Is it just me, or is anyone else worried about the incentive structure this sets up?
I mean, now an unscrupulous open source developer could intentionally insert some blatantly stolen code, claiming it's their own; some in-cahoots business with a copyright on the code can take everyone to court; the insurance will have to pay out big time, and the company slips a million to the asshole developer under the table.
The Open Source movement gets a bunch of bad PR, the code needs an emergency re-write, some scoundrels make a killing, and the insurance company rethinks its business model.
I know insurance investigators can go about investigating and trying to stop this from happening, but it seems like a very hard thing to prove, as along as the payment to the programmer is channeled very secretly.
Exactly. Except it's probably even worse than that.
They don't say where they find the "average" toilet seat, but since they were surveying the bacteria in cubicles, I'll bet you they're checking office toilet seats.
If the offices they checked are anything like the comapany I used to work for, the toilet seats are cleaned with an industrial disinfectant every singly day.
The cubicles are usually cleaned when someone quits and someone else moves into the cubicle, or when departments move- I'd say between 6 months and 3 years between cleanings, on average.
"The initiative doesn't give the govt. more information, it just helps agencies better share the information they already have."
This does not make the new legislation harmless.
Some branch or other of the government already has almost every scrap of information on you that they want. Coordinating it between departments that otherwise wouldn't have access to it can be just as scary as gathering too much information in the first place. This is mostly what Total Information Awareness was all about; sharing information.
A particular danger associated with this is it's potential for facilitating the transition to "rule of men" instead of "rule of law" in this country.
That is, almost everyone has something that's technically illegal in their backgrounds. Unpaid parking tickets, mistakes on taxes, an unpaid bill, or any of hundreds of little things. If you want to get really technical about it, there are kinds of flashlights that are illegal to have in conjunction with a firearm, there are outdated traffic laws that are widely unknown, always ignored, and never enforced, and for a while, Tryptophan, an amino acid essential to life, was illegal to possess in the US. There are elements of the tax code where it's illegal no matter how it's done, and throwing batteries in the trash can tecnically lead to huge fines and years in jail. If they want to put the information together and be picky enough to try to get someone, everyone can be gotten for somehting. Luckily, most of the silly stuff usually goes unenforced. But that doesn't mean it's not scary that, technically, we're all criminals.
Allowing a variety of authorities- from police, sheriffs, & highway patrol, up to FBI and CIA, and down to your neighborhood precinct representative to have easy access to tons of information on you increases the possibility for selective enforcement of laws.
Maybe the officials will use this information wisely to help track down big criminals, murderers, terrorists, etc. more effectively. Or maybe they'll use it to harass good people. Or maybe they'll even use their newfound power over everyone for extortion and blackmail.
Be very wary of governments making sweeping or vague laws, and of classifying lots of things as illegal. Also be worried when they gather or consolidate information. I'll agree the information gathering's/access is potentially useful, and it's the overflow of laws and regulations that scares me much more. But the two in conjunction can be a dangerous combination.
"...it includes neither an e-mail account nor voice phone service."
But it does sustain rates around 500 kbps or over...
Voice over IP, anyone? It seems like they're practically begging that application- why carry and pay for a cell phone too, especially if you can get this service on a PDA some day?
Hey-find anywone with access to a machine shop- one second in a milling machine will give you a nice flat side on that nut. Re-polish it, and you're ready to go.
Or, just buy a tiny mirror from someone like Edmund Scientific and glue it on, it'll make you life much easier.
It's true a lot of Mac users don't want to know what goes on behind the scenes (behind the finder), but this book is perfect for me and a lot other Mac geeks.
I started using the Mac with system 6.x on Mac Pluses and SE's, and have been owning/using/supporting Macs ever since. I worked in Mac tech support (not for Apple) part time in high school, and in college people came to me with their Mac problems. I knew almost everything to know about the Mac GUI- where all the control panel settings were, how to catch extension conflicts and which ones were likely, all the little-known utilities, how to mess around with programs in ResEdit and change resources. We used to use ResEdit, HexEdit, Telnet, and keystroke loggers to break into all the machines in my high school no matter what sort of stupid protection program they put on them, and for April Fool's Day we had all the computers in the Mac lab singing "99,999 Bottle of Beer on the wall" all day, and we put "Sproing" on all the cursors, and the guy in charge of the lab couldn't take any of it off all day. We had LAN parties using LocalTalk with node boxes connected to our printer ports, and shared software and played network games like Bolo. I wrote little utilities and programs with Applescript and Facespan. We upgraded the RAM, hard drives, processors, video cards, and interface cards in our machines. We had accounts on local BBS's andd traded files. First Class Client was the best. We also had freenet accounts and used the internet from 1994-99. We had access to lots of different hardware at school, and hung around after school moving components around and rebuilding machines. We segmented our HD's and ran multiple OS installations. One of my friends actually put together a (sometimes) working Mac entirely from scrap parts being tossed out. It didn't even have a case.
Anyway, we were mac geeks, and there were many of us, and I met many more in college. We'd all used PC's and some of us had used UNIX to varying degrees, but basically we only knew, owned, and used Macs.
