Real hard to figure out WTF you were quoting or saying there, which of those words were yours, and what your point was.
Anyway, with only 38% of downloads resulting in payment they still pulled in over $6 million. A "band with no name" wouldn't have to get anywhere near that amount to consider such an experiment a success.
Note I said "downloads resulting in payment" not "people paying", since the former is accurate and the latter baselessly assumes one download per person. Especially for a no-name band, the "try before you buy" aspect would actually be an advantage; people reluctant to try out a new band could do so for free, and pay later if they liked it. That appeals to me anyway since I don't like "risking" my money on an album I may not like. The percentage of downloads that result in payment really isn't the important metric, then, it's the amount of money taken in.
Actually you raise a good point on the advertising costs. If they did not spend much in terms of advertising, then their costs would be lower and it's possible that they ended up with similar or even more profits. Having an already established name would help, of course, along with the free publicity, but hey, that's savvy too. But yeah, no idea how that actually played out.
This is because there has been a huge merging frenzy in the past decade, almost like an orgy of nested expressions that would do any LisP programmer proud. Toss in SmithKline and Beecham, blend with Burroughs and Wellcome, sprinkle in some Glaxo, bake at high temperature, and out comes a steaming hot GlaxoSmithKline. Then there's Pfizer, gobbling up Warner and Pharmacia / Upjohn, and then spitting out the bones, a process so repetitious that the people eaten up and summarily laid off produced a T-shirt with the oval blue logo in the style of the Pfizer logo that says, "Pfired!"
Someone my dad used to work with (former Upjohn -> Pharmacia-Upjohn -> Pfired employee) took a picture of the downtown Kalamazoo building from across the parking lot, a year and a half after the buyout. In the foreground: light posts with banners hanging from them saying things like "Pfizer -- we love where we live!" and "Pfizer -- building communities together!" and other such drivel that was used to make people feel better in the early aftermath of the buyout. In the background: A crane and wrecking ball, destroying the downtown building.
A perfect metaphor for Pfizer's operations. I really need to get it up online so I can link it in discussions like this.
*BUT* they don't give up! With doctors pointing out that Emperor AstraZeneca's new clothes don't really cover their genitalia, AZ aims at a new market: the general public. AZ thinks up a new brand name that doesn't sound remotely like "Prilosec", so that the public won't realize that they're getting the same thing.
Thus explaining why their advertising expenses exceed their R&D expenses -- it takes a lot of money to convince the same old crap is new again.
BTW, do you know if this case resulted in a patentable change in the chemical manufacturing process? I know they patent not just the molecules but the process for making them, and I've been postulating that a big reason they do these little "side-grades" of drugs is to get around the fact that the old patent is expiring by getting a drug just new enough to slap a new patent on.
So, my fellow Slashdotters: don't fret about medical research. This is just another case of A Big Company that is Supposedly Innovative but actually only knows how to bluster and pretend to run research labs while it Eats Up Other Companies. Meanwhile, a New Way Of Thinking, which has actually been around for a long time, is gathering force and making its presence felt.
That does make me feel better. The idea that we can have both great new medical advances and witness the slow painful death of those Big Pharma Phuckers makes me smile. But doesn't it seem probably that on their way down, Big Pharma will suck up and destroy a great many of these upstarts?
Well there's another option that you didn't consider, one that occurs in reality quite often:
A new drug is developed that is inferior in efficacy but superior in that it isn't about to run out of patent protection. To get people to use the new inferior drug instead of the old drug with the expiring patent, advertise the ever loving hell out of the new drug including loading doctors with free samples and junkets and fill the airwaves with ads to get the people to believe the new one is better and demand it from their doctors. This advertising will end up costing more than actually developing the new drug and getting it approved (look at any pharma's quarterly report for advertising vs R&D expenses), but that's okay because in the end being able to sell the new drug at patent-monopoly prices will bring in more than enough profit.
The only thing long patents do to stop this is to keep the pharma from needing to come up with a new drug, better or not. They keep competing with the other company's patented drugs, using mostly advertising, not clinical performance as the lever to move market share their way. And when there is no competing drug for that purpose, and the existing drug is still protected by patents? Yay insane profit margins!
I do see your point though, there does seem to be a lot more effort put into non-essential drugs and pretty commercials than in developing drugs to treat serious diseases.
That's not a case of "seems", that's a case of "matter of factual record according to the pharma companies' own filings to the IRS".
All these companies spend several times more on advertising than on R&D. The biggest one, Pfizer, is also the worst in this regard, and spends something like 4x as much on advertising than on R&D. And then they have the balls to come out and say that drugs cost a lot because of the R&D expenses. This is like me arguing that it's my cable bill (not the rent) that is keeping me from dropping prices in my store, except I'm still pulling in a 50% margin after both those expenses.
The company that Pfizer bought out a few years ago, Pharmacia-Upjohn, was one of the best iirc, something like a 1.5-2x ratio of advertising to R&D. My father worked for them before Pfizer layed off nearly everyone in the site. They did lots of research into obscure and difficult to cure diseases some of which my father worked on. I do give them and pharma in general credit for that.
But to enjoy the absolutely insane profits and margins that the pharma industry enjoys, they can't just make good drugs that doctors can prescribe to people who need it. They have to make fluffy solve-the-problem-you-weren't-sure-you-had please-annoy-your-doctor-until-he-prescribes-it stuff, and to get people to do this they need to advertise the living hell out of them. And for that, I have zero sympathy.
I don't remember Vonnegut mentioning the fate of that profession in Player Piano. I'm imagining it would have been replaced with machines like everything else but engineering and management. Though reading it in the early 2000s I realized that really, machines will eventually design machines (they already do a fair portion of the work with things like automatic place-and-route), and at least middle management is conceivably replaceable.
