They don't have to wait for a decade, they can just crop out the last decade of data and ask the model minus 10 years of data to predict it.
That only works if you never ever intend to run the model with different parameters, otherwise you just settle on the parameters that "fit" the existing data.. which continues to not be prediction.
Not if you remove that data (that you have cropped out) from the original model. As far as the model is concerned, that data does not exist, and it not used to create the model parameters.
This has been done with ocean temperatures and other climate models.
It's not as simple as fitting the line then hiding the last 5 data points and saying "oh look, the points are on the line".
Uh-huh, big whoop. We've had heaps of models that fit the historical data - that's the easy part. It's all there, you can tweak your model as you like until it fits the historicals just right. The value of a model isn't in how well it fits the historical data, but how well it predicts future data.
So crank a prediction or two out of this puppy and get back to us in a decade.
They don't have to wait for a decade, they can just crop out the last decade of data and ask the model minus 10 years of data to predict it. Since they already have the answer, they'll know if it fits.
The is routinely done with large timescale models like the atmosphere and the ocean.
How can something that blocks out the sun make it hotter?? Wouldn't it make it cooler? Thats what they say is going to happen if a super volcano erupts it will block out the sun and make it much cooler and making very hard to grow stuff with less sun. Ya ask me its all the roads that have been build and building with dark roofs making it much hotter on the surface of the earth. The reason cities are much warmer then the burbs. Soot moves around and it cleaned out by rain our natural air filter.
You answered your own question.
It absorbs IR and UV, and reradiates it - that's how CO2 (and all of the other greenhouse gasses like water vapour) work. If it's thick enough to block incoming UV then that energy from the sun never reaches the ground. This is what happens during a super volcano eruption.
If it's finely dispersed in the atmosphere then it acts like CO2, absorbing the returning IR from the surface of the earth and warming the atmosphere.
This is a LIE !!!! Can we not look at past evidence of large volcanic eruptions in the past and see the effect of massive soot releases caused....gasp...GLOBAL COOLING. What a bunch of sheep. Can scientists please start using critical thinking, check existing facts, and stop jumping on political bandwagon bullshit.
If you log in and take ownership of this statement I'll tell you why you are wrong. As it is, you can just live in blissful ignorance.
(Hint: think about the quantity of soot and ash and the way UV and IR radiation passes through different concentrations of soot clouds)
Given that almost every "expert" on here seems to be going off on one about "rare earth" issues, I doubt they're even aware of what barium itself is, let alone any alternatives to BaSO4 contrast suspensions.
Um, how about calcium sulfate or strontium sulfate? All are alkaline earth metals, and have the same or similar basic chemical properties because of having the same valence, electron configuration and so on. Right?
It's not the chemical properties that are really important (other than the insolubility of BaSO4). The main reason is the density of the Ba atom - it's heavy, so it has a high absorption cross section for X rays. Calcium and strontium are much less large.
Was being brief and assumed the implications were obvious...... guess not
1. Just because a few geeks are certain re-use is ok and might be willing to do it, the general public would not be
2. Even if you are a geek, there's no guarantee some minimum-wage flunky at a re-processing company (or some unionized hospital worker who is mad and in the middle of some "labor action") is gonna do a perfect job and the stuff YOU end up drinking will be properly re-processed. A bit like drinking re-cycled urine.... fine if you are a geek and the processing is being done by the rocket scientists at NASA for the space station, but are you still willing if it's being done by the guy who's only other career option included saying "want fries with that?"
3. A good lawyer will easily convince a typical jury (possibly with members who are anti-science lefties who reject nuclear stuff) that there was some bad thing in the re-processing process (probably done by evil "big hospital" or "big pharma") i.e. it's just another level of "doubt"....
Think some more and you can imagine many other reasons that each just make the business case a little bit harder to close. No single cut might kill the patient (in this case: re-use of Barium), but lots of little cuts and he bleeds-out
You assume, naively, that the hospital does the recycling and just makes up fresh suspensions. Of course, if any recycling was done it would be to recover the pure BaSO4, which would be the domain of a chemical supplier; who then supplies the material to a pharma company, who then makes the thing you drink, who sells it to the hospital.