Now OSX came out, and I feel like an idiot. Suddenly, the one line of computers I knew everything about, I know nothing about. I mean, sure, I picked up all the GUI widgets very quickly and know a lot more than the average user, but as soon as I try to get under the hood, I have no idea what's going on. That's why I'm going to buy this book. I suspect many of my old high school and college friends who have stuck with Macs will get it too.
Here's my input to the President's comission, if anyone's interested:
The cost of large-capacity space launches currently runs around $5,000/pound. None of the serious plans on NASA's drawing board are going to have any chance of taking that below $500 per pound.
Every aspect of space exploration would benefit immeasurably from lowering this cost significantly. There is only one technologically feasible plan for achieving greatly lowered costs to space: a space elevator. Due to great advances in materials science, the technology to achieve this is clearly right around the corner, and our drive toward that curve in the road could be greatly accelerated by NASA funding. The marginal cost of moving material into space could fall to $10 per pound. Suddenly, space would be wide-open. The most serious limitations we face would be removed.
Please try this: have a panel estimate the lowest total number of pounds it is roughly feasible that Bush's proposed mission could possibly require. That is, roughly the least number of pounds, in a best-case scenario, for construction of a manned moon base, plus launching a mission to Mars that could take a minimal crew all the way there, land them, and return them to earth. Multiply this by the lowest realistic price per pound you hope to be able to achieve in time to do the mission. Multiply the pounds by the cost per pound and tell me if there's any way this can be done under your budget constraints. I think this basic accounting will make it clear to anyone that this mission is not happening in the next 20 years using any conventional launch technology, including possible new launch vehicles to replace the shuttle.
To make a serious attempt at achieving these goals under budgetary constraints, the construction of a space elevator is the only viable course.
Bush/congress would have to increase NASA's budget to a trillion dollars a year to undertake this mission using conventional launch technology, which isn't going to happen, making the proposed mission impossible. Whatever administration we have over the next 20 years, and the press, will probably make this look like NASA's failure, saying there were terrible cost overruns and such that prevented the mission outlined in Bush's 20-year timeline from becoming a reality. It won't matter than that the numbers never added up in the first place and the mission was only a pretense all along. The time is now for NASA to complete a feasibility study making public the numbers I suggested above, and make it clear right now that this mission can't be expected to be done under the proposed budget the way Bush is asking NASA to do it. But obviously you can't let the American public down, and just sit around being the nay-sayers, saying "it can't be done," when you're supposed to be the visionaries. Say it can be done, but you need a lot of money now for a space elevator, and that will make everything else possible. NASA will come out the clear visionaries, the space elevator will be the obvious world gateway to space that makes far-out plans like Bush's feasible when they were otherwise impossible.
Additionally, if one of the goals is to demonstrate US dominance in space, a space elevator would instantly move us beyond compare. No country paying thousands of dollars per pound for space missions could compete in any way with a space program that's paying a marginal cost of $10 per pound.
Kick all available funding into space elevator research. It's an inevitable step if we are to begin serious, long-term, visionary space exploration. No other technologically feasible method can achieve a price per pound ratio that makes large manned trips possible. The sooner this step is taken, the sooner significant space exploration can really begin.
I do not have the time or resources available to me now to argue the technological case for how possible a space elevator is. But I'm sure you need to do this kind of feasibility study in-house anyway.
I agree with everyone else here: you're an idiot. Don't blow $7k on a soon to be obsolete technology for the benefit of your neighbors whom you'll soon move away from and never see again, meanwhile subjecting yourself to a whole bunch of work and trouble, and the possible wrath of your landlord.
That being said, here's how I'd do it:
Get a laptop with an 802.11 card and an external directional antenna hooked up to it, and get a friend with another laptop with an 802.11 base station hooked up to it via a long ethernet cord. Get on the phone with each other, and walk around various apartments, him moving the base station and telling you where it is, and you walking around with the laptop, pointing the antenna as close as you can to the base station, and checking reception. Do this basic thing in several different apartments, and draw a little "reception map."
Depending on what your floors and walls are made of, you may find you can do this whole thing without too many base stations, so that means not having to run too many wires. Puzzle out the minimum number of base stations required.
Then run cat-5 from wherever your high-speed wire enters the building into a fast ethernet hub, and then to wherever you calculated the base stations should go. Tell all your rich game-playing friends to go buy themselves 802.11 G cards (no "B" cards to slow you all down, as long as you're going to all this trouble) and, as necessary, to buy themselves directional antennas. Then tell them to split the bill on your dedicated T5, or whatever you're getting.
Alternatly, depending on where your apartment is and how you tenants and your landlords feel about it, save yourself a lot of time & money and go the dorm cable route- run cat5 in & out of your windows from apartment to apartment.
-Phat Tony
So, the computer has a task the CPU is poor at performing, so they offload that procedure to specialized "wetware" that's more efficient at handling that kind of processing. The people are being used like FPU's or GPU's. Paid in porn, instead of run on electricity.