Vonnegut's musings on the impact on the human soul aside, it's still pretty exciting to see robotic surgery start to bear fruit. It's a great advance that will help many people, and I think for the time being the surgeon's job is safe since even the best robot isn't doing better than pantomiming specific actions, and are a terribly long way from the reasoning capacity to adjust the plan by itself if there are complications.
On the other hand, it -does- go against my general principle of not giving robots weapons.
No, because they actually read the post they replied to, and it is clear he got the gist correct (i.e. that they were speculating on something on the meaning of something they haven't even read).
As for "intent to be private," do you you really think that's realistic, when talking about the Internet? I can intend to not shoot my foot, but if I point a gun at my foot and fire, my intent was ridiculous.
The "and that one could reasonably expect that privacy to be respected." is not an optional part, it is a necessary condition.
I get that, but putting an ear to the window is still a pretty active step. Someone who does that is probably looking for trouble, they have to get pretty close to your house, etc.
I'm glad you have recognized the importance of taking active steps. This is quite relavent. This is why you have no expectation of privacy for your conversations in a public park -- people hear whether they want to or not -- versus your expectation of privacy for your undergarments when wearing a skirt in a public part -- generally requires active steps to look up, though not much. The "not much" part isn't important.
And you keep seeming to lose track of what this is about. If the legal theory being posed here were to be ruled valid, then a police officer wouldn't be "looking for trouble" because if you caught them in the act you wouldn't be able to do anything since it would be completely legal for them to listen to you. I know you're concerned with stopping them from listening to you even if they break the law, but making it so that it isn't breaking the law only means that they can try all the harder to get around your protections, again with no penalty should they be caught because it's legal.
But isn't using plaintext on the Internet, a whole lot closer to the public park scenario? You're relying on countless (literally; you often really don't know how many there are) strangers, who have no accountability to either party, to relay a message.
Do a traceroute to Slashdot.org. That's the number of servers responsible for relaying your message (and granted an unknown number of sysadmins, but then again you don't how many postal workers handle your mail in the various post offices your mail goes through). That's hardly "countless". And it's also hardly a given that any of them must see the contents of your data packets. They would have to take steps to go retrieve the data off the servers to view, an active step like we were just discussing.
Back before (all? most?) the cable companies start using PPPoE, every packet their customers sent, was literally sent into all their neighbors homes, visible just by having a NIC in promiscuous mode. And nowdays, a lot of people are using 802.11: that's literally radio broadcast. Is it unscrupulous or criminal to pay attention to broadcast traffic? Maybe. But it's not anywhere close to entering someone's lot, hoping you're not seen, and putting your ear up to someone's window.
Yes it was easier to listen to your data before they upgraded the cable network protocols. Unencrypted wi-fi is vulnerable, though it has a limited range and is hardly some ridiculous number of people, it basically includes the people down the street. If you encrypt your wi-fi then encrypting your email is redundant for the people on your street. A number of people, by the way, not much different than those that could hear your conversations with a good parabolic mic, because your voice is also broadcast in the vicinity.
Internet traffic is too "broadcasty" to be comparable to talking inside your home. It's more like talking on a CB radio, and expecting lots of people to have the good manners to not pay attention to what you sent to them. Sure, maybe you have the intent to have a private conversion, but I just can't apply the word "reasonable" to that. If it has some wacky technical case law definition, ok, but it is utterly contrary to any layman's interpretation.
The internet as a whole is not "broadcasty" at all. While it supports the concept, Internet Protocol is essentially a point-to-point communication protocol more remeniscient of the phone network o
A fine point, just stop pretending it has anything to do with the 1st amendment, or implying hypocrisy from people who feel strongly about free speech but also mock idiots like JT.
I'm saying for the amount of love we give that right in particular, we are the first to mock another's right to freely use it. We (like the crowd) use it as a shield to scorn others, but all in all the crowds reaction was one of mocking rather than voicing their concerns and frustrations in a calm rational way.
We're not mocking his right to use it, we're mocking the words that come out of his mouth during his use of it. Where's our first amendment right to mock idiots? This is exactly what I'm saying -- the issue of respecting someone's First Amendment Rights to speak has nothing at all to do with respecting what they say.
I say the better plan for that debate would be to ask him questions to which we know he'll give answers that contradict his case. From the sounds of it, he won this debate hands down against both Lanning and the crowd.
Maybe, maybe not. You "lose" a debate with JT just by giving him the attention. I think the best strategy is not to engage him in debate at all, because he's at his self-destructive best when given free reign to explain his unique way of thinking.
On what planet is being blasted for saying stupid things the same as not being allowed to say them?
It's only the truly ridiculous who depend on a persecution complex -- Jack Thompson and the KKK being two examples that spring immediately to mind -- who seem to think that the 1st Amendment means that not only can they say whatever they want, we must also take what they say seriously and respectfully and not repeat what they say in a high-pitched mocking tone while pointing and laughing.
This is wrong. Nowhere in the 1st Amendment does it suggest that you should be free to say what you want without having people judge you based on your words to be an idiot and to treat you accordingly.
I'm not arguing about the strategic value of trying to look like a bigger ass than JT. I'm saying bringing in the 1st Amendment as if he was in any way denied his rights is stupid.
Apparently "expectation of" has become a very technical term, basically meaning "desired."
Well yes it IS a technical term because we're talking about Constitutional Law here. The fact that it is expressed in English, where words can have multiple meanings, should not be taken to mean that any definition you like is the one that applies. The meaning of the phrase is put down in case law, not the Oxford English Dictionary.
And no, it doesn't just mean "desired", it means that it was the intent to be private, and that one could reasonably expect that privacy to be respected. So having a conversation in a public park has no "expectation of privacy" because no reasonable person would expect that others would not hear them -- they couldn't help but hear as they are walking past. Whereas having a conversation in a private house does have an expectation of privacy, even though it is fairly trivial to listen in (put an ear to the window).
