Drug development is generally not publically funded. It is an expensive, long-term, high risk investment. In 2001, the average cost of developing a new prescription drug was $802 million, and took from 10 to 15 years. That does not include any marketing costs. Yes drug companies spend a ton of money on marketing, eclipsing their spending on R&D. Yes drug companies are highly profitable, high-risk investments generally produce higher return than low risk investments. Investment and advertising seem like things generally associated with free markets.
If you want to argue whether drug companies are sleezy and annoying and shouldn't be allowed to advertise on TV and are filthy rich and should do more to offer life-saving drugs to people who can't afford them, you'll have to find someone else, because I agree with you.
Your assertion that the US has "relatively low levels of access to basic health care" is also true, but unrelated. I have relatively low levels of access to a Ferrari. That doesn't mean the automotive industry is not a free market.
You are correct that even a capitalist like me can not cure viral disease. But neither can any other economic system. But what about productivity lost for conditions for which there are known treatments? In Canada, the median wait time to get treatment from a specialist is more than 17 weeks (see page 25 in this study, warning, it's a PDF). That's 17 weeks of reduced productivity for patients with conditions that have known treatments.
The economics of the US healthcare industry are complex. The Hippocratic Oath is often at odds with the economic desires of those who provide care. Crafting public policy that works for patients as well as providers is where all the action and debate is at, not whether the US healthcare industry is a free market or not.
"Better" healthcare is difficult to quantitatively measure. I don't know where you got your "up to 50% cheaper", but yes, there are countries that have lower infant mortaility rates (a common measure of how "good" the healthcare is in a country) than the US, while at the same time, spending less on healthcare per individual.
Many patients desire a better quality of life, and the market has responded with products and services. Nobody I know measures quality of healthcare by how many liposuctions have been done, but those all count in the healthcare spending per individual.
A free market contains unregulated supply and demand. While that isn't exactly true of the US healthcare system (the FDA regulates drugs, HIPAA legislation requires health care providers to maintain patient privacy, patient's who show up in the emergency department must be treated regardless of their ability to pay), it is very nearly a free market. Just because the government essentially functions as a large insurer does mean that they are hindering, restricting or encumbering the market.
Having said that, it is a complex market. If hospitals want want physicians to admit patients to their facility, they better pass their JCAHO audit. JCAHO is not a government encumberance, but an independent, not-for-profit accrediting body. Not many other industries have such a proliferation of third party payers (insurance companies). These insurance companies have a lot of power to negotiate pricing with providers, because they can say, if you don't do it for our price, then we'll find someone who will, and tell our patients to go there instead. The costs of malpractice insurance continue to skyrocket, and many medical students are avoiding specialties like obstetrics that have especially high insurance premiums. Patients continue to demand advanced treatments for everything from arthritis to hair loss to sexual disfunction. For many patient's these are not life and death issues, but quality of life issues. So pharmaceutical companies respond to what their patients want, developing an increasing number of drugs for erectile disfunction, while at the same time reducing investment in antibiotics.
The US healthcare system has lots of problems, but it is already a free market. Many people argue that changing that would make things worse, not better.
All this talk about tax laws, blah, blah, and operating leases, yada yada, and depreciation. OK, that's all important and stuff, but in a Fortune 100 outfit, the taxes are the piddly part. It's really all about budget.
You see, if you are going to spend a wad of dough on new hardware, it's got to come out of one of two budgets, your operating budget or your capital budget. If you have ever tried to get a big capital budget approved in a company with more employees than your IQ, you know it's pretty tough. Bean counters all over the place, wanting to know about ROI, and justification, and increased revenue.
A clever spender will try and get all the shiny toys using his operating budget, for two reasons. No high dollar figure for PHB to choke on, and it's much harder for someone to cut your budget later. Capital expenditures are the first thing to go when times are tough.
Any sufficiently wealthy corporation can find a way to show Uncle Sam the dark side of the moon. But it's those same bean counters who approve your budget, and it's lots easier to sneak stuff into your operating budget than it is to get them to approve capital expenditures.
Yes, God only appears once in the Declaration, but any trial lawyer will tell you that your opening argument better be good, and your closing argument even better.
The document opens by stating that men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men".
The closing sentence of the Declaration is "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."
Those excerpts do not include the word God, but you can hardly say that references to diety are conspicuous by their absence.
It is a great tribute to the founding fathers that references to God are not codified in the constitution. It shows their great desire to create a secular government, which they successfully did.
Your claim that the founding fathers were Deists, not Christian's, is simply not correct. Your quotes from Mr. Jefferson seem to indicate that he may have had some qualms with organized religion. Agreed. There are also lots of quotes from early statesmen like this:
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams
"It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible" George Washington
It's hard to believe that men who did not believe that God gave revelation to men (according to your definition of deism), would write this in the document that they signed: " and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them". If your definition is correct, to what would the "Laws of Nature's God" be referring to?
