Hmm, I apologize for not even taking the time to see if the NAIPEEC exists. It does, although I still am not convinced that this is a true story. Still, I apologize for my ignorance and poor research.
NORID Handle...............: MMA14O-NORID Organization Name..........: Micro Media ADB Organization Number........: 0 Post Address...............: Postboks 13 Postal Code................: N-3283 Postal Area................: Steinsholt Country....................: Norway Phone Number...............: +47 33 12 91 22 Fax Number.................: +47 33 12 95 52 Email Address..............: mmadb@online.no
----
This sure doesn't seem like his dad to me. It also is a post office box address. Can someone in Norway confirm the authenticiy of this? Hell, I haven't even seen a post that the NAIPEEC is a real organization. And if this not fake, I apologize for being too skeptical.
I like most of your points, but IE, while it is the best browser available for Windows, is not free in any sense of the word, any more than MS Solitaire is free. You already bought the license to use all the tools that come "free" with Windows, having paid handsomely for the privelege.
With regard to newbies, I would say that Linus is actually better about preventing damage to the system. The reason I use Linux is because it's a better operating system, despite some difficulties. But I fail to see how making a bunch of easy graphical configuration utilities and a super-easy install script will result in a lower-quality OS. It seems to me that what you want is for only smart people to use Linux, so you can feel special. This narrow, "clubhouse" approach to computing unnecessarily discourages people everywhere from being efficient with computers. As long as those who are knowledgeable want their knowledge to remain sacred and "pure", the whole society is hurt.
When someone (BillG) comes along with the idea to put a computer on every desktop, everyone scoffs. And then look at the crap we get when he succeeds! If you want to keep Linux in the cabal, fine, but don't expect the rest of us who want the choice of an easy Linux to stay back in the Dark Ages with you.
That's a great idea! Someone moderate this up so it gets to Rob! Although I would restrict it so that AC's couldn't ask for meta-mod. Also, maybe people who assiduously point out bad moderation (moderation marked unfair in MM) would get moderator points more.
I would say that that is the same reason I browse at +1 rather than -1. I'm just not interested in hearing the abuse, and so I'm willing to give up all the stuff that's either been moderated down or is not posted by someone who is willing to give an e-mail address or at least a name. I'm a pretty busy person, but not too busy to read through all the posts. It just makes me uncomfortable to read the attacks. In Japan, where confrontation is considered very embarrassing for all parties, I'm sure that this feeling is even more intense.
Thus, some people are willing to do whatever they can to avoid reading the flame. My dad, who is of similar temperment, wants all his info sources to have a couple of dials on them: One for hostility/hatred, one for profanity (not a biggie for me, but while we're at it...), and one for violence. I think it'd be great to be able to turn down the violence level on a movie!
Okay, so that was a joke, but seriously, can't you see a net connected microwave reporting back to the manufacturer what kinds of foods you're eating? WebVan could buy ad space on your screen, trying to sell you a more expensive kind of the food you already eat. "Hmmm, she's eating cheap Marukan ramen, I wonder if we can get her to upgrade to Nissin cup o'noodles?"
The bottom line is that more smart devices means more potential for abuse. Hell, thanks to the club cards, the store knows what I buy anyway, so they could track the food pattern back to the IP of my microwave...
Actually, no dice, since Bill himself owns a whole bunch of M$ shares that started at $.16 and are now worth 112 5/8. Quite a rate of return...
On a slightly on-topic note, Warren Buffett choses not to split the shares of his company Berkshire Hathaway precisely because higher nominal prices are more attractive to larger investors. They reduce transaction costs since you have to pay less to buy a given amount of stock.
Not to be too picky about this, but a patent takes 18 months to 2 years to be issued. I seem to recall using Mosaic in 1995 or so. At that point, there were a lot of people excited about the web, but not many people buying and selling. However, the idea of the browser, HTTP, the hypertext link, these were all incredibly novel. Yes, I'm aware that hypertext as a concept far predates the web, but to link between computers essentially transparently was revolutionary. I certianly think that that could have been awarded a patent, but the inventors chose not to seek one.