Without cryptography, it's too easy for lots of people to be reading your email, and it'll happen without you ever knowing it happened.
I repeat: It has nothing to do with how easy it is. It has nothing to do with what unscrupulous people performing illegal actions could do.
Your mail is trivial to read by holding it up to the light. Your conversations in your home are trivial to listen to by holding a glass up to the door. Hell, I could read the contents of your phone conversations, or the contents of your computer screen, without ever physically coming into contact with the phone lines or your computer. So... for none of these things should you have an "expectation of privacy"? Law enforcement should be able to spy on these things at will without a warrant?
Likewise, it's so incredibly easy to use crypto, that refraining from doing so, is almost like.. well... giving consent.
So easy eh? So how do you exchange keys with the one you are communicating with? You seem to be proposing the theory that if it is trivial to violate your privacy, then you never had any expectation of privacy at all. Well guess what? It is trivial to modify the unencrypted packets used to exchange public keys such that they are the public keys of a 3rd party, who can then act as a man-in-the-middle reading all the unencrypted communications with neither side the wiser.
Would you say, then, that your encrypted emails should carry no expectation of privacy? After all, it's so easy to get around this problem (always exchange keys with the intended recipient in person using a physical medium for the data) that you're basically giving consent by not doing it, right?
I know it's not, not really. But it's sort of like you put a sign in front of your house, saying, "This house is unlocked. Gee, I hope none of my stuff disappears. *wink* *wink*"
But we're not talking about what an unscrupulous criminal could do. We're talking about what a law abiding government agent should do to remain in compliance with the law. Does leaving your door unlocked imply that it should be legal for a cop to enter your house and search through your stuff for something incriminating (like your mp3 collection)? Of course not, and you know it's not.
Again, if it's not clear enough, let me try to make it so: The issue here is about the 4th Amendment and the requirement for a warrant before conducting a search. It is about what law enforcement and government intelligence agencies are allowed to do legally to read citizen's communications. It has nothing to do with what someone - law enforcement or otherwise - is physically capable of doing if they have no regard for the law.
Is privacy a right that, unlike all other rights, really can just be taken for granted, without anyone ever having to defend it? The obvious defense is right there to be used, and we just say, "Nah, it's not important enough."
1) the real threat is actually so great that the surveillance programs should continue
I assume the implication here is that the threat is much greater than we, the people, know, and that the surveillance has been more successful at stopping the threat than we know. Well that would be rather odd given that Bush's PR team takes every possible opportunity to play up the threats and their successes, rarely even waiting long enough to figure out whether their PR fluff will hold up once the facts are brought in court. If there was such a great threat, and we were so successful at stopping it, I'd think they could do better than half-assed prosecutions against people who are at best tangentially related to al Qaeda and which end up mostly falling apart as examples of how much we need them.
2) the conduct of the surveillance programs is actually more in keeping with accepted American principles than is commonly believed among the public.
If their conduct is "in keeping with accepted American principles", then why do they keep trying to acquire -- or exercise and justify post-facto -- extra-Constitutional powers? Unless the American Principles you're talking about are "apathy" and "a willingness to abandon their freedom at the first sign of danger", I'd say trying to weasel out of the 4th Amendment is not in any way, shape, and form "in keeping with American principles". Your suggestion that despite this public appearance of complete disregard for the Constitution, behind closed doors it's actually a program very respectful of American's rights, and that they're keeping this a secret to be rather hard to take.
Really. The government is clearly desperate for us to believe that the threat is great, they are the only ones who can save us, and that in doing so they are still protecting our rights. It's kind of silly to think that these things are true but nevertheless the government cannot -- not won't, can't, because they are clearly trying desperately to -- show these things to be true.
But then again, I was around when they were desperately trying to prove that Iraq had WMD and would jump on anything and everything they could that could support that idea, even if it fell apart after further investigation (Trailers of Mass Destruction, anyone?) This "take it on faith that the spooks know everything and just can't show us how awesome they are" thing is a horse that won't run anymore.
I predict that for at least the duration of the next presidential term, we will not hear of any surveillance program being shut down by order of the President
I agree, but not for any of the reasons you mention. The fact is that whoever takes up the mantle of President next is most likely going to be just as hungry for power as the current President. First sign: They want to be President. They don't actually mind Bush's huge power grab for the executive branch, because they're hoping that they will be the next ones to benefit. This is why the opposing party's response to these things is mock outrage and zero actual action.
Then again I lost my naivete on the "everything will be great once the other guys get power!" thing even before I lost it about the "oh don't worry your government has everything under control -- despite all appearances" thing.
Also, you can't reasonably expect any privacy in email unless you encrypt its contents.
In the sense that you mean it, no, you can't. However it is important to remember that this is not the sense meant by the term "expectation of privacy" when determining if the 4th Amendment (the privacy amendment) applies.
Expectation of privacy does not mean that you expect that nobody CAN violate your privacy, it means that you can reasonably expect that they WON'T. The ease with which your privacy can be violated is, generally, immaterial. For example your average snail-mail letter is trivial to read simply by holding the sealed envelope up to a light. However this does not give either the postman or the policeman the right to do this, because you do have a basic expectation of privacy with your mail.
Yet there are still special envelopes which make it difficult or impossible to read the letter inside. You use these to try to ensure your privacy, and you do it not because doing so is the only way that one can expect privacy, you do it because you don't want the kind of unscrupulous people who have no respect for your privacy to be able to see the check or money order or whatever important thing is in your letter and possibly steal it.