In fact, John Witherspoon, a delegate from New Jersey, was an ordainedminister in the Church of Scotland. I think that would disqualify him as a Deist.
Many early settlers who came to the New World were seeking freedom from religion oppression; many of these groups were seperatists from the Church of England. Their frame of reference was The Act of Supremecy of 1534, which recognized the King of England as "the only supreme head of the Church of England". When these colonists formed their own goverment, they wanted to avoid the pitfalls of this union of church and state.
Regardless of their positions on organized religion, the value systems of the vast majority of colonists was unquestionably Christian. Most had not been exposed to Hinduism, or to the teachings of Muhammad. Yes, they were brilliant thinkers, men of reason and judgement, but they also came from a Christian society, and the system of government they architected reflects those basic values.
Mono includes a compiler for the C# language, an ECMA-compatible runtime engine (the Common Language Runtime, or CLR),and class libraries.
Note the absence of the RAD part. There is no Visual Studio equivelent. It's a compiler, a run-time, and some class libraries. Programmers still use emacs, or vi, or whatever else to edit their code.
You know, we also ought to require a hand print. And a retinal scan. And a one-time pad cipher that you can get at the drive-up, but only if you give a blood sample.
The thing is, security only works if it is intrusive enough to be secure, but not so intrusive that it is more trouble than it's worth. Username and password is pretty much where everybody has settled.
Besides, as shown by the attemps to secure new email accounts and whois queries with those "Type in the characters that you see here" thingies, that kind of stuff doesn't really work. It took all of a couple of days before there were porn sites having the addicted masses interpret the wavy text to get their daily fix.
Think of the information (you know, the I part of IT), and who controls it. Lots of it still locked up in IBM big iron; credit card companies, insurance companies, banking, etc. When IBM talks about web-linked software, they are talking about facilitating all of these big data stores being able to communicate with each other. Linux can help make that happen.
Basically IBM is entrenched in the back end, Microsoft owns the front end, and the war is over the middle. IBM doesn't want to capture the desktop (anymore, they finally gave up), they want to own the middle, the application servers that the client apps talk to, and the stuff that lets these big data stores talk to each other.
If you adjust your rules (s/desktop/data center/g), then IBM invented the rules, and got wealthy while BG was still in middle school.
It's important to understand that a significant chunk of the budget of your typical film goes to the salaries of the behind-the-scenes folks.
Right. Say there are 250 bahind the scenes people, and the each make 60K per year. Assuming you need all those people for a full year (which is usually not the case), that's a big whopping 15 million bucks. That's is a lot of money. About as much as it costs to hire Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis or Brad Pitt or Cameron Diaz or Nicole Kidman or Halle Berry or.....
Besides, if you shoot on location, it cost's you a ton of money just to be there. Think Master and Commander, Waterworld, K2, LOTR, etc. It's not cheap putting 200 people up in hotels and feeding them.
Oh yeah, and then there's the special effects, which for many movies is a significant investment of money. And then there is the marketing budget, which is also eats up a lot of the budget.
By the time you add that all up, the behind the scenes people really don't get a significant chunck of the budget. And the stuntman/anti-piracy advocate is going to get paid, whether he lives in Vancouver or Hollywood. It's the big studio hotshots that are feeling the pinch, not the stuntman.
For most movies, if they don't break even within the first 60 days of release, they aren't going to. There are a few movies that do poorly in the theater, but the DVD's sell enough to cover the investment to make the movie.
Yes studios look for ways to cut costs, but it has a whole lot more to do with making movies that blow chunks and nobody wants to watch than it has to do with redued profitability because of piracy.
I'm not saying that "piracy" is right or legal, but to hear the [(MP)|(RI)]AA talk it is the only reason that they aren't making as much as they used to, which just isn't true. A few profitable movies are being used to finance a bunch of unprofitable ones. And once everyone has replaced all their VHS tapes with DVD's, you are going to see another big drop in studio profitability. Just like we saw with the music industry.
Maybe Congress should consider making a law that makes it illegal to produce sucky movies. That would do a lot more to protect the precious industry than the copyright statute and the DMCA combined.
You are rignt about the final price of a product being derived from the percieved value, not the real cost of goods. You are wrong about that being a bad deal for programmers.
As a programmer who owns a small software development firm, (there's two of us), our customers care about the percieved value of an inventory system. They do not care about operating systems, databases, web servers, or any of that stuff, they care about keeping track of their inventory. In the past, we have had to "educate" the customer that if they wanted to have an inventory system, they had to pay $$ for an operating system, and then $$$$ for a database, and $$ for a web server, and then they could spend $$$$ for our inventory software. Lots of that money went to people besides me, but the customer percieved they were buying an inventory system, and these other components were necessary expenditures to get what they really wanted.