I don't know if it's exactly an error, but somehow saying that Postal "converts the player into a stressed-out clerk who kills his office colleagues." seems a big far-fetched. Heck, half the gamers in America would have become stressed out postal clerks by now...
As usual, the solution to this paradox is a faulty assumption. You say: 1. They want to execute him on one of the five days. 2. They don't want him to know which day it will be. 3. Assume the day they want to execute him on is Friday.
Assumption #3 is your problem. They can't execute him on friday without him knowing; that is actually impossible. However, that does not mean that #3 still holds if they then decide to execute him on a Thursday. It becomes false. And, since from a fallacy you can prove anything, we get the paradox.
So, the moral of the story is: Check your premises.;) Which wouldn't be a bad idea for all those weighing in on the punishment issue...
So your point is that poorer countries need to be more severe in their punishments so that people steal less. You "remind" us that China has more people, but really what you are trying to say is that what justice is differs based on how well-off a country is. Actually, that's my question: Does is matter than China is poorer? I would say no.
What you call "imballances that needs to be taken care of by 'non-standard' means" really refer to the problems China has trying to pull themselves out of terrible poverty and overpopulation by moving slightly towards a free market. However, this will always be problematic, for two reasons:
First, a totalitarian regime is always most threatened when it is giving up power. Do you really think that the Chinese people feel that they are the ones who run the country? They get a taste of freedom, and you'd better believe we'll see a new government (unless the army uses 'non-standard' means to take care of some imbalances).
Second, communism means that the rulers should rule for the benefit of the people, but of course the people can't themselves rule, so it falls to a small group who know what's best for the people. They also want to keep their grip on power, since the Party officials are the only ones with a decent standard of living. So, they are always willing to sacrifice the lives of some small number of people (say, less than 10%) for the benefit of the larger number (or themselves).
Yes, but also note that the link provided is dead, meaning that when Roblimo posted the link was alive. Thus he didn't know the affair had been resolved, and was at least justified in posting the story, although we can argue about the title...
I think the distinction that you're looking for here is the difference between applications that are fairly open-ended with respect to the feature set versus those where the specification is as complex as the program. In the TurboTax example writing the spec from the tax code is 90% of the work, and the spec cannot be written except by experts. 90% of the work would have to be done beforehand by experts, who presumably would want to be paid. Heck, the more popular TurboTax is, the *less* work for the accountants who helped write it. Compare this to apache, where the specified behavior is fairly loose and subject to modification in many different directions at once. You might only need one person who really knows HTTP to spec that part, the rest is determined by what people want to do.
It's probably safe to say that most systems that require more domain knowledge than programming knowledge will remain difficult to open source. Can anyone come up with an example of such a system that is an open source success?
You've just enumerated most of the options that are always open for any open source project. Obviously the best thing is to get involved, with code if possible, with the existing project and hope that the coordinator(s) are smart enough to recognize your contribution as valuable. If not, then you can fork or start from scratch, although at some later date the original project might choose to incorporate your changes anyway. This is precisely what happened with libc and glibc.
Does anyone have an URL they can send that explains these issues in more detail? The question is just too broad to answer in a/. post.
Actually, fascism and communism are essentially the same political philsophy: the belief that individuals are subordinate to something bigger. In fascism, it's the State, and in communism, it's the People. Same result
Nonetheless, it does not appear that Disney really was a fascist, any more than Lucille Ball is a communist.
This is sort of a wierd concept, but it is straightforward: The creator of the software has the right to license it under any terms he or she wishes. If I wanted, I could release software simulataneously under the GPL and under a license where I would get your firstborn if you ever ran the software. If you received a copy under the latter license, you would have to adhere to it, while those who got it under the GPL would not have to. Of course, getting the software under the FBL (Firstborn License) does not preclude you getting it under the GPL and gaining less restrictive terms.
No, nor will it finish anytime soon. RC5-64 can pretty much be assumed to be brute-force resistant. They're still in the low percentages of the total keyspace and they've been at it for AGES.