Recovering the material from shit is no different to recovering it from the ore it originally came from in the ground. Medical-purity BaSO4 is likely to be a further cut above the lab-grade stuff you can buy from any number of common chemical suppliers - purifying it is trivial - they do it all the time to make the stuff in the first place. What we're discussing here is the economic viability of recovering it from sewage waste. The source is ultimately unimportant. If it ends up in a drug it has to come from a very specific, well monitored source. There's no chance some "flunky" is going to affect the dose of contrast agent you drink. (Oh, and nice, unnecessary jab at union workers and "lefties" there - given your level of discourse and opinion of union labour I'll try and keep my words to fewer than four syllables so you can follow along).
It seems you live in a world full of conspiracies and hidden enemies in the shadows at every turn trying to get one over on you. You might want to just relax a bit. You can log in too; the government is not tracking your slashdot account.
In the abstract, this may sound great, but I doubt many average people will want to drink the "recovered" barium....
It's also not just the "ick" factor: The stuff is often passed-through very sick people. In re-processing it you would need to absolutely guarantee you had eliminated any and all biological "stuff" right down to the cellular level..... without error. ANY quality control problems == huge lawsuits. We used to re-use syringes and needles in medical facilities, but no more..... you only do such things when it's so hard and expensive to make new stuff and the lawsuit penalties for error are so low that the risks are "acceptable"; that's just not modern America.
Well, it melts at around 1300 C, so I assume heating it in a furnace at 1000 C would be suitable for eliminating "any and all biological stuff"?
What about recycling? I mean even if it degrades to something else because of radioactivity, there's no reason not to revert that process and use solar energy to do it.
Barium sulfate is not radioactive.
It's very insoluble in water, which is why it's so useful as a contrast agent; it's very heavy (thus, radio opaque) but insoluble so it doesn't have toxic effects.
Recovering it would be a case of waiting for the patient to shit it out. Perhaps hook all of the hospital toilets to a reclamation system. I figure the cost of reclaiming the amount used in a typical X-ray study is just not a cost effective thing to do.
The USPS should have gotten into certificates a long time ago. Is it any wonder they're going under?
They're going under because they are facing the same pressures as the Royal Mail in the UK - private companies can pick and choose profitable delivery while dumping the unprofitable stuff on the national mail carrier who simply *must* take on the stuff that private companies would ignore as unprofitable. The USPS has it slightly better than the Royal Mail because third party carriers can't put things in your mailbox (there is no such restriction here), but parcel delivery companies are seriously squeezing them.
Also because you can send something across the whole US for a buck or so and be almost certain it will get there in a couple of days, come rain or shine.
What exact tax rate would balance the budget smart guy?
Why is it everyone who says taxes are too low can't give a percentage that would make everything rosy?
Is it because they know if you crank up taxes to where it "needs" to be it would crash the economy plunging us into a depression, and the government would just spend more if they got that money anyways.
No, it's because the rate will vary depending on the current obligations of the government (ie, the budget it sets), and the variables created by external factors that are hard to predict accurately (what other countries do).
It's not rocket science.
Cutting the defence budget would be an excellent start - you don't even have to look at taxes.
Then repeal all of the Bush tax cuts to reset them to the way they were (which are still pretty low). That puts a a couple of trillion in the pot over the next decade. I find it hard to imagine that cutting a slice off the defence budget and repealing the Bush tax cuts would "crash the economy" and "plunge us into depression".
Most likely the money train only makes regular stops early in the game cycle. Eventually the players get bored with Mafia Wars and instead move onto Chinese Triad Wars, which is the same thing with new artwork, and the cycle begins again.
At some point the cost of support is going to outweigh the income, and Zynga's primary aim above all others is keeping the profit per unit time as high as possible.
As I said, payment may give him incentive to continue writing software. It may not, if it's too low a sum. He may write software for the mere pleasure, or because it adds value to him.