In the open source era, I can go to the customer and say, "Here is an inventory solution for $$$$$$$$". The perceived value is the same to the customer, but I don't have to pay Sun for the OS licence, and Oracle for the database license, etc. I use open source alternatives like Linux, PostgreSQL, and tomcat instead.
If you look at the big picture, the open source software movement is doing for software what the IBM compatible PC did for hardware. Commoditization. I shudder to think that during the course of my career I wrote two application development frameworks. Why? Because I needed one, and it was cheaper to build one myself than it was to buy one of the three commercially available ones, which may or may not have met my needs. Now there are a dozen robust, mature open source application development frameworks for me to choose from. I can select one that closely meets my needs, and modify it, if necessary.
The end result is that when programmers "give away their time, and effort" it makes thier time and effort worth more, not less, as you assert. By sharing the work for common functionality, my time becomes more valuable because I can spend it doing the thing I know well, inventory, not the thing that I don't, like application frameworks. My contributions to open source projects may be small, but when you combine the efforts of many people, those small contributions provide great benefit for all.
In time, open source inventory systems will be far better than the one we have developed, and people will be saying "I can't believe that I once wrote an inventory system, what a waste when there are so many good was available." I will then have to move up the software food chain to the Next Big Thing, as will everyone else.
Well, I can't vouch for the authenticity of the memo, but I can offer some circumstantial/anecdotal information. I have met Mike Anderer several times, and we have a mutual friend whom I speak with several times per week. I know that Mike is well connected at Microsoft. He has a company that gets a majority of their revenue from Microsoft contracts. Mike knows lots of people in the tech industry, and is well connected with capital. If I was Microsoft and was looking for someone to broker or facilitate funding for SCO, Mike would be the perfect guy. I don't know how he got hooked up with SCO, but he has had high level connections at Microsoft for more than 5 years. Because he has just recently been involved with SCO, it's plausible that Microsoft had some role in his engagement there. There are lot's of strategic consultants in the country. How coincidental that a long-time Microsoft ally gets pulled in to advise SCO on raising capital.
The "Fyodor ripped their nmap license, so that must mean they can't distribute anything GPL'ed software" argument is rediculous.
Say I write some Stuff. I own the copyright. I want to license the work to others. I choose a license, say the GPL. My choice of licence applies to my "Stuff" (the GPL calls this the "Program"). The terms of my license have absolutely nothing at all to do with anything anybody else has written.
The GPL is not some mythical viral license that consumes everything it touches and assigns ownership to the GPL Goddess. It's the license I chose to distribute my code under. That license is between me and whoever uses my Stuff, not between me and anybody who chose to distribute their stuff under the same terms I did.
Last time I checked, IBM doesn't distribute Linux. These guys are not morons. They know as much about Intellectual Property (tm) as anybody. But they are moving towards a service business model in a big way. They contribute code not because they want to do a Good Thing, but because they want to make money.
They are more than willing to let the Suse's and RedHat's of the world sell their linux distributions for a couple hundred bucks. They want the services revenue. One guy on site for a week setting up and configuring a linux cluster costs 10 grand. Which revenue stream would you want?
Celeron's were never really meant to scale, they were meant to be cheap. So you take the cache off, keep the clock speed up, and know the unsuspecting consumer thinks they are getting a fast chip for cheap.
Celeron's are like a Hummer with a 1/2 gallon gas tank. It sure goes good when it has gas, but you have to stop and fill it up every 10 minutes.
Last time I checked, every piece of paper money printed in the US says "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" on it. Coins have no such notice. Now I'm sure there are some private individuals who would not accept cash in exchange for goods or services, they might require sterling silver, gold bullion, diamonds, 300 foot yachts, or whatever, but _all_ Government divisions and agencies have to accept cash, the paper kind. The idiot who tried to pay the IRS with a truckload of pennies deserved the bi!@#slapping he got.
Lots of government transactions can be completed through the mail, for convienience; no one in their right mind would send cash in the mail, and so, as a convenience, checks are accepted. Sometimes it takes a little work to find the right address, but any government transaction can be completed in person, with cash.
As for your argument that the Government (your emphasis, not mine) can stop printing the statement of legal tender on bills, they certainly could do that, and make the Argentinian currency devaluation look mild. It is essentially an announcement that this money we just issued is of no value to us. That's bad business.
/me smoothes out tin foil, again, and puts it back on his head
I don't know that SCO is making a living. Yes, their stock price is higher than it used to be, but what are their revenue projections for the next 4 quarters? What are their possible sources of revenue for the next 2 years?