I would have to respectfully disagree. With a couple of notable exceptions, the distributed.net attack on RC5-64 (and before that, RC5-56) has been growing quite quickly. I remember participating in the RC5-56 contest when the estimated time to completion was in the decades. Moore's Law and a word-of-mouth spread of participants has caused it to rise dramatically. For an example, take a look at the distributed.net statistics at rc5stats.distributed.net and compare the current keyrate against the average. It's more than double! Also note the "The odds are 1 in 1,680 that we will wrap this thing up in the next 24 hours." So that's 1 out of 5 years, but a simple doubling of computing power over 18 months means 1 out of 2.5 years, and another doubling 1 out of 1.25, etc., even if you don't count the keyspace exhausted while waiting for the doubling to happen. Add that to substantial growth in participants, and you have a solution in probably 2 years.
I know, it's a long time, but this is using completely idle cycles and general purpose hardware and volunteered programming and organizational ability. A full-time project with the funding and wherewithal to develop custom hardware (along the lines of EFF's "Deep Crack" machine for DES [see http://www.eff.org/descracker.html]) would be able to crack RC5-64 fairly easily. RC5-128, probably not.
#1 Other companies (not just MS) really are doing this kind of book cooking, but it is "okay" because the NASB has not moved to prohibit it. However, anyone who looks at this situation sees the problem. Earnings are supposed to reflect how profitable the core business is, and ignore extraneous factors. That is why you often see earnings estimates stated EBIDT (Earnings before interest, depreciation, and taxes): because ID+T don't have anything to do with how well the core of the business is going. Yes, high interest costs (for example) will still sink the firm (reducing profits to 0:), but the fact remains that the underlying business is still profitable. Problems come in when costs that really are part of the expenses of the company are treated as extraneous, such as, oh, how about wages! What the investment advisor is mainly complaining about is MS treating the cost of providing options (a major component of its labor costs) as non-core, while counting the strike price of the option as part of its core income. This is dishonest, and insofar as it does distort the earnings picture, is a very, very bad thing.
#2While the advisor has all the hallmarks of a crackpot (and in fact probably is one, given his extremely tangential references to teachers and MS employees "pre-paying"), he is a crackpot who has stumbled onto a genuine fraud, albeit one that is fairly well-known.
I agree that it's a widespread practice. That's probably why the FASB's proposed change to accounting for stock options was so heavily opposed by corporations. Just because it's ``widespread'' doesn't make it the correct way of doing business.
Completely correct. In terms of a change that got implemented, the accounting for mergers used to happen in such a way that the new company suddenly had higher revenues. That standard has now been changed in order to provide more continuity for revenue during a merger. However, you can bet that the people who were merging with each other and getting offers for their stock above market value (CEO's, major stockholders) were very disappointed.
Re:Even if their stock went to 0 tomorrow......that's still only, what, 75 or so points off the Dow?
Actually, it's calculated by adding up the stocks and then dividing by a factor of approximately.49. So the index would drop by much more than 75 points. Even given the rough assumption that MS has about an average stock price, the Dow would drop by 1/30th, or about 3%. That is a huge drop, given that the purpose of having such a broad average is to see market trends and not be unduly affected by the troubles or success of any company.
I would have to disagree that online and distance education will ever substantially improve the quality of education delivered. This is not a case of kinks to be worked out and new skills to be honed, but rather a situation where companies are attempting a commoditization of education at any cost. Mind you, it would not be a problem if the same quality of pedagogical result could be achieved, but the important role one-on-one interaction and challenge between student and professor is often obliterated. This results in a markedly lower standard of learning.
The other dangerous thing about online education is that often the instructor's coursework is appropriated by the school and then redistributed online without his or her involvement. The only conceivable reason for doing this is to reduce teaching expenses. Of course, as many have seen, the costs of producing an online course can often be higher per student than the original course, and involve more work, not less for instructor. Luckily, one of my former professors has already made these same arguments before, and much more cogently. Please take a look at the three essays at http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl and reconsider whether the principl so far governed online education are sound.