This is similar to email and encryption. Email is a private communication, between the sender and the listed recipients. You should be able to expect privacy even for unencrypted emails, you should be able to expect that no scrupulous person or law-abiding law-enforcement officer would read it whenever they choose. If the contents of the mail are important enough that you can't trust people to be law-abiding, or you are simply paranoid (not that there's anything wrong with that), then you encrypt to try to guarantee privacy even against those who would violate it. Because that's what reading your mail is, even without encryption: violating your privacy. How easy it is to do this is immaterial.
I think this distinction is important, because this is exactly the kind of play-on-words logic they are using to try to erode our right to privacy. They use "expect" as it is meant in privacy court decisions in one sentence, then use it the way you did when talking about whether you can "expect" your email to be private. In this case they are saying that because you authorized in a legal contract a specific exception that allows the ISPs to read your mail, that you no longer 'expect' that nobody will read your mail, therefore the expectation of privacy no longer applies and now it's law enforcement who can read your mail at will. You never authorized anyone but your ISP to intrude on your privacy, but that single exception has through this word-play logic been generalized to mean that you are effectively authorizing anyone to read your email.
You could use the same logic to argue that because someone left a key for the contractor working on their house to enter, this means they have no expectation of privacy in their home and the police can enter and search the place top to bottom without a warrant.
That logic is ridiculous, and I hope the court sees through such shenanigans.
You'll notice that I have never, nor will I ever, make an Amish (or other such group) joke.
I do, but that's because they're pretty much tied with Buddhist Monks for being the group least likely to hear my jokes, and group least likely to punch me if they did.
Fundies of the shove-it-down-your-throat variety may be more deserving of jokes, but they're a lot more likely to beat me up.:(
I love this idea, especially since this genetic modification seems to cause aggression. What an awesome mascot that would be. "The Energizer Rabbit -- he just keeps going and going and killing and killing..."
Measuring computer performance in Hz is like buying a car based on red line RPMs. Just like a car needs torque to give rpm's context, processors need how many instructions can be completed per cycle to be compared to the frequency. I've lost faith in the MHz race and generally look at benchmarks closest to the intended purpose of the processor.
That's exactly how I explained it to my father, back in the K7 vs Pentium 4 days, and as far as he knew MHz was how fast it went and Intel was selling chips with bigger MHz. Because it was a physical attribute of the chip it was easier to advertise with, and thus became a metric to compete on. As soon as you want to start talking seriously about IPC, like you said you have to start talking about benchmarks and that's a much, much trickier subject. It wasn't completely riduculous to sell based on MHz back when the competitors were not wildly different architectures, but it got worse over time and the P4 really threw things out of wack by being entirely designed around high clock frequencies.
The biggest difference between now and then is that while the P4's "netburst" architecture was high frequency at the expected tradeoff of low IPC, the Core 2 is actually a well balanced machine with good IPC and frequency headroom. That it has this much headroom is thus fairly significant.
Quite remarkable, and not at all believable. The sun's far more massive and using the same nuclear reactions.
Uh, just because the same stoichiometric fusion reactions are occuring does not in any way shape or form mean that they are in fact the same kind of reactor. They're just about as different as can be.
Nuclear bombs -- both fission and fusion -- work by compressing the reaction mass (usually via explosives, in the case of fusion devices using a fission explosion!) into the smallest space possible so that not only does a super-critical reaction occur, it occurs so rapidly that nearly all of the nuclear material reacts before the energy created by the reaction blows the bomb apart and the remaining nuclear material is too far apart to react.
The sun sustains the pressure for fusion to occur via gravity, while there is a constant outward pressure from the fusion itself, which slows the reaction. The sun is anything but the fastest, most thorough fusion reaction possible. Rather the opposite, it's actually burning it's fuel very slowly. Which is very good for us, because we'd like the sun to be around for a long time.
Clearly if the sun consumed nearly all of its fuel in the span of 390 picoseconds, nobody would ever talk about the wimpy Tsar Bomb test explosion again... because we wouldn't be around any more to talk about it.
I was a high school wrestler, and I always thought the reason I got along so well with them was that wrestling was the misfit sport much like I was a social misfit in other ways. I never noticed a wrestler (even though many of them played football) harassing non-athletes, while this was common for other sports. I also thought this was because wrestling wasn't considered a big deal at all at our school, our wrestling program was mediocre at best (some individuals went to state, but our team was celebrating like we won the olympics when it broke.5 winning record). But maybe not, I really don't know.
Oh come one, he said it was a stereotype, which if you're going to offer that fact up means you know that it doesn't apply to everyone. And he's absolutely right that it has a basis in reality, the reality of our high school culture. High schools are demented, dementing places where social strata are formed based on fashion, and higher strata are allowed (and to maintain status often required) to harass lower strata while the faculty look on and smile. This is, of course, a generalization, and doesn't apply to every school. But I should hope that if you can't see any truth to this description of high school and the social pressures it creates, then you are probably in the minority.
It shouldn't be surprising at all that outside of a High School most athletes tend to be much nicer, more humble, and more accepting of intellectualism if not intellectuals themselves. A park pick-up game isn't passed through the filter of high school athletics. Hell, some of the worst "jocks" I knew in high school became vastly better human beings the very second you interacted with them outside of that pressure-cooker of social dysfunction.
There is definitely such a thing as a "jock" and they are by and large a byproduct of high schools where while the nerds may use the term "jock" derisively, it is most often used as an aspiration.
The fact that being a "jock" is completely meaningless after high school is why things get so much better in that regard, just like every meaningless social issue in high school gets better after high school.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to look at the numbers without spin, it's simple: Radiohead pulled in 6-10 million bucks.
That's the bottom line, that's the number that matters, and without any spin it's clear that this is a good, positive number.
Real hard to figure out WTF you were quoting or saying there, which of those words were yours, and what your point was.