By their own admission, their licensing revenue is decreasing. Therefore, the increase in stock price is driven by the high risk "we can be millionaire's _if_ SCO wins this suit and gets a big judgement" proposition. If everything goes badly and IBM has to write a check, it will be many years before the judicial avenues have been exhausted. Where will the SCO revenue come from until then?
5 million BC - a single cell amoeba crawls out of the plasma and blogs his adventure for the world to see on his slash powered site. He loudly proclaims, PERL(tm) IS NOT UNIX(tm).
1 million BC - a caveman finally succeeds in making a fire. Quick put the recipe in the ChangeLog and check it in to CVS.
1485 - Christopher Columbus is looking for ships, but nobody seems to be able to construct one fast enough. He goes home and sketches out automake with his quill pen. Upon taking it to the shipyard, they are able to build him three boats instead of one.
1945 - ENIAC is assembled. Guys with slide rules say "It's not that cool, but it sure is fast"
1970 - The PDP-11 is born. ENIAC advocacy groups say "We invented it first."
1979 - Someone figures out that UUCP sucks, and invents TCP/IP. An IBM spokesman says "we don't think this thing is going to take off."
1982 - Xerox invents the mouse. IBM and Microsoft say "Who wants a dead animal on their desk. Nobody will ever use this." Jobs and the Woz laugh. The Mac is Born.
1987 - An IBM Spokesman says "We invented a radical new graphical user interface. Pick up your OS/2 floppies today!"
1991 - Windows 3.1 is released. Bill loudly proclaims, "Windows is the first graphical user interface for personal computing." Liar.
2003 - SCO says "All your UNIX are belong to us. We own everything".
There are very few revolutionary ideas in technology, it's mostly evolutionary. People build on the ideas of others. That's just the way stuff works. The "open source didn't invent anything" and "Microsoft invented everything useful" argument is just plain BS.
Exactly. Why just the other day, we had this problem with Word crashing all of the time. We called those bums at Micro$oft, got right through to a person, and told them that we didn't get our sales presentation finished on time because Word kept crashing. The MS guy was real nice, he took all of the blame, and even offered to remunerate us for our lost revenue. My boss said, "see, that's why we spend the big bucks for Micro$oft products, they have great support and always make things right."
Really what happens is you wait on hold for 30 minutes, and then talk to someone offshore who may or may not understand the English you are speaking. After hitting your credit card for 35 bucks, you are told to reboot, and that will fix the problem.
I'll take the mailing list any day.
Re:Novell never wanted WordPerfect
on
Novell Buys Ximian
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I call BS on the "it wasn't a disaster" argument.
Novel merged with WordPerfect in Jun 1994. Novell gave up 51 million shares of stock to get all the outstanding shares of WordPerfect. NOVL was trading near $15. That puts the price tag for the deal well over 700 million bucks.
Two years later, Novell unloads WordPerfect to Corel for 11 million in cash and 10 million shares of Corel stock. At that time CORL was about $10. Value of deal: 110 million.
That means Novell paid 600 million for Groupwise. Seems like a disaster to me.
Voters can exercise a lot of power between elections. But it's work, and you have to be in it for the long haul. I am the chairman of my voting precint for the Republican party. There are ~ 400 homes in our district. That makes it an almost insignificant percentage of the registered voters in my state. Even so, I get 5 or 6 invitations a year to receptions, BBQ's, dinners, speaches, etc from our 2 senators the congressman from our district. Imagine that, they ask me to come to them!
It's pretty tough to get elected to be the chairman of your precinct, just show up at the caucus meeting. The previous chairman will be there, (he's in charge of the meeting) and maybe a couple of other people. If you want to do it, it's yours. With an hour investment of your time, you can have some access to your elected officials.
If you want to get a conversation with your elected official, just get some signatures from people in your precinct on a petition and take it to the next BBQ-reception-I'm-your-dutiful-public-servant thingy that you get invited to. You have very good odds of getting a few minutes of face time with your congresscritter.
Wow, just like that, with no money and a few hours of your time you have access, and a mono-y-mono conversation. Can you compete with paid lobbyists? Yes and no. Lobbyists have someone paying them to do it full time, all you have is signatures of voters.
If you are trying to get re-elected, you can't afford to ignore your voters, even if it is a couple of years until the next election.
If you think IBM isn't going to close any more AIX deals after Friday because of this, you are mistaken. They will continue doing business as usual, and wait for SCO to try and present something in court, where they will be laughed out of the room.
Life support systems in emergency rooms all over the country suddenly stopped working this weekend when SCO terminated the IBM's AIX license. Wanker McBride, executive vice-president of DRM for SCO, said in a newsconference that this action was justified. "We just can't have people stealing our intellectual property, it's just not the American Way(tm)."