I definitely agree that whenever you have demand, you can make money if that is your object. As you point out, any kind of extra service adds value and can be sold, again only if you desire. My point is only that I believe it is better to enable a creator of value to profit from that value if they so choose. Imagine if instead of having to sell a 250,000 albums to make money, a band could distribute albums themselves and be able to pursue music full-time on a tenth as many sales. That would benefit the buyers of the music as well as the artists. However, given that all people are not honest, it seems that the best way to enable this is to give creators control over what they create. It may be that a voluntary system would work just as well; for example, I've rarely seen anyone rip off a newspaper box, despite the fact that you can pay for one copy and take twenty. However, given the popularity of copied music, I think it is unlikely it will work in this case.
If you do not care about payment but are interested in attribution, a control system would allow you to essentially GPL your music, and enforce those terms.
I am definitely not saying that SDMI is a solution. In fact, given that it was slapped together behind the scenes I believe it is unlikely to have any positive effect at all. However, I would still assert that a person's control over his or her products is valuable both in a monetary and non-monetary sense.
As for why I posted my comments for free, the dialog I see on/. is worth more to me than any potential renumeration that would result if I had a way to extract money from anyone who read the comment.
Yes, the theft of intellectual property is something that anyone interested in the freedom of information should be concerned about. If you are really interested in allowing artists (or programmers) to distribute thier wares without a middleman, then you want to make it technologically possible for them to do so and still make a profit. I cannot imagine that it is in my best interest to have all songs released in an unprotected form, because then no one would be able to make money from them, not studios, and not artists. Rather, if you can combine payment for IP with "friction-free" distribution, everybody benefits. Think how cheaply artists could sell albums if they were able to attain widespread distribution *without* a studio helping. Of course, studios are skilled in music distribution and promotion, which they would continue to do, but with the threat that any artist could at any time begin doing his or her own promotion and distribution. It will be interesting to see how the balance of power shifts...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, I apologize for not even taking the time to see if the NAIPEEC exists. It does, although I still am not convinced that this is a true story. Still, I apologize for my ignorance and poor research.
Walt
From the whois query on mmadb.no at http://www.norid.no/whois/?host=128.39.2.9&query=m madb.no
% Rights restricted by copyright. See http://www.ripe.net/db/dbcopyright.html
Domain Information
Domain Name................: mmadb.no
Organization Handle........: MMA14O-NORID
Registrar Handle...........: REG1-NORID
Legal-c Handle.............: PJ21P-NORID
Tech-c Handle..............: DNH1P-NORID
Zone-c Handle..............: DNH1P-NORID
Bill-c Handle..............:
Nameserver Handle..........: NS636H-NORID
Nameserver Handle..........: NS97H-NORID
NORID Handle...............: MMA14O-NORID
Organization Name..........: Micro Media ADB
Organization Number........: 0
Post Address...............: Postboks 13
Postal Code................: N-3283
Postal Area................: Steinsholt
Country....................: Norway
Phone Number...............: +47 33 12 91 22
Fax Number.................: +47 33 12 95 52
Email Address..............: mmadb@online.no
----
This sure doesn't seem like his dad to me. It also is a post office box address. Can someone in Norway confirm the authenticiy of this? Hell, I haven't even seen a post that the NAIPEEC is a real organization. And if this not fake, I apologize for being too skeptical.
Walt
I like most of your points, but IE, while it is the best browser available for Windows, is not free in any sense of the word, any more than MS Solitaire is free. You already bought the license to use all the tools that come "free" with Windows, having paid handsomely for the privelege.
Walt
With regard to newbies, I would say that Linus is actually better about preventing damage to the system. The reason I use Linux is because it's a better operating system, despite some difficulties. But I fail to see how making a bunch of easy graphical configuration utilities and a super-easy install script will result in a lower-quality OS. It seems to me that what you want is for only smart people to use Linux, so you can feel special. This narrow, "clubhouse" approach to computing unnecessarily discourages people everywhere from being efficient with computers. As long as those who are knowledgeable want their knowledge to remain sacred and "pure", the whole society is hurt.