Investing time now to acquire future income is a gamble. The decision on whether to invest time must be made on an assessment of the future income, and past performance is a useful indicator to factor into that assessment. But the time is lost whether that income occurs or not.
Right, but the justification seems to be that because that time has already been "gambled" away, that someone not paying for the app but still using it is morally ok because "it's just ones and zeros and the time has been spent to make it whether I buy it or not". That's the argument I'm addressing. It's clear in that case that the developer's gamble *did* pay off - someone wants to use his product. So, the demand is there. It's not infeasible to expect that someone who wants to use the app actually pays for it if it is being sold. The gamble in investing time and money to make it is whether there's sufficient demand and a decent customer base for your product, not that you should feel "lucky" if people actually pay for it.
Not sure how the above comment, at a base score, is overrated.
Only on slashdot can you be modded overated for a pro-developer stance and for taking the argument "If I make something and chose to sell it for money, then people who take it without paying are negatively affecting said developer".
Remember, -1 mods are not synonymous with "I disagree".
and yet somehow, to some people, it is still too much to pay.
If the developer doesn't want to take your money because you're still in high school, therefore under 18, therefore no credit card, then two bucks is too much to pay. If the developer doesn't want to take your money because you happen to have been born in the wrong country, then two bucks is too much to pay. In fact, that's where the expectation of free apps on Android came from: because Android Market launched with no paid apps in most countries, early developers had to make their programs ad-supported.
You think not having a credit card means you can't buy apps from the App Store? I suggest you go and learn some facts before you start building a hill to die on.
You have problems with the app store model? Fine, argue those - that's the point of a discussion site, but at least argue honestly. Justifying app piracy because the person who wants the app is under 18 and doesn't have a credit card? Weak. Not only is it a pathetic argument, it's also not even remotely true. You can open an iTunes account with no credit card and buy iTunes gift cards with cash. No credit or other bank card has to ever go near your account.
Someone had to do the work to get that particular combination of ones and zeroes to line up. Our laws give them copyright governing how they are distributed and they choose to ask for money in exchange.
So who, exactly, was it that put the gun to the "content creators'" heads and forced them to create "content"? Certainly it wasn't me, and certainly they are well aware of the level of technology available to the average person in our society. Therefore I have no sympathy for them and merely offer them cheese to go along with their whine about how they "had" to line up their ones and zeros.
For musicians, they could simply choose to not record, and opt for earning income from live performances and merchandising (think SpaceBalls the Flamethrower (the kids love that one)). For actors they could choose to stop recording screen acting sessions and opt for live performances as well.
If you really want to stop our society from replicating your "copyrighted" strings of zeros and ones the solution is easy: turn off our electricity. Because the reality is I've never heard Broadway whining, nor live performance bands. Probably because they still rake in plenty of cold hard cash which allows them drink wine and eat cheese, rather than whine and beg the question if they would like some cheese.
They didn't "have" to, but they did. They're certainly not entitled to make a profit on their app, or even get back what they put into it in terms of time and money - that's how business works. Put it this way, they have the same entitlement to profit as you do to copy it without paying; none.
With your attitude then I suspect many of them decide to say "screw this, I won't do it any more" and we're all worse off as the only developers left on major app stores are the behemoths.
Theft of my time. Time I could have spent earning extra income helping someone with an odd job or time I could have spent going out with friends or even getting a couple extra hours of sleep.
No. Your time has already been used. You wont get it back if someone pays you a dollar for your app.
You may be incentivised to invest more time into trying to earn another dollar in the same way, but that time you spent? It's gone. It wont come back. It can't be stolen, for it no longer exists.
Sorry.
So, to take this to its logical conclusion, since his time isn't being "stolen" because he already used it, he's less likely to make software in the future seeing that the attitude of the consumers is "it doesn't count as theft of service because he already put the work in".
You might get that killer app for free today, but what about tomorrow's killer app? Who is going to write that?