SCO announced a 11:00am MDT conference call on their web site, but when this reporter called the number, a recorded message said, "Could not complete your call as dialed, message 3027".
On an unrelated note, banks all over the country were unable to disburse funds this morning because their systems were down. Signs were spotted on many banks that said "Come back later, and bring last month's statement"
And oh yeah, you should see the line at the DMV now.
SCO's stock tumbled to $0.01, moments after the opening bell, amid fears of massive lawsuits
There is a Good Product out there. Somebody decides that they can make a compatible product for less. They try. Their first attempts are inexpensive, but not 100% compatible. Owners of the Good Product say "It's worth it for you to pay us big money, because it's worth it to be 100% compatible". Somebody else finally makes a 100% compatible product. Owners of Good Product have competition. Competition spurs innovation. Prices drop. This is a Good Thing.
s/Good Product/IBM PC/g
Because this happened to IBM, the personal computing industry was born. Aren't you glad this is the Way Stuff Works(tm)?
Yup, the point sure is that Apache dominates the server world because it comes with commercial Unix boxes. Same way that BSD's TCP/IP stack is used in all kinds of commercial OS's. That is the biggest kind of win that open source can have. Code that is better than what a commercial vendor can write themselves. Code that works so well that there is no return on the investment to create their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Drug development is generally not publically funded. It is an expensive, long-term, high risk investment. In 2001, the average cost of developing a new prescription drug was $802 million, and took from 10 to 15 years. That does not include any marketing costs. Yes drug companies spend a ton of money on marketing, eclipsing their spending on R&D. Yes drug companies are highly profitable, high-risk investments generally produce higher return than low risk investments. Investment and advertising seem like things generally associated with free markets.
If you want to argue whether drug companies are sleezy and annoying and shouldn't be allowed to advertise on TV and are filthy rich and should do more to offer life-saving drugs to people who can't afford them, you'll have to find someone else, because I agree with you.
Your assertion that the US has "relatively low levels of access to basic health care" is also true, but unrelated. I have relatively low levels of access to a Ferrari. That doesn't mean the automotive industry is not a free market.
You are correct that even a capitalist like me can not cure viral disease. But neither can any other economic system. But what about productivity lost for conditions for which there are known treatments? In Canada, the median wait time to get treatment from a specialist is more than 17 weeks (see page 25 in this study, warning, it's a PDF). That's 17 weeks of reduced productivity for patients with conditions that have known treatments.
The economics of the US healthcare industry are complex. The Hippocratic Oath is often at odds with the economic desires of those who provide care. Crafting public policy that works for patients as well as providers is where all the action and debate is at, not whether the US healthcare industry is a free market or not.
Quality of care is not the same as a free market.
"Better" healthcare is difficult to quantitatively measure. I don't know where you got your "up to 50% cheaper", but yes, there are countries that have lower infant mortaility rates (a common measure of how "good" the healthcare is in a country) than the US, while at the same time, spending less on healthcare per individual.
Many patients desire a better quality of life, and the market has responded with products and services. Nobody I know measures quality of healthcare by how many liposuctions have been done, but those all count in the healthcare spending per individual.
A free market contains unregulated supply and demand. While that isn't exactly true of the US healthcare system (the FDA regulates drugs, HIPAA legislation requires health care providers to maintain patient privacy, patient's who show up in the emergency department must be treated regardless of their ability to pay), it is very nearly a free market. Just because the government essentially functions as a large insurer does mean that they are hindering, restricting or encumbering the market.
Having said that, it is a complex market. If hospitals want want physicians to admit patients to their facility, they better pass their JCAHO audit. JCAHO is not a government encumberance, but an independent, not-for-profit accrediting body. Not many other industries have such a proliferation of third party payers (insurance companies). These insurance companies have a lot of power to negotiate pricing with providers, because they can say, if you don't do it for our price, then we'll find someone who will, and tell our patients to go there instead. The costs of malpractice insurance continue to skyrocket, and many medical students are avoiding specialties like obstetrics that have especially high insurance premiums. Patients continue to demand advanced treatments for everything from arthritis to hair loss to sexual disfunction. For many patient's these are not life and death issues, but quality of life issues. So pharmaceutical companies respond to what their patients want, developing an increasing number of drugs for erectile disfunction, while at the same time reducing investment in antibiotics.
The US healthcare system has lots of problems, but it is already a free market. Many people argue that changing that would make things worse, not better.
You see, if you are going to spend a wad of dough on new hardware, it's got to come out of one of two budgets, your operating budget or your capital budget. If you have ever tried to get a big capital budget approved in a company with more employees than your IQ, you know it's pretty tough. Bean counters all over the place, wanting to know about ROI, and justification, and increased revenue.