When someone (BillG) comes along with the idea to put a computer on every desktop, everyone scoffs. And then look at the crap we get when he succeeds! If you want to keep Linux in the cabal, fine, but don't expect the rest of us who want the choice of an easy Linux to stay back in the Dark Ages with you.
Walt
That's a great idea! Someone moderate this up so it gets to Rob! Although I would restrict it so that AC's couldn't ask for meta-mod. Also, maybe people who assiduously point out bad moderation (moderation marked unfair in MM) would get moderator points more.
Walt
P.S. Is this Ocie of HMC?
I would say that that is the same reason I browse at +1 rather than -1. I'm just not interested in hearing the abuse, and so I'm willing to give up all the stuff that's either been moderated down or is not posted by someone who is willing to give an e-mail address or at least a name. I'm a pretty busy person, but not too busy to read through all the posts. It just makes me uncomfortable to read the attacks. In Japan, where confrontation is considered very embarrassing for all parties, I'm sure that this feeling is even more intense.
Thus, some people are willing to do whatever they can to avoid reading the flame. My dad, who is of similar temperment, wants all his info sources to have a couple of dials on them: One for hostility/hatred, one for profanity (not a biggie for me, but while we're at it...), and one for violence. I think it'd be great to be able to turn down the violence level on a movie!
Walt
Okay, so that was a joke, but seriously, can't you see a net connected microwave reporting back to the manufacturer what kinds of foods you're eating? WebVan could buy ad space on your screen, trying to sell you a more expensive kind of the food you already eat. "Hmmm, she's eating cheap Marukan ramen, I wonder if we can get her to upgrade to Nissin cup o'noodles?"
The bottom line is that more smart devices means more potential for abuse. Hell, thanks to the club cards, the store knows what I buy anyway, so they could track the food pattern back to the IP of my microwave...
Walt
Time to buy out Bill Gates.
Actually, no dice, since Bill himself owns a whole bunch of M$ shares that started at $.16 and are now worth 112 5/8. Quite a rate of return...
On a slightly on-topic note, Warren Buffett choses not to split the shares of his company Berkshire Hathaway precisely because higher nominal prices are more attractive to larger investors. They reduce transaction costs since you have to pay less to buy a given amount of stock.
Walt
Not to be too picky about this, but a patent takes 18 months to 2 years to be issued. I seem to recall using Mosaic in 1995 or so. At that point, there were a lot of people excited about the web, but not many people buying and selling. However, the idea of the browser, HTTP, the hypertext link, these were all incredibly novel. Yes, I'm aware that hypertext as a concept far predates the web, but to link between computers essentially transparently was revolutionary. I certianly think that that could have been awarded a patent, but the inventors chose not to seek one.
Walt
I don't know if it's exactly an error, but somehow saying that Postal "converts the player into a stressed-out clerk who kills his office colleagues." seems a big far-fetched. Heck, half the gamers in America would have become stressed out postal clerks by now...
Walt
As usual, the solution to this paradox is a faulty assumption. You say:
;) Which wouldn't be a bad idea for all those weighing in on the punishment issue...
1. They want to execute him on one of the five days.
2. They don't want him to know which day it will be.
3. Assume the day they want to execute him on is Friday.
Assumption #3 is your problem. They can't execute him on friday without him knowing; that is actually impossible. However, that does not mean that #3 still holds if they then decide to execute him on a Thursday. It becomes false. And, since from a fallacy you can prove anything, we get the paradox.
So, the moral of the story is: Check your premises.
Walt
So your point is that poorer countries need to be more severe in their punishments so that people steal less. You "remind" us that China has more people, but really what you are trying to say is that what justice is differs based on how well-off a country is. Actually, that's my question: Does is matter than China is poorer? I would say no.
What you call "imballances that needs to be taken care of by 'non-standard' means" really refer to the problems China has trying to pull themselves out of terrible poverty and overpopulation by moving slightly towards a free market. However, this will always be problematic, for two reasons:
First, a totalitarian regime is always most threatened when it is giving up power. Do you really think that the Chinese people feel that they are the ones who run the country? They get a taste of freedom, and you'd better believe we'll see a new government (unless the army uses 'non-standard' means to take care of some imbalances).