Anyway, with only 38% of downloads resulting in payment they still pulled in over $6 million. A "band with no name" wouldn't have to get anywhere near that amount to consider such an experiment a success.
Note I said "downloads resulting in payment" not "people paying", since the former is accurate and the latter baselessly assumes one download per person. Especially for a no-name band, the "try before you buy" aspect would actually be an advantage; people reluctant to try out a new band could do so for free, and pay later if they liked it. That appeals to me anyway since I don't like "risking" my money on an album I may not like. The percentage of downloads that result in payment really isn't the important metric, then, it's the amount of money taken in.
Actually you raise a good point on the advertising costs. If they did not spend much in terms of advertising, then their costs would be lower and it's possible that they ended up with similar or even more profits. Having an already established name would help, of course, along with the free publicity, but hey, that's savvy too. But yeah, no idea how that actually played out.
Wow, awesome post.
This is because there has been a huge merging frenzy in the past decade, almost like an orgy of nested expressions that would do any LisP programmer proud. Toss in SmithKline and Beecham, blend with Burroughs and Wellcome, sprinkle in some Glaxo, bake at high temperature, and out comes a steaming hot GlaxoSmithKline. Then there's Pfizer, gobbling up Warner and Pharmacia / Upjohn, and then spitting out the bones, a process so repetitious that the people eaten up and summarily laid off produced a T-shirt with the oval blue logo in the style of the Pfizer logo that says, "Pfired!"
Someone my dad used to work with (former Upjohn -> Pharmacia-Upjohn -> Pfired employee) took a picture of the downtown Kalamazoo building from across the parking lot, a year and a half after the buyout. In the foreground: light posts with banners hanging from them saying things like "Pfizer -- we love where we live!" and "Pfizer -- building communities together!" and other such drivel that was used to make people feel better in the early aftermath of the buyout. In the background: A crane and wrecking ball, destroying the downtown building.
A perfect metaphor for Pfizer's operations. I really need to get it up online so I can link it in discussions like this.
*BUT* they don't give up! With doctors pointing out that Emperor AstraZeneca's new clothes don't really cover their genitalia, AZ aims at a new market: the general public. AZ thinks up a new brand name that doesn't sound remotely like "Prilosec", so that the public won't realize that they're getting the same thing.
Thus explaining why their advertising expenses exceed their R&D expenses -- it takes a lot of money to convince the same old crap is new again.
BTW, do you know if this case resulted in a patentable change in the chemical manufacturing process? I know they patent not just the molecules but the process for making them, and I've been postulating that a big reason they do these little "side-grades" of drugs is to get around the fact that the old patent is expiring by getting a drug just new enough to slap a new patent on.
So, my fellow Slashdotters: don't fret about medical research. This is just another case of A Big Company that is Supposedly Innovative but actually only knows how to bluster and pretend to run research labs while it Eats Up Other Companies. Meanwhile, a New Way Of Thinking, which has actually been around for a long time, is gathering force and making its presence felt.
That does make me feel better. The idea that we can have both great new medical advances and witness the slow painful death of those Big Pharma Phuckers makes me smile. But doesn't it seem probably that on their way down, Big Pharma will suck up and destroy a great many of these upstarts?
Well there's another option that you didn't consider, one that occurs in reality quite often:
A new drug is developed that is inferior in efficacy but superior in that it isn't about to run out of patent protection. To get people to use the new inferior drug instead of the old drug with the expiring patent, advertise the ever loving hell out of the new drug including loading doctors with free samples and junkets and fill the airwaves with ads to get the people to believe the new one is better and demand it from their doctors. This advertising will end up costing more than actually developing the new drug and getting it approved (look at any pharma's quarterly report for advertising vs R&D expenses), but that's okay because in the end being able to sell the new drug at patent-monopoly prices will bring in more than enough profit.
The only thing long patents do to stop this is to keep the pharma from needing to come up with a new drug, better or not. They keep competing with the other company's patented drugs, using mostly advertising, not clinical performance as the lever to move market share their way. And when there is no competing drug for that purpose, and the existing drug is still protected by patents? Yay insane profit margins!
I do see your point though, there does seem to be a lot more effort put into non-essential drugs and pretty commercials than in developing drugs to treat serious diseases.
That's not a case of "seems", that's a case of "matter of factual record according to the pharma companies' own filings to the IRS".
All these companies spend several times more on advertising than on R&D. The biggest one, Pfizer, is also the worst in this regard, and spends something like 4x as much on advertising than on R&D. And then they have the balls to come out and say that drugs cost a lot because of the R&D expenses. This is like me arguing that it's my cable bill (not the rent) that is keeping me from dropping prices in my store, except I'm still pulling in a 50% margin after both those expenses.
The company that Pfizer bought out a few years ago, Pharmacia-Upjohn, was one of the best iirc, something like a 1.5-2x ratio of advertising to R&D. My father worked for them before Pfizer layed off nearly everyone in the site. They did lots of research into obscure and difficult to cure diseases some of which my father worked on. I do give them and pharma in general credit for that.
But to enjoy the absolutely insane profits and margins that the pharma industry enjoys, they can't just make good drugs that doctors can prescribe to people who need it. They have to make fluffy solve-the-problem-you-weren't-sure-you-had please-annoy-your-doctor-until-he-prescribes-it stuff, and to get people to do this they need to advertise the living hell out of them. And for that, I have zero sympathy.
I don't remember Vonnegut mentioning the fate of that profession in Player Piano. I'm imagining it would have been replaced with machines like everything else but engineering and management. Though reading it in the early 2000s I realized that really, machines will eventually design machines (they already do a fair portion of the work with things like automatic place-and-route), and at least middle management is conceivably replaceable.