A clever spender will try and get all the shiny toys using his operating budget, for two reasons. No high dollar figure for PHB to choke on, and it's much harder for someone to cut your budget later. Capital expenditures are the first thing to go when times are tough.
Any sufficiently wealthy corporation can find a way to show Uncle Sam the dark side of the moon. But it's those same bean counters who approve your budget, and it's lots easier to sneak stuff into your operating budget than it is to get them to approve capital expenditures.
The document opens by stating that men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men". The closing sentence of the Declaration is "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." Those excerpts do not include the word God, but you can hardly say that references to diety are conspicuous by their absence.
It is a great tribute to the founding fathers that references to God are not codified in the constitution. It shows their great desire to create a secular government, which they successfully did.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams
"It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible" George Washington
It's hard to believe that men who did not believe that God gave revelation to men (according to your definition of deism), would write this in the document that they signed: " and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them". If your definition is correct, to what would the "Laws of Nature's God" be referring to?
In fact, John Witherspoon, a delegate from New Jersey, was an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland. I think that would disqualify him as a Deist.
Many early settlers who came to the New World were seeking freedom from religion oppression; many of these groups were seperatists from the Church of England. Their frame of reference was The Act of Supremecy of 1534, which recognized the King of England as "the only supreme head of the Church of England". When these colonists formed their own goverment, they wanted to avoid the pitfalls of this union of church and state.
Regardless of their positions on organized religion, the value systems of the vast majority of colonists was unquestionably Christian. Most had not been exposed to Hinduism, or to the teachings of Muhammad. Yes, they were brilliant thinkers, men of reason and judgement, but they also came from a Christian society, and the system of government they architected reflects those basic values.
You know, we also ought to require a hand print. And a retinal scan. And a one-time pad cipher that you can get at the drive-up, but only if you give a blood sample.
The thing is, security only works if it is intrusive enough to be secure, but not so intrusive that it is more trouble than it's worth. Username and password is pretty much where everybody has settled.
Besides, as shown by the attemps to secure new email accounts and whois queries with those "Type in the characters that you see here" thingies, that kind of stuff doesn't really work. It took all of a couple of days before there were porn sites having the addicted masses interpret the wavy text to get their daily fix.
Basically IBM is entrenched in the back end, Microsoft owns the front end, and the war is over the middle. IBM doesn't want to capture the desktop (anymore, they finally gave up), they want to own the middle, the application servers that the client apps talk to, and the stuff that lets these big data stores talk to each other.
If you adjust your rules (s/desktop/data center/g), then IBM invented the rules, and got wealthy while BG was still in middle school.
Besides, if you shoot on location, it cost's you a ton of money just to be there. Think Master and Commander, Waterworld, K2, LOTR, etc. It's not cheap putting 200 people up in hotels and feeding them.
Oh yeah, and then there's the special effects, which for many movies is a significant investment of money. And then there is the marketing budget, which is also eats up a lot of the budget.
By the time you add that all up, the behind the scenes people really don't get a significant chunck of the budget. And the stuntman/anti-piracy advocate is going to get paid, whether he lives in Vancouver or Hollywood. It's the big studio hotshots that are feeling the pinch, not the stuntman.
For most movies, if they don't break even within the first 60 days of release, they aren't going to. There are a few movies that do poorly in the theater, but the DVD's sell enough to cover the investment to make the movie.
Yes studios look for ways to cut costs, but it has a whole lot more to do with making movies that blow chunks and nobody wants to watch than it has to do with redued profitability because of piracy.
I'm not saying that "piracy" is right or legal, but to hear the [(MP)|(RI)]AA talk it is the only reason that they aren't making as much as they used to, which just isn't true. A few profitable movies are being used to finance a bunch of unprofitable ones. And once everyone has replaced all their VHS tapes with DVD's, you are going to see another big drop in studio profitability. Just like we saw with the music industry.
Maybe Congress should consider making a law that makes it illegal to produce sucky movies. That would do a lot more to protect the precious industry than the copyright statute and the DMCA combined.
As a programmer who owns a small software development firm, (there's two of us), our customers care about the percieved value of an inventory system. They do not care about operating systems, databases, web servers, or any of that stuff, they care about keeping track of their inventory. In the past, we have had to "educate" the customer that if they wanted to have an inventory system, they had to pay $$ for an operating system, and then $$$$ for a database, and $$ for a web server, and then they could spend $$$$ for our inventory software. Lots of that money went to people besides me, but the customer percieved they were buying an inventory system, and these other components were necessary expenditures to get what they really wanted.
In the open source era, I can go to the customer and say, "Here is an inventory solution for $$$$$$$$". The perceived value is the same to the customer, but I don't have to pay Sun for the OS licence, and Oracle for the database license, etc. I use open source alternatives like Linux, PostgreSQL, and tomcat instead.
