have about $6/share. However, the company also has about 25 Billion more in Long term assets (the building(s) they own, any longer term investments, etc).
Now balanced against that is about 19 Billion in liabilities, showing that the net assets of the company is about 70 Billion (also known as shareholder equity).
However, even using that value is a really bad idea for valuation. Unlike manufacturing companies, MSFT can't actually put its biggest asset on the balance sheet - it's intellectual property! GAAP say that only IP that is BOUGHT can be put on the balance sheet, and that which is internally developed cannot - take a look, and MSFT only has 600 MM in intangible assets. This means that the IP value of Windows, Office, etc, etc, etc, is nowhere on the sheet. Now, however much we may agree that they don't make the greatest software, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who thinks that having all that IP isn't worth some major bucks. Add all that back in, and the cost of MSFT stock doesn't look that bad at all. After all, do you think everyone who owns the stock is stupid?
Disclaimer- I do not own any MSFT stock, nor do I plan to buy any in the near future - index funds rock!
I've been using a pre release of WA 5 for about a week (came from WA3), and the one feature that made me love the video playback through winamp seems to be gone - the 30sec skip. Great for skipping through commercials on recorded shows! If i'm just a moron that didn't see the option, please somebody point it out to me!
Come on - with tiny dicks and no brains, do you really think they'll be reproducing (without cloning) anytime soon, even if they aren't sterile?
I've seen this arguement a couple of times now, but isn't this a slightly skewed comparison? In shoplifting a CD, yes, you do actually have the theft of actual materials, but that one theft is the end of it. If you share, you are assumed to have infringed (I didn't say stolen!) the song in the first place, but you are also making it available for distribution - Seems to me the better comparison would be what happens if you were to make a bunch of copies of a CD (bought or stolen, doesn't matter), and then set up a road side stand advertising them (for free, to keep it as close a comparison as possible). And I'm pretty sure your free road side stand would get you a much bigger punishment than stealing that one CD from the store would.
I've done quite a bit of searching for MP3s in my time, and what I have found (Note: this is not a scientific analysis, just an observation) that few people had complete albums. Just about everybody had one or two songs from a given album. That pattern is suggestive of people hunting around for new music to try, not somebody out to save a few bucks.
Or, it is suggestive that most albums only have one or two decent songs on them.. which is why paying 17.99 for one is ridiculous.
All conservatives hate gays, minorities, and any other group that isn't like them.
Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? But that's the same type of generalization made when someone says
"And on the sweatshop thing-- the liberals hate sweatshops because they hate the poor."
I'm a liberal.. but that does NOT mean I'm not for a free market economy. Liberals come in all shapes and sizes, just like conservatives. Yes, I hate sweatshops, but I do realize the fact that they exist because there are no better alternatives for those people to go to. It's definitely Nike's right to hire whoever they want, for however much they want to pay them (as long as those rates don't violate any minimum wage laws). However, while Nike might have the right to say "Our factories are not sweatshops," the overall precedent of granting corporations the same free speech protections as individuals is dangerous (IMNSHO). Corporations are NOT people, and we should observe the difference between a statement made by an individual (such as a CEO making a statement in an interview) and those made by the Corporation as a whole (such as the pamphlet Nike put out). IANAL, but isn't there some way to differentiate the speech of the PEOPLE working for a corporation and the commercial speech of the corporation itself?
P.S. I got a degree in economics, and most of my professors were liberal.
What exactly do you measure the quality of life by?
Starting with the beginnings of the industrial age, where women and children were being forced to work in terrible conditions
But before the industrial age, didn't children work just as hard on farms just to get enough to eat for the family? Yes, I agree that during the beginning of the industrial age, the conditions were probably worse (e.g. more accidents in factories than on farms before), but I think we've moved past that now, and that children today are much better off than they were before the beginning of industrialization. Obviously in America this is true, but I believe it is true elsewhere in the world (although not to the same extent).
Second, keep in mind that in developing nations and developed nations alike, the infant mortality rate has dropped tremendously in that time. This has led to other problems, yes (overpopulation), but imagine not living past 6 month pre-industrialization, and tell me that actually surviving to become a grown human isn't better.
And, to top it all off, in the past 30 years or so, incidences of stress-related mental illness has increased by something like 500%
How much of this is a true increase in stress-related mental illness, and how much is an increase in our willingness to acknowledge it? 30 years ago, you were either normal, or nuts.. no real shades of gray. Now, we find new types of disorders around every corner. I'm not saying which are/aren't real, just that there's more attention paid to them now.
In fact, we have seen the opposite; the two-income family is so common that it has become difficult to be one-income anymore. The quality of life has decreased enough that the average two-income family now lives about the same as an average one-income family in the 1920's.
You hear this a lot these days, but with one exception (real estate) I think that people are measuring, not the quality of life in absolute terms, but the quality of life measured against those around them. I think this is not so much an effect of corporatized industrialization, as you put forth, but rather an increase in the level of competitiveness, and ambition of the American family. With the exception of housing costs, the percentage of per capita income spent on "fundamental needs" has decreased every decade last century (although the 30's we almost flat). We need to make more because we want to get more, and we measure our "quality of life" by where we are socio-economically (Upper Class, Lower Middle Class, etc). And as more and more families try to climb, the same rung of the socioeconomic scale has a MUCH higher quality of life than before.
(As always, everything above is just IMHO)