Vonnegut's musings on the impact on the human soul aside, it's still pretty exciting to see robotic surgery start to bear fruit. It's a great advance that will help many people, and I think for the time being the surgeon's job is safe since even the best robot isn't doing better than pantomiming specific actions, and are a terribly long way from the reasoning capacity to adjust the plan by itself if there are complications.
On the other hand, it -does- go against my general principle of not giving robots weapons.
No, because they actually read the post they replied to, and it is clear he got the gist correct (i.e. that they were speculating on something on the meaning of something they haven't even read).
Nice try though.
As for "intent to be private," do you you really think that's realistic, when talking about the Internet? I can intend to not shoot my foot, but if I point a gun at my foot and fire, my intent was ridiculous.
The "and that one could reasonably expect that privacy to be respected." is not an optional part, it is a necessary condition.
I get that, but putting an ear to the window is still a pretty active step. Someone who does that is probably looking for trouble, they have to get pretty close to your house, etc.
I'm glad you have recognized the importance of taking active steps. This is quite relavent. This is why you have no expectation of privacy for your conversations in a public park -- people hear whether they want to or not -- versus your expectation of privacy for your undergarments when wearing a skirt in a public part -- generally requires active steps to look up, though not much. The "not much" part isn't important.
And you keep seeming to lose track of what this is about. If the legal theory being posed here were to be ruled valid, then a police officer wouldn't be "looking for trouble" because if you caught them in the act you wouldn't be able to do anything since it would be completely legal for them to listen to you. I know you're concerned with stopping them from listening to you even if they break the law, but making it so that it isn't breaking the law only means that they can try all the harder to get around your protections, again with no penalty should they be caught because it's legal.
But isn't using plaintext on the Internet, a whole lot closer to the public park scenario? You're relying on countless (literally; you often really don't know how many there are) strangers, who have no accountability to either party, to relay a message.
Do a traceroute to Slashdot.org. That's the number of servers responsible for relaying your message (and granted an unknown number of sysadmins, but then again you don't how many postal workers handle your mail in the various post offices your mail goes through). That's hardly "countless". And it's also hardly a given that any of them must see the contents of your data packets. They would have to take steps to go retrieve the data off the servers to view, an active step like we were just discussing.
Back before (all? most?) the cable companies start using PPPoE, every packet their customers sent, was literally sent into all their neighbors homes, visible just by having a NIC in promiscuous mode. And nowdays, a lot of people are using 802.11: that's literally radio broadcast. Is it unscrupulous or criminal to pay attention to broadcast traffic? Maybe. But it's not anywhere close to entering someone's lot, hoping you're not seen, and putting your ear up to someone's window.
Yes it was easier to listen to your data before they upgraded the cable network protocols. Unencrypted wi-fi is vulnerable, though it has a limited range and is hardly some ridiculous number of people, it basically includes the people down the street. If you encrypt your wi-fi then encrypting your email is redundant for the people on your street. A number of people, by the way, not much different than those that could hear your conversations with a good parabolic mic, because your voice is also broadcast in the vicinity.
Internet traffic is too "broadcasty" to be comparable to talking inside your home. It's more like talking on a CB radio, and expecting lots of people to have the good manners to not pay attention to what you sent to them. Sure, maybe you have the intent to have a private conversion, but I just can't apply the word "reasonable" to that. If it has some wacky technical case law definition, ok, but it is utterly contrary to any layman's interpretation.
The internet as a whole is not "broadcasty" at all. While it supports the concept, Internet Protocol is essentially a point-to-point communication protocol more remeniscient of the phone network o
A fine point, just stop pretending it has anything to do with the 1st amendment, or implying hypocrisy from people who feel strongly about free speech but also mock idiots like JT.
I'm saying for the amount of love we give that right in particular, we are the first to mock another's right to freely use it. We (like the crowd) use it as a shield to scorn others, but all in all the crowds reaction was one of mocking rather than voicing their concerns and frustrations in a calm rational way.
We're not mocking his right to use it, we're mocking the words that come out of his mouth during his use of it. Where's our first amendment right to mock idiots? This is exactly what I'm saying -- the issue of respecting someone's First Amendment Rights to speak has nothing at all to do with respecting what they say.
I say the better plan for that debate would be to ask him questions to which we know he'll give answers that contradict his case. From the sounds of it, he won this debate hands down against both Lanning and the crowd.
Maybe, maybe not. You "lose" a debate with JT just by giving him the attention. I think the best strategy is not to engage him in debate at all, because he's at his self-destructive best when given free reign to explain his unique way of thinking.
On what planet is being blasted for saying stupid things the same as not being allowed to say them?
It's only the truly ridiculous who depend on a persecution complex -- Jack Thompson and the KKK being two examples that spring immediately to mind -- who seem to think that the 1st Amendment means that not only can they say whatever they want, we must also take what they say seriously and respectfully and not repeat what they say in a high-pitched mocking tone while pointing and laughing.
This is wrong. Nowhere in the 1st Amendment does it suggest that you should be free to say what you want without having people judge you based on your words to be an idiot and to treat you accordingly.
I'm not arguing about the strategic value of trying to look like a bigger ass than JT. I'm saying bringing in the 1st Amendment as if he was in any way denied his rights is stupid.
Apparently "expectation of" has become a very technical term, basically meaning "desired."
.. well... giving consent.
Well yes it IS a technical term because we're talking about Constitutional Law here. The fact that it is expressed in English, where words can have multiple meanings, should not be taken to mean that any definition you like is the one that applies. The meaning of the phrase is put down in case law, not the Oxford English Dictionary.
And no, it doesn't just mean "desired", it means that it was the intent to be private, and that one could reasonably expect that privacy to be respected. So having a conversation in a public park has no "expectation of privacy" because no reasonable person would expect that others would not hear them -- they couldn't help but hear as they are walking past. Whereas having a conversation in a private house does have an expectation of privacy, even though it is fairly trivial to listen in (put an ear to the window).