GPL does make a point about charging for the software. It very specifically says that you MAY NOT charge for the software. It also specifically states that you may not charge to distribute, but that you MAY collect a small fee for the time and materials that might be consumed in reproducing that software (burning a CD or whatever).
No, it really doesn't. It says exactly the opposite of that, in fact - and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing immoral or incompatible with charging for your software.
No, when they say "copy freely" they mean without restriction. Patent fees impose restrictions via cost, this is why FRAND (and software patents in general) is bad, particularly for standards.
I can copy open source code without restriction?
Cool! I'll roll some of that fancy GPLv3 code into my new product. It's a Tivo box. Awesome.
Oh you want my changes? Those are mine! You can buy my Tivo box though, it's cool.
So, I'm not getting it. Funneling even more money into the government, where it has been proven to be wasted, is somehow better?
Well it's certainly wasted where it is now. Hoarding the money in tax havens and other such things essentially makes it useless to the economy. You want it to circulate through the economy to keep it working. Large spending programs are a way to do that (science and tech, education, welfare, infrastructure etc) by creation of jobs.
The other option would be considerably increased wages across the board and a vast increase in the minimum wage - the average wage for the middle class hasn't really moved in decades (proportionally to the cost of living), unlike the compensation for the super wealthy, which has skyrocketed. Great for them, but at the cost of stagnating the economy.
There's no simple answer, but low taxes on the wealthy is certainly not among the right options. It just siphons money away from where it does any good. It's like reducing the amount of blood you circulate in your body, keeping a large volume of it in a separate body that you can't use.
Social security does not effect the deficit at all?
Then why is the President warning us that if the debt ceiling is not raised, we won't make Social Security payments?
With he is lying, or you are wrong.
Give you a hint: future payments are not from invested money, but from current payments by new investors. Grandma and Grandpa are not paid by their money invested over the last 45 years of paying into SS, but by the current payments of their children and their grandchildren. THere is no lockbox.
I.e. how a Ponzi scheme works... Until there are not enough investors, then it collapses. In this case, we start cashing in the SS IOUs, forcing the government to issue bonds to pay those IOUs and thus impacting the debt, and why we need to raise the debt limit to cover the bonds.
We are at that tipping point right now, it will only get worse as the baby boomers retire.
Because the government has borrowed money from SS to pay for things, and thus when the payments need to be made the government needs to pay back what it borrowed... with more borrowing from somewhere else.
Social Security is paid into by those who claim the money back later - it's not something that "costs" the government in that sense, except that they borrowed from it and need to pay it back.
What? LOL! The creationists have had control for a VERY long time. The evolutionists are currently barking loudest, giving the impression that they have the upper hand. For some reason, science accepts certain theories as fact, even without real proof. Sounds to me like the same type of faith over which they berate creationists.
You clearly have no idea how science works, but I'll bite. What "certain theories" does science (as a concept I guess, but I assume you mean scientists here) accept as fact with no real proof?
The United States government gets plenty of taxes already, thanks. What's the figure, something like one-third to one-half of all wealth created in the nation goes to the government? New taxes are not the solution. They aren't even the precipitate. Give them more money, and they will just waste it. Guaranteed.
Nonsense. Taxes in the US are at an all time low. The last time the wealth was this badly skewed in favour of the super rich with such ludicrously low taxes the Great Depression happened.
It's not a coincidence. Funnelling money into the hands of the few and crippling the middle and lower classes brings the economic engine to its knees.
the government has been spending nearly double what it earns for many years now, how is that not a spending problem? live within your means or pay the consequences later. It is almost time to pay the consequences and it is going to be severe no matter how you spin this one.
The problem is, the things they want to cut aren't going to do anything to help. The GOP wants to kill things like social security (which does not affect the deficit at all) and social programs and god damn funding for PBS, NASA etc while at the same time leaving the military spending alone.
That's like buying a car on credit and then "reducing your debt" by not borrowing money to take it to the car wash on the way home from the lot.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't have to wait for a decade, they can just crop out the last decade of data and ask the model minus 10 years of data to predict it.