Second, communism means that the rulers should rule for the benefit of the people, but of course the people can't themselves rule, so it falls to a small group who know what's best for the people. They also want to keep their grip on power, since the Party officials are the only ones with a decent standard of living. So, they are always willing to sacrifice the lives of some small number of people (say, less than 10%) for the benefit of the larger number (or themselves).
Yes, but also note that the link provided is dead, meaning that when Roblimo posted the link was alive. Thus he didn't know the affair had been resolved, and was at least justified in posting the story, although we can argue about the title...
I think the distinction that you're looking for here is the difference between applications that are fairly open-ended with respect to the feature set versus those where the specification is as complex as the program. In the TurboTax example writing the spec from the tax code is 90% of the work, and the spec cannot be written except by experts. 90% of the work would have to be done beforehand by experts, who presumably would want to be paid. Heck, the more popular TurboTax is, the *less* work for the accountants who helped write it. Compare this to apache, where the specified behavior is fairly loose and subject to modification in many different directions at once. You might only need one person who really knows HTTP to spec that part, the rest is determined by what people want to do.
It's probably safe to say that most systems that require more domain knowledge than programming knowledge will remain difficult to open source. Can anyone come up with an example of such a system that is an open source success?
Walt
You've just enumerated most of the options that are always open for any open source project. Obviously the best thing is to get involved, with code if possible, with the existing project and hope that the coordinator(s) are smart enough to recognize your contribution as valuable. If not, then you can fork or start from scratch, although at some later date the original project might choose to incorporate your changes anyway. This is precisely what happened with libc and glibc.
/. post.
Does anyone have an URL they can send that explains these issues in more detail? The question is just too broad to answer in a
Actually, fascism and communism are essentially the same political philsophy: the belief that individuals are subordinate to something bigger. In fascism, it's the State, and in communism, it's the People. Same result
Nonetheless, it does not appear that Disney really was a fascist, any more than Lucille Ball is a communist.
This is sort of a wierd concept, but it is straightforward: The creator of the software has the right to license it under any terms he or she wishes. If I wanted, I could release software simulataneously under the GPL and under a license where I would get your firstborn if you ever ran the software. If you received a copy under the latter license, you would have to adhere to it, while those who got it under the GPL would not have to. Of course, getting the software under the FBL (Firstborn License) does not preclude you getting it under the GPL and gaining less restrictive terms.
No, nor will it finish anytime soon. RC5-64 can pretty much be assumed to be brute-force resistant. They're still in the low percentages of the total keyspace and they've been at it for AGES.
I would have to respectfully disagree. With a couple of notable exceptions, the distributed.net attack on RC5-64 (and before that, RC5-56) has been growing quite quickly. I remember participating in the RC5-56 contest when the estimated time to completion was in the decades. Moore's Law and a word-of-mouth spread of participants has caused it to rise dramatically. For an example, take a look at the distributed.net statistics at rc5stats.distributed.net and compare the current keyrate against the average. It's more than double! Also note the "The odds are 1 in 1,680 that we will wrap this thing up in the next 24 hours." So that's 1 out of 5 years, but a simple doubling of computing power over 18 months means 1 out of 2.5 years, and another doubling 1 out of 1.25, etc., even if you don't count the keyspace exhausted while waiting for the doubling to happen. Add that to substantial growth in participants, and you have a solution in probably 2 years.
I know, it's a long time, but this is using completely idle cycles and general purpose hardware and volunteered programming and organizational ability. A full-time project with the funding and wherewithal to develop custom hardware (along the lines of EFF's "Deep Crack" machine for DES [see http://www.eff.org/descracker.html]) would be able to crack RC5-64 fairly easily. RC5-128, probably not.
This excerpt does bring out two important points:
:), but the fact remains that the underlying business is still profitable. Problems come in when costs that really are part of the expenses of the company are treated as extraneous, such as, oh, how about wages! What the investment advisor is mainly complaining about is MS treating the cost of providing options (a major component of its labor costs) as non-core, while counting the strike price of the option as part of its core income. This is dishonest, and insofar as it does distort the earnings picture, is a very, very bad thing.