If you look at the big picture, the open source software movement is doing for software what the IBM compatible PC did for hardware. Commoditization. I shudder to think that during the course of my career I wrote two application development frameworks. Why? Because I needed one, and it was cheaper to build one myself than it was to buy one of the three commercially available ones, which may or may not have met my needs. Now there are a dozen robust, mature open source application development frameworks for me to choose from. I can select one that closely meets my needs, and modify it, if necessary.
The end result is that when programmers "give away their time, and effort" it makes thier time and effort worth more, not less, as you assert. By sharing the work for common functionality, my time becomes more valuable because I can spend it doing the thing I know well, inventory, not the thing that I don't, like application frameworks. My contributions to open source projects may be small, but when you combine the efforts of many people, those small contributions provide great benefit for all.
In time, open source inventory systems will be far better than the one we have developed, and people will be saying "I can't believe that I once wrote an inventory system, what a waste when there are so many good was available." I will then have to move up the software food chain to the Next Big Thing, as will everyone else.
Well, I can't vouch for the authenticity of the memo, but I can offer some circumstantial/anecdotal information. I have met Mike Anderer several times, and we have a mutual friend whom I speak with several times per week. I know that Mike is well connected at Microsoft. He has a company that gets a majority of their revenue from Microsoft contracts. Mike knows lots of people in the tech industry, and is well connected with capital. If I was Microsoft and was looking for someone to broker or facilitate funding for SCO, Mike would be the perfect guy. I don't know how he got hooked up with SCO, but he has had high level connections at Microsoft for more than 5 years. Because he has just recently been involved with SCO, it's plausible that Microsoft had some role in his engagement there. There are lot's of strategic consultants in the country. How coincidental that a long-time Microsoft ally gets pulled in to advise SCO on raising capital.
Say I write some Stuff. I own the copyright. I want to license the work to others. I choose a license, say the GPL. My choice of licence applies to my "Stuff" (the GPL calls this the "Program"). The terms of my license have absolutely nothing at all to do with anything anybody else has written.
The GPL is not some mythical viral license that consumes everything it touches and assigns ownership to the GPL Goddess. It's the license I chose to distribute my code under. That license is between me and whoever uses my Stuff, not between me and anybody who chose to distribute their stuff under the same terms I did.
They are more than willing to let the Suse's and RedHat's of the world sell their linux distributions for a couple hundred bucks. They want the services revenue. One guy on site for a week setting up and configuring a linux cluster costs 10 grand. Which revenue stream would you want?
Celeron's are like a Hummer with a 1/2 gallon gas tank. It sure goes good when it has gas, but you have to stop and fill it up every 10 minutes.
Last time I checked, every piece of paper money printed in the US says "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" on it. Coins have no such notice. Now I'm sure there are some private individuals who would not accept cash in exchange for goods or services, they might require sterling silver, gold bullion, diamonds, 300 foot yachts, or whatever, but _all_ Government divisions and agencies have to accept cash, the paper kind. The idiot who tried to pay the IRS with a truckload of pennies deserved the bi!@#slapping he got.
Lots of government transactions can be completed through the mail, for convienience; no one in their right mind would send cash in the mail, and so, as a convenience, checks are accepted. Sometimes it takes a little work to find the right address, but any government transaction can be completed in person, with cash.
As for your argument that the Government (your emphasis, not mine) can stop printing the statement of legal tender on bills, they certainly could do that, and make the Argentinian currency devaluation look mild. It is essentially an announcement that this money we just issued is of no value to us. That's bad business.
By their own admission, their licensing revenue is decreasing. Therefore, the increase in stock price is driven by the high risk "we can be millionaire's _if_ SCO wins this suit and gets a big judgement" proposition. If everything goes badly and IBM has to write a check, it will be many years before the judicial avenues have been exhausted. Where will the SCO revenue come from until then?
1 million BC - a caveman finally succeeds in making a fire. Quick put the recipe in the ChangeLog and check it in to CVS.
1485 - Christopher Columbus is looking for ships, but nobody seems to be able to construct one fast enough. He goes home and sketches out automake with his quill pen. Upon taking it to the shipyard, they are able to build him three boats instead of one.
1945 - ENIAC is assembled. Guys with slide rules say "It's not that cool, but it sure is fast"
1970 - The PDP-11 is born. ENIAC advocacy groups say "We invented it first."
1979 - Someone figures out that UUCP sucks, and invents TCP/IP. An IBM spokesman says "we don't think this thing is going to take off."
1982 - Xerox invents the mouse. IBM and Microsoft say "Who wants a dead animal on their desk. Nobody will ever use this." Jobs and the Woz laugh. The Mac is Born.