That only works if you never ever intend to run the model with different parameters, otherwise you just settle on the parameters that "fit" the existing data.. which continues to not be prediction.
Not if you remove that data (that you have cropped out) from the original model. As far as the model is concerned, that data does not exist, and it not used to create the model parameters.
This has been done with ocean temperatures and other climate models.
It's not as simple as fitting the line then hiding the last 5 data points and saying "oh look, the points are on the line".
Uh-huh, big whoop. We've had heaps of models that fit the historical data - that's the easy part. It's all there, you can tweak your model as you like until it fits the historicals just right. The value of a model isn't in how well it fits the historical data, but how well it predicts future data.
So crank a prediction or two out of this puppy and get back to us in a decade.
They don't have to wait for a decade, they can just crop out the last decade of data and ask the model minus 10 years of data to predict it. Since they already have the answer, they'll know if it fits.
The is routinely done with large timescale models like the atmosphere and the ocean.
How can something that blocks out the sun make it hotter?? Wouldn't it make it cooler? Thats what they say is going to happen if a super volcano erupts it will block out the sun and make it much cooler and making very hard to grow stuff with less sun. Ya ask me its all the roads that have been build and building with dark roofs making it much hotter on the surface of the earth. The reason cities are much warmer then the burbs. Soot moves around and it cleaned out by rain our natural air filter.
You answered your own question.
It absorbs IR and UV, and reradiates it - that's how CO2 (and all of the other greenhouse gasses like water vapour) work. If it's thick enough to block incoming UV then that energy from the sun never reaches the ground. This is what happens during a super volcano eruption.
If it's finely dispersed in the atmosphere then it acts like CO2, absorbing the returning IR from the surface of the earth and warming the atmosphere.
It's all about concentration.
This is a LIE !!!!
Can we not look at past evidence of large volcanic eruptions in the past and see the effect of massive soot releases caused....gasp...GLOBAL COOLING.
What a bunch of sheep. Can scientists please start using critical thinking, check existing facts, and stop jumping on political bandwagon bullshit.
If you log in and take ownership of this statement I'll tell you why you are wrong. As it is, you can just live in blissful ignorance.
(Hint: think about the quantity of soot and ash and the way UV and IR radiation passes through different concentrations of soot clouds)
Given that almost every "expert" on here seems to be going off on one about "rare earth" issues, I doubt they're even aware of what barium itself is, let alone any alternatives to BaSO4 contrast suspensions.
Does anyone know of alternatives to barium?
Um, how about calcium sulfate or strontium sulfate? All are alkaline earth metals, and have the same or similar basic chemical properties because of having the same valence, electron configuration and so on. Right?
It's not the chemical properties that are really important (other than the insolubility of BaSO4). The main reason is the density of the Ba atom - it's heavy, so it has a high absorption cross section for X rays. Calcium and strontium are much less large.
Was being brief and assumed the implications were obvious...... guess not
1. Just because a few geeks are certain re-use is ok and might be willing to do it, the general public would not be
2. Even if you are a geek, there's no guarantee some minimum-wage flunky at a re-processing company (or some unionized hospital worker who is mad and in the middle of some "labor action") is gonna do a perfect job and the stuff YOU end up drinking will be properly re-processed. A bit like drinking re-cycled urine .... fine if you are a geek and the processing is being done by the rocket scientists at NASA for the space station, but are you still willing if it's being done by the guy who's only other career option included saying "want fries with that?"
3. A good lawyer will easily convince a typical jury (possibly with members who are anti-science lefties who reject nuclear stuff) that there was some bad thing in the re-processing process (probably done by evil "big hospital" or "big pharma") i.e. it's just another level of "doubt" ....
Think some more and you can imagine many other reasons that each just make the business case a little bit harder to close. No single cut might kill the patient (in this case: re-use of Barium), but lots of little cuts and he bleeds-out
You assume, naively, that the hospital does the recycling and just makes up fresh suspensions. Of course, if any recycling was done it would be to recover the pure BaSO4, which would be the domain of a chemical supplier; who then supplies the material to a pharma company, who then makes the thing you drink, who sells it to the hospital.