Without cryptography, it's too easy for lots of people to be reading your email, and it'll happen without you ever knowing it happened.
I repeat: It has nothing to do with how easy it is. It has nothing to do with what unscrupulous people performing illegal actions could do.
Your mail is trivial to read by holding it up to the light. Your conversations in your home are trivial to listen to by holding a glass up to the door. Hell, I could read the contents of your phone conversations, or the contents of your computer screen, without ever physically coming into contact with the phone lines or your computer. So... for none of these things should you have an "expectation of privacy"? Law enforcement should be able to spy on these things at will without a warrant?
Likewise, it's so incredibly easy to use crypto, that refraining from doing so, is almost like
So easy eh? So how do you exchange keys with the one you are communicating with? You seem to be proposing the theory that if it is trivial to violate your privacy, then you never had any expectation of privacy at all. Well guess what? It is trivial to modify the unencrypted packets used to exchange public keys such that they are the public keys of a 3rd party, who can then act as a man-in-the-middle reading all the unencrypted communications with neither side the wiser.
Would you say, then, that your encrypted emails should carry no expectation of privacy? After all, it's so easy to get around this problem (always exchange keys with the intended recipient in person using a physical medium for the data) that you're basically giving consent by not doing it, right?
I know it's not, not really. But it's sort of like you put a sign in front of your house, saying, "This house is unlocked. Gee, I hope none of my stuff disappears. *wink* *wink*"
But we're not talking about what an unscrupulous criminal could do. We're talking about what a law abiding government agent should do to remain in compliance with the law. Does leaving your door unlocked imply that it should be legal for a cop to enter your house and search through your stuff for something incriminating (like your mp3 collection)? Of course not, and you know it's not.
Again, if it's not clear enough, let me try to make it so: The issue here is about the 4th Amendment and the requirement for a warrant before conducting a search. It is about what law enforcement and government intelligence agencies are allowed to do legally to read citizen's communications. It has nothing to do with what someone - law enforcement or otherwise - is physically capable of doing if they have no regard for the law.
Is privacy a right that, unlike all other rights, really can just be taken for granted, without anyone ever having to defend it? The obvious defense is right there to be used, and we just say, "Nah, it's not important enough."
Yes
1) the real threat is actually so great that the surveillance programs should continue
I assume the implication here is that the threat is much greater than we, the people, know, and that the surveillance has been more successful at stopping the threat than we know. Well that would be rather odd given that Bush's PR team takes every possible opportunity to play up the threats and their successes, rarely even waiting long enough to figure out whether their PR fluff will hold up once the facts are brought in court. If there was such a great threat, and we were so successful at stopping it, I'd think they could do better than half-assed prosecutions against people who are at best tangentially related to al Qaeda and which end up mostly falling apart as examples of how much we need them.
2) the conduct of the surveillance programs is actually more in keeping with accepted American principles than is commonly believed among the public.
If their conduct is "in keeping with accepted American principles", then why do they keep trying to acquire -- or exercise and justify post-facto -- extra-Constitutional powers? Unless the American Principles you're talking about are "apathy" and "a willingness to abandon their freedom at the first sign of danger", I'd say trying to weasel out of the 4th Amendment is not in any way, shape, and form "in keeping with American principles". Your suggestion that despite this public appearance of complete disregard for the Constitution, behind closed doors it's actually a program very respectful of American's rights, and that they're keeping this a secret to be rather hard to take.
Really. The government is clearly desperate for us to believe that the threat is great, they are the only ones who can save us, and that in doing so they are still protecting our rights. It's kind of silly to think that these things are true but nevertheless the government cannot -- not won't, can't, because they are clearly trying desperately to -- show these things to be true.
But then again, I was around when they were desperately trying to prove that Iraq had WMD and would jump on anything and everything they could that could support that idea, even if it fell apart after further investigation (Trailers of Mass Destruction, anyone?) This "take it on faith that the spooks know everything and just can't show us how awesome they are" thing is a horse that won't run anymore.
I predict that for at least the duration of the next presidential term, we will not hear of any surveillance program being shut down by order of the President
I agree, but not for any of the reasons you mention. The fact is that whoever takes up the mantle of President next is most likely going to be just as hungry for power as the current President. First sign: They want to be President. They don't actually mind Bush's huge power grab for the executive branch, because they're hoping that they will be the next ones to benefit. This is why the opposing party's response to these things is mock outrage and zero actual action.
Then again I lost my naivete on the "everything will be great once the other guys get power!" thing even before I lost it about the "oh don't worry your government has everything under control -- despite all appearances" thing.
Also, you can't reasonably expect any privacy in email unless you encrypt its contents.
In the sense that you mean it, no, you can't. However it is important to remember that this is not the sense meant by the term "expectation of privacy" when determining if the 4th Amendment (the privacy amendment) applies.
Expectation of privacy does not mean that you expect that nobody CAN violate your privacy, it means that you can reasonably expect that they WON'T. The ease with which your privacy can be violated is, generally, immaterial. For example your average snail-mail letter is trivial to read simply by holding the sealed envelope up to a light. However this does not give either the postman or the policeman the right to do this, because you do have a basic expectation of privacy with your mail.
Yet there are still special envelopes which make it difficult or impossible to read the letter inside. You use these to try to ensure your privacy, and you do it not because doing so is the only way that one can expect privacy, you do it because you don't want the kind of unscrupulous people who have no respect for your privacy to be able to see the check or money order or whatever important thing is in your letter and possibly steal it.