1987 - An IBM Spokesman says "We invented a radical new graphical user interface. Pick up your OS/2 floppies today!"
1991 - Windows 3.1 is released. Bill loudly proclaims, "Windows is the first graphical user interface for personal computing." Liar.
2003 - SCO says "All your UNIX are belong to us. We own everything".
There are very few revolutionary ideas in technology, it's mostly evolutionary. People build on the ideas of others. That's just the way stuff works. The "open source didn't invent anything" and "Microsoft invented everything useful" argument is just plain BS.
Exactly. Why just the other day, we had this problem with Word crashing all of the time. We called those bums at Micro$oft, got right through to a person, and told them that we didn't get our sales presentation finished on time because Word kept crashing. The MS guy was real nice, he took all of the blame, and even offered to remunerate us for our lost revenue. My boss said, "see, that's why we spend the big bucks for Micro$oft products, they have great support and always make things right."
Really what happens is you wait on hold for 30 minutes, and then talk to someone offshore who may or may not understand the English you are speaking. After hitting your credit card for 35 bucks, you are told to reboot, and that will fix the problem.
I'll take the mailing list any day.
Novel merged with WordPerfect in Jun 1994. Novell gave up 51 million shares of stock to get all the outstanding shares of WordPerfect. NOVL was trading near $15. That puts the price tag for the deal well over 700 million bucks.
Two years later, Novell unloads WordPerfect to Corel for 11 million in cash and 10 million shares of Corel stock. At that time CORL was about $10. Value of deal: 110 million.
That means Novell paid 600 million for Groupwise. Seems like a disaster to me.
Voters can exercise a lot of power between elections. But it's work, and you have to be in it for the long haul. I am the chairman of my voting precint for the Republican party. There are ~ 400 homes in our district. That makes it an almost insignificant percentage of the registered voters in my state. Even so, I get 5 or 6 invitations a year to receptions, BBQ's, dinners, speaches, etc from our 2 senators the congressman from our district. Imagine that, they ask me to come to them!
It's pretty tough to get elected to be the chairman of your precinct, just show up at the caucus meeting. The previous chairman will be there, (he's in charge of the meeting) and maybe a couple of other people. If you want to do it, it's yours. With an hour investment of your time, you can have some access to your elected officials.
If you want to get a conversation with your elected official, just get some signatures from people in your precinct on a petition and take it to the next BBQ-reception-I'm-your-dutiful-public-servant thingy that you get invited to. You have very good odds of getting a few minutes of face time with your congresscritter.
Wow, just like that, with no money and a few hours of your time you have access, and a mono-y-mono conversation. Can you compete with paid lobbyists? Yes and no. Lobbyists have someone paying them to do it full time, all you have is signatures of voters.
If you are trying to get re-elected, you can't afford to ignore your voters, even if it is a couple of years until the next election.
If you think IBM isn't going to close any more AIX deals after Friday because of this, you are mistaken. They will continue doing business as usual, and wait for SCO to try and present something in court, where they will be laughed out of the room.
June 16, 2003 - Wahoo, Nebraska
Life support systems in emergency rooms all over the country suddenly stopped working this weekend when SCO terminated the IBM's AIX license. Wanker McBride, executive vice-president of DRM for SCO, said in a newsconference that this action was justified. "We just can't have people stealing our intellectual property, it's just not the American Way(tm)."
SCO announced a 11:00am MDT conference call on their web site, but when this reporter called the number, a recorded message said, "Could not complete your call as dialed, message 3027".
On an unrelated note, banks all over the country were unable to disburse funds this morning because their systems were down. Signs were spotted on many banks that said "Come back later, and bring last month's statement"
And oh yeah, you should see the line at the DMV now.
SCO's stock tumbled to $0.01, moments after the opening bell, amid fears of massive lawsuits
Wait a minute.
s/Game Boy/Good Product/g
There is a Good Product out there. Somebody decides that they can make a compatible product for less. They try. Their first attempts are inexpensive, but not 100% compatible. Owners of the Good Product say "It's worth it for you to pay us big money, because it's worth it to be 100% compatible". Somebody else finally makes a 100% compatible product. Owners of Good Product have competition. Competition spurs innovation. Prices drop. This is a Good Thing.
s/Good Product/IBM PC/g
Because this happened to IBM, the personal computing industry was born. Aren't you glad this is the Way Stuff Works(tm)?
Yup, the point sure is that Apache dominates the server world because it comes with commercial Unix boxes. Same way that BSD's TCP/IP stack is used in all kinds of commercial OS's. That is the biggest kind of win that open source can have. Code that is better than what a commercial vendor can write themselves. Code that works so well that there is no return on the investment to create their own.