#1 Other companies (not just MS) really are doing this kind of book cooking, but it is "okay" because the NASB has not moved to prohibit it. However, anyone who looks at this situation sees the problem. Earnings are supposed to reflect how profitable the core business is, and ignore extraneous factors. That is why you often see earnings estimates stated EBIDT (Earnings before interest, depreciation, and taxes): because ID+T don't have anything to do with how well the core of the business is going. Yes, high interest costs (for example) will still sink the firm (reducing profits to 0
#2While the advisor has all the hallmarks of a crackpot (and in fact probably is one, given his extremely tangential references to teachers and MS employees "pre-paying"), he is a crackpot who has stumbled onto a genuine fraud, albeit one that is fairly well-known.
I agree that it's a widespread practice. That's probably why the FASB's proposed change to accounting for stock options was so heavily opposed by corporations. Just because it's ``widespread'' doesn't make it the correct way of doing business.
Completely correct. In terms of a change that got implemented, the accounting for mergers used to happen in such a way that the new company suddenly had higher revenues. That standard has now been changed in order to provide more continuity for revenue during a merger. However, you can bet that the people who were merging with each other and getting offers for their stock above market value (CEO's, major stockholders) were very disappointed.
Re:Even if their stock went to 0 tomorrow... ...that's still only, what, 75 or so points off the Dow?
.49. So the index would drop by much more than 75 points. Even given the rough assumption that MS has about an average stock price, the Dow would drop by 1/30th, or about 3%. That is a huge drop, given that the purpose of having such a broad average is to see market trends and not be unduly affected by the troubles or success of any company.
Actually, it's calculated by adding up the stocks and then dividing by a factor of approximately
The other dangerous thing about online education is that often the instructor's coursework is appropriated by the school and then redistributed online without his or her involvement. The only conceivable reason for doing this is to reduce teaching expenses. Of course, as many have seen, the costs of producing an online course can often be higher per student than the original course, and involve more work, not less for instructor. Luckily, one of my former professors has already made these same arguments before, and much more cogently. Please take a look at the three essays at http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl and reconsider whether the principl so far governed online education are sound.
I definitely agree that whenever you have demand, you can make money if that is your object. As you point out, any kind of extra service adds value and can be sold, again only if you desire. My point is only that I believe it is better to enable a creator of value to profit from that value if they so choose. Imagine if instead of having to sell a 250,000 albums to make money, a band could distribute albums themselves and be able to pursue music full-time on a tenth as many sales. That would benefit the buyers of the music as well as the artists. However, given that all people are not honest, it seems that the best way to enable this is to give creators control over what they create. It may be that a voluntary system would work just as well; for example, I've rarely seen anyone rip off a newspaper box, despite the fact that you can pay for one copy and take twenty. However, given the popularity of copied music, I think it is unlikely it will work in this case.
/. is worth more to me than any potential renumeration that would result if I had a way to extract money from anyone who read the comment.
If you do not care about payment but are interested in attribution, a control system would allow you to essentially GPL your music, and enforce those terms.
I am definitely not saying that SDMI is a solution. In fact, given that it was slapped together behind the scenes I believe it is unlikely to have any positive effect at all. However, I would still assert that a person's control over his or her products is valuable both in a monetary and non-monetary sense.
As for why I posted my comments for free, the dialog I see on
Walt
Yes, the theft of intellectual property is something that anyone interested in the freedom of information should be concerned about. If you are really interested in allowing artists (or programmers) to distribute thier wares without a middleman, then you want to make it technologically possible for them to do so and still make a profit. I cannot imagine that it is in my best interest to have all songs released in an unprotected form, because then no one would be able to make money from them, not studios, and not artists. Rather, if you can combine payment for IP with "friction-free" distribution, everybody benefits. Think how cheaply artists could sell albums if they were able to attain widespread distribution *without* a studio helping. Of course, studios are skilled in music distribution and promotion, which they would continue to do, but with the threat that any artist could at any time begin doing his or her own promotion and distribution. It will be interesting to see how the balance of power shifts...
Walt