This is similar to email and encryption. Email is a private communication, between the sender and the listed recipients. You should be able to expect privacy even for unencrypted emails, you should be able to expect that no scrupulous person or law-abiding law-enforcement officer would read it whenever they choose. If the contents of the mail are important enough that you can't trust people to be law-abiding, or you are simply paranoid (not that there's anything wrong with that), then you encrypt to try to guarantee privacy even against those who would violate it. Because that's what reading your mail is, even without encryption: violating your privacy. How easy it is to do this is immaterial.
I think this distinction is important, because this is exactly the kind of play-on-words logic they are using to try to erode our right to privacy. They use "expect" as it is meant in privacy court decisions in one sentence, then use it the way you did when talking about whether you can "expect" your email to be private. In this case they are saying that because you authorized in a legal contract a specific exception that allows the ISPs to read your mail, that you no longer 'expect' that nobody will read your mail, therefore the expectation of privacy no longer applies and now it's law enforcement who can read your mail at will. You never authorized anyone but your ISP to intrude on your privacy, but that single exception has through this word-play logic been generalized to mean that you are effectively authorizing anyone to read your email.
You could use the same logic to argue that because someone left a key for the contractor working on their house to enter, this means they have no expectation of privacy in their home and the police can enter and search the place top to bottom without a warrant.
That logic is ridiculous, and I hope the court sees through such shenanigans.
You'll notice that I have never, nor will I ever, make an Amish (or other such group) joke.
:(
I do, but that's because they're pretty much tied with Buddhist Monks for being the group least likely to hear my jokes, and group least likely to punch me if they did.
Fundies of the shove-it-down-your-throat variety may be more deserving of jokes, but they're a lot more likely to beat me up.
I love this idea, especially since this genetic modification seems to cause aggression. What an awesome mascot that would be. "The Energizer Rabbit -- he just keeps going and going and killing and killing..."
Measuring computer performance in Hz is like buying a car based on red line RPMs. Just like a car needs torque to give rpm's context, processors need how many instructions can be completed per cycle to be compared to the frequency. I've lost faith in the MHz race and generally look at benchmarks closest to the intended purpose of the processor.
That's exactly how I explained it to my father, back in the K7 vs Pentium 4 days, and as far as he knew MHz was how fast it went and Intel was selling chips with bigger MHz. Because it was a physical attribute of the chip it was easier to advertise with, and thus became a metric to compete on. As soon as you want to start talking seriously about IPC, like you said you have to start talking about benchmarks and that's a much, much trickier subject. It wasn't completely riduculous to sell based on MHz back when the competitors were not wildly different architectures, but it got worse over time and the P4 really threw things out of wack by being entirely designed around high clock frequencies.
The biggest difference between now and then is that while the P4's "netburst" architecture was high frequency at the expected tradeoff of low IPC, the Core 2 is actually a well balanced machine with good IPC and frequency headroom. That it has this much headroom is thus fairly significant.
Quite remarkable, and not at all believable. The sun's far more massive and using the same nuclear reactions.
Uh, just because the same stoichiometric fusion reactions are occuring does not in any way shape or form mean that they are in fact the same kind of reactor. They're just about as different as can be.
Nuclear bombs -- both fission and fusion -- work by compressing the reaction mass (usually via explosives, in the case of fusion devices using a fission explosion!) into the smallest space possible so that not only does a super-critical reaction occur, it occurs so rapidly that nearly all of the nuclear material reacts before the energy created by the reaction blows the bomb apart and the remaining nuclear material is too far apart to react.
The sun sustains the pressure for fusion to occur via gravity, while there is a constant outward pressure from the fusion itself, which slows the reaction. The sun is anything but the fastest, most thorough fusion reaction possible. Rather the opposite, it's actually burning it's fuel very slowly. Which is very good for us, because we'd like the sun to be around for a long time.
Clearly if the sun consumed nearly all of its fuel in the span of 390 picoseconds, nobody would ever talk about the wimpy Tsar Bomb test explosion again... because we wouldn't be around any more to talk about it.
they are so ugly that the ground repels them
:(
Oh damn! And all this time I thought levitation was my mutant super power. Turns out that it's my face that is my mutant super power.
Wait... Are you saying that Wii is the plural of Wus?
I was a high school wrestler, and I always thought the reason I got along so well with them was that wrestling was the misfit sport much like I was a social misfit in other ways. I never noticed a wrestler (even though many of them played football) harassing non-athletes, while this was common for other sports. I also thought this was because wrestling wasn't considered a big deal at all at our school, our wrestling program was mediocre at best (some individuals went to state, but our team was celebrating like we won the olympics when it broke .5 winning record). But maybe not, I really don't know.
Oh come one, he said it was a stereotype, which if you're going to offer that fact up means you know that it doesn't apply to everyone. And he's absolutely right that it has a basis in reality, the reality of our high school culture. High schools are demented, dementing places where social strata are formed based on fashion, and higher strata are allowed (and to maintain status often required) to harass lower strata while the faculty look on and smile. This is, of course, a generalization, and doesn't apply to every school. But I should hope that if you can't see any truth to this description of high school and the social pressures it creates, then you are probably in the minority.
It shouldn't be surprising at all that outside of a High School most athletes tend to be much nicer, more humble, and more accepting of intellectualism if not intellectuals themselves. A park pick-up game isn't passed through the filter of high school athletics. Hell, some of the worst "jocks" I knew in high school became vastly better human beings the very second you interacted with them outside of that pressure-cooker of social dysfunction.
There is definitely such a thing as a "jock" and they are by and large a byproduct of high schools where while the nerds may use the term "jock" derisively, it is most often used as an aspiration.
The fact that being a "jock" is completely meaningless after high school is why things get so much better in that regard, just like every meaningless social issue in high school gets better after high school.
Damnit, I blew my cover! What year is this?!
And no, of course you don't get flying cars.
Additional research. There's been quite a lot of that done in the 55 years since the paper was published.