Recovering the material from shit is no different to recovering it from the ore it originally came from in the ground. Medical-purity BaSO4 is likely to be a further cut above the lab-grade stuff you can buy from any number of common chemical suppliers - purifying it is trivial - they do it all the time to make the stuff in the first place. What we're discussing here is the economic viability of recovering it from sewage waste. The source is ultimately unimportant. If it ends up in a drug it has to come from a very specific, well monitored source. There's no chance some "flunky" is going to affect the dose of contrast agent you drink. (Oh, and nice, unnecessary jab at union workers and "lefties" there - given your level of discourse and opinion of union labour I'll try and keep my words to fewer than four syllables so you can follow along).
It seems you live in a world full of conspiracies and hidden enemies in the shadows at every turn trying to get one over on you. You might want to just relax a bit. You can log in too; the government is not tracking your slashdot account.
In the abstract, this may sound great, but I doubt many average people will want to drink the "recovered" barium....
It's also not just the "ick" factor: The stuff is often passed-through very sick people. In re-processing it you would need to absolutely guarantee you had eliminated any and all biological "stuff" right down to the cellular level ..... without error. ANY quality control problems == huge lawsuits. We used to re-use syringes and needles in medical facilities, but no more ..... you only do such things when it's so hard and expensive to make new stuff and the lawsuit penalties for error are so low that the risks are "acceptable"; that's just not modern America.
Well, it melts at around 1300 C, so I assume heating it in a furnace at 1000 C would be suitable for eliminating "any and all biological stuff"?
What about recycling? I mean even if it degrades to something else because of radioactivity, there's no reason not to revert that process and use solar energy to do it.
Barium sulfate is not radioactive.
It's very insoluble in water, which is why it's so useful as a contrast agent; it's very heavy (thus, radio opaque) but insoluble so it doesn't have toxic effects.
Recovering it would be a case of waiting for the patient to shit it out. Perhaps hook all of the hospital toilets to a reclamation system. I figure the cost of reclaiming the amount used in a typical X-ray study is just not a cost effective thing to do.
The USPS should have gotten into certificates a long time ago. Is it any wonder they're going under?
They're going under because they are facing the same pressures as the Royal Mail in the UK - private companies can pick and choose profitable delivery while dumping the unprofitable stuff on the national mail carrier who simply *must* take on the stuff that private companies would ignore as unprofitable. The USPS has it slightly better than the Royal Mail because third party carriers can't put things in your mailbox (there is no such restriction here), but parcel delivery companies are seriously squeezing them.
Also because you can send something across the whole US for a buck or so and be almost certain it will get there in a couple of days, come rain or shine.
What exact tax rate would balance the budget smart guy?
Why is it everyone who says taxes are too low can't give a percentage that would make everything rosy?
Is it because they know if you crank up taxes to where it "needs" to be it would crash the economy plunging us into a depression, and the government would just spend more if they got that money anyways.
No, it's because the rate will vary depending on the current obligations of the government (ie, the budget it sets), and the variables created by external factors that are hard to predict accurately (what other countries do).
It's not rocket science.
Cutting the defence budget would be an excellent start - you don't even have to look at taxes.
Then repeal all of the Bush tax cuts to reset them to the way they were (which are still pretty low). That puts a a couple of trillion in the pot over the next decade. I find it hard to imagine that cutting a slice off the defence budget and repealing the Bush tax cuts would "crash the economy" and "plunge us into depression".
Most likely the money train only makes regular stops early in the game cycle. Eventually the players get bored with Mafia Wars and instead move onto Chinese Triad Wars, which is the same thing with new artwork, and the cycle begins again.
At some point the cost of support is going to outweigh the income, and Zynga's primary aim above all others is keeping the profit per unit time as high as possible.
As I said, payment may give him incentive to continue writing software. It may not, if it's too low a sum. He may write software for the mere pleasure, or because it adds value to him.
Investing time now to acquire future income is a gamble. The decision on whether to invest time must be made on an assessment of the future income, and past performance is a useful indicator to factor into that assessment. But the time is lost whether that income occurs or not.
Right, but the justification seems to be that because that time has already been "gambled" away, that someone not paying for the app but still using it is morally ok because "it's just ones and zeros and the time has been spent to make it whether I buy it or not". That's the argument I'm addressing. It's clear in that case that the developer's gamble *did* pay off - someone wants to use his product. So, the demand is there. It's not infeasible to expect that someone who wants to use the app actually pays for it if it is being sold. The gamble in investing time and money to make it is whether there's sufficient demand and a decent customer base for your product, not that you should feel "lucky" if people actually pay for it.
Not sure how the above comment, at a base score, is overrated.
Only on slashdot can you be modded overated for a pro-developer stance and for taking the argument "If I make something and chose to sell it for money, then people who take it without paying are negatively affecting said developer".
Remember, -1 mods are not synonymous with "I disagree".
and yet somehow, to some people, it is still too much to pay.
If the developer doesn't want to take your money because you're still in high school, therefore under 18, therefore no credit card, then two bucks is too much to pay. If the developer doesn't want to take your money because you happen to have been born in the wrong country, then two bucks is too much to pay. In fact, that's where the expectation of free apps on Android came from: because Android Market launched with no paid apps in most countries, early developers had to make their programs ad-supported.
You think not having a credit card means you can't buy apps from the App Store? I suggest you go and learn some facts before you start building a hill to die on.
You have problems with the app store model? Fine, argue those - that's the point of a discussion site, but at least argue honestly. Justifying app piracy because the person who wants the app is under 18 and doesn't have a credit card? Weak. Not only is it a pathetic argument, it's also not even remotely true. You can open an iTunes account with no credit card and buy iTunes gift cards with cash. No credit or other bank card has to ever go near your account.
Someone had to do the work to get that particular combination of ones and zeroes to line up. Our laws give them copyright governing how they are distributed and they choose to ask for money in exchange.
So who, exactly, was it that put the gun to the "content creators'" heads and forced them to create "content"? Certainly it wasn't me, and certainly they are well aware of the level of technology available to the average person in our society. Therefore I have no sympathy for them and merely offer them cheese to go along with their whine about how they "had" to line up their ones and zeros.
For musicians, they could simply choose to not record, and opt for earning income from live performances and merchandising (think SpaceBalls the Flamethrower (the kids love that one)). For actors they could choose to stop recording screen acting sessions and opt for live performances as well.
If you really want to stop our society from replicating your "copyrighted" strings of zeros and ones the solution is easy: turn off our electricity. Because the reality is I've never heard Broadway whining, nor live performance bands. Probably because they still rake in plenty of cold hard cash which allows them drink wine and eat cheese, rather than whine and beg the question if they would like some cheese.
They didn't "have" to, but they did. They're certainly not entitled to make a profit on their app, or even get back what they put into it in terms of time and money - that's how business works. Put it this way, they have the same entitlement to profit as you do to copy it without paying; none.
With your attitude then I suspect many of them decide to say "screw this, I won't do it any more" and we're all worse off as the only developers left on major app stores are the behemoths.
Theft of my time. Time I could have spent earning extra income helping someone with an odd job or time I could have spent going out with friends or even getting a couple extra hours of sleep.
No. Your time has already been used. You wont get it back if someone pays you a dollar for your app.
You may be incentivised to invest more time into trying to earn another dollar in the same way, but that time you spent? It's gone. It wont come back. It can't be stolen, for it no longer exists.
Sorry.
So, to take this to its logical conclusion, since his time isn't being "stolen" because he already used it, he's less likely to make software in the future seeing that the attitude of the consumers is "it doesn't count as theft of service because he already put the work in".
You might get that killer app for free today, but what about tomorrow's killer app? Who is going to write that?
GPL does make a point about charging for the software. It very specifically says that you MAY NOT charge for the software. It also specifically states that you may not charge to distribute, but that you MAY collect a small fee for the time and materials that might be consumed in reproducing that software (burning a CD or whatever).
No, it really doesn't. It says exactly the opposite of that, in fact - and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing immoral or incompatible with charging for your software.
Oh great, a moron.
No, when they say "copy freely" they mean without restriction. Patent fees impose restrictions via cost, this is why FRAND (and software patents in general) is bad, particularly for standards.
I can copy open source code without restriction?
Cool! I'll roll some of that fancy GPLv3 code into my new product. It's a Tivo box. Awesome.
Oh you want my changes? Those are mine! You can buy my Tivo box though, it's cool.
See, I can overgeneralise and oversimplify too.
So, I'm not getting it. Funneling even more money into the government, where it has been proven to be wasted, is somehow better?
Well it's certainly wasted where it is now. Hoarding the money in tax havens and other such things essentially makes it useless to the economy. You want it to circulate through the economy to keep it working. Large spending programs are a way to do that (science and tech, education, welfare, infrastructure etc) by creation of jobs.
The other option would be considerably increased wages across the board and a vast increase in the minimum wage - the average wage for the middle class hasn't really moved in decades (proportionally to the cost of living), unlike the compensation for the super wealthy, which has skyrocketed. Great for them, but at the cost of stagnating the economy.
There's no simple answer, but low taxes on the wealthy is certainly not among the right options. It just siphons money away from where it does any good. It's like reducing the amount of blood you circulate in your body, keeping a large volume of it in a separate body that you can't use.
Social security does not effect the deficit at all?
Then why is the President warning us that if the debt ceiling is not raised, we won't make Social Security payments?
With he is lying, or you are wrong.
Give you a hint: future payments are not from invested money, but from current payments by new investors. Grandma and Grandpa are not paid by their money invested over the last 45 years of paying into SS, but by the current payments of their children and their grandchildren. THere is no lockbox.
I.e. how a Ponzi scheme works... Until there are not enough investors, then it collapses. In this case, we start cashing in the SS IOUs, forcing the government to issue bonds to pay those IOUs and thus impacting the debt, and why we need to raise the debt limit to cover the bonds.
We are at that tipping point right now, it will only get worse as the baby boomers retire.
Because the government has borrowed money from SS to pay for things, and thus when the payments need to be made the government needs to pay back what it borrowed... with more borrowing from somewhere else.
Social Security is paid into by those who claim the money back later - it's not something that "costs" the government in that sense, except that they borrowed from it and need to pay it back.
What? LOL! The creationists have had control for a VERY long time. The evolutionists are currently barking loudest, giving the impression that they have the upper hand. For some reason, science accepts certain theories as fact, even without real proof. Sounds to me like the same type of faith over which they berate creationists.
You clearly have no idea how science works, but I'll bite. What "certain theories" does science (as a concept I guess, but I assume you mean scientists here) accept as fact with no real proof?
The United States government gets plenty of taxes already, thanks. What's the figure, something like one-third to one-half of all wealth created in the nation goes to the government? New taxes are not the solution. They aren't even the precipitate. Give them more money, and they will just waste it. Guaranteed.
Nonsense. Taxes in the US are at an all time low. The last time the wealth was this badly skewed in favour of the super rich with such ludicrously low taxes the Great Depression happened.
It's not a coincidence. Funnelling money into the hands of the few and crippling the middle and lower classes brings the economic engine to its knees.
the government has been spending nearly double what it earns for many years now, how is that not a spending problem? live within your means or pay the consequences later. It is almost time to pay the consequences and it is going to be severe no matter how you spin this one.
The problem is, the things they want to cut aren't going to do anything to help. The GOP wants to kill things like social security (which does not affect the deficit at all) and social programs and god damn funding for PBS, NASA etc while at the same time leaving the military spending alone.
That's like buying a car on credit and then "reducing your debt" by not borrowing money to take it to the car wash on the way home from the lot.
Or even degrees C, which is what scientists use...
Actually, the SI unit of temperature is the Kelvin.