How'd you like to have a job as a coprocessor? Is this the computer-age version of dehumanizing assembly line drones- soon people will sit in front of computers all day long handling the offloaded processing tasks computers are poor at handling?
Come to think of it, this is already going on a lot. Computers process all the transactions at most companies, but they have certain "flags" they catch that offload certain transactions-ones that are exceptional for some reason (complex, may involve fraud, etc)- for people to handle personally. I just hadn't thought of people as coprocessing drones handeling certain exceptions a computer program comes across and offloads for biological processing.
The matrix won't happen all at once with a war. It will creep up on us so we hardly notice it. We won't be subjugated, we'll volunteer.
"If I do a search for 'playmate,' and a banner ad pops up for a non-Playboy adult-oriented site, how is that not trademark infringement?"
It seems to me that this has to do with what you think a search engine is. I think of it as advice on how to find something. As such, I think they should pretty much be allowed to point you toward whatever they want to, and if you don't like it, get advice somewhere else. But don't sue them because you don't like where their advice leads.
If you went into a grocery store and asked a clerk "do you sell playboy?," and he said, "no, but over here's the nudy magazine section, and we've got Penthouse, Hustler, Maxim, and Cosmopolitan," should that be illegal to use the Playboy brand name to identify that the person's looking for adult oriented material, and then point the to something else?
What if they come in and ask for a Kleenex, or ask if they can make a Xerox copy, and the store only carries Scott Tissues and Puffs, and has a Canon copier. Are they legally obliged to send the person away to another store, instead of pointing them toward a different brand-name product?
Along the advice line of thinking, if a friend tells you he's thinking of getting a new Windows machine, should Microsoft be able to sue you if you try to talk him into switching to Linux? You only brought up Linux specifically because he brought up Windows. You're using the Windows copyright as a que in order to prostheletize Linux.
I'm sure people will respond saying that it's different when a company tells you. Why, because they're making money? What if OSDL offered to pay you to try to talk people into using Linux, then should it be illegal to do so if you find out they're already using Windows? It srikes me that this is freedom of speech. If someone comes to you for advice, you should be able to give them any advice you want. If someone's paying you to give out certain advice, as long as it's understood that that's what's going on, which it should be for "featured" links, I don't see why that should be illegal. And if it is illegal, don't give anyone advice when there are brand names involved.
"With not much SCO news today, it seemed that this story was needed "
Yes!
I was just sitting around thinking "the world seems so fair and just, and people try so hard to do the right thing, it's really getting me depressed. Boy I could use some SCO news, to restore my faith in people being jerks!"
You know what would really hit the spot right now? A story about both SCO and a DDOS attack. Now that would hit the spot. That's what I need.
</sarcasm>
This story seemed fine for slashdot, but in general, I don't think lack of news on a topic is a good reason to post something.
This is a really impotant issue. I used to go to the University of Chicago, and a friend there who worked in the library (Regenstein) told be they think that as much as 5% of the collection cold be missing due to mis-shelving. Millions of dollars worth of books. They try to audit the shelves one by one to find these, but it takes them something like 20 years to do a full circuit on the book-by-book auditing at the rate they go. At least that's what he told me, don't know if it's true.
What I do know is true is a guy in my dorm who was a complete asshole who used to have a job at the library reshelving books, and every day he'd go in, check out his cart of books to return, and ditch all of them in any space he could find on the nearest shelves, and leave. He got paid for 2 hours of reshelving a day for this. All those books will be lost for up to twenty years. They'll show that they're in, until someone goes to try to find one. He single handedly lost thousands of books from the collection.
-Phat Tony
"The GNP reflects the product as the US as a whole, not what the goverment produces. The goverment itself is responsable for printing and mantaining the money supply but does that not mean that they should simple be able to barrow on what is my work because they feel it will be in my best intrest without asking."
This has to do with total government expenditure. I strongly agree that the government shouldn't be able to go around spending (wasting) all this money that we, the people, are generating- but the sad fact of the matter is that they can. They can come take our money away via taxes, and they can spend all they want to, regardless of whether they have it or not. But the issue of the government's right or ability to tax and spend has no bearing on what is a realistic way to view the deficit.
"While this is a republic, and many socialiast aspects of other govements have taken a hold here it does not follow that they govement should be allowed to use the GNP, a product of it's citizans work -- not it's work, as a credit rateing as to what it should be allowed to barrow on."
They don't use GNP as a "credit rating" for what they're "allowed to spend." They can spend all they want to, and run deficits as high as they want, in nominal dollars or percent of GDP. They don't need a credit rating to spend. When a bill for another $100 billion in pork-barrel spending comes before congress, they don't say "gee, the debt's $7 trillion dollars, but that's only 66% of GDP, let's add on some more." They just do it. But again, what you're saying has no bearing on what is a good way to view the budget situation. Are you saying that our deficit of $7 trillion would be a problem of the same magnitude if it were assumed by a country like Angola, with a GDP of $7 billion instead of our $10 trillion? Do you really believe that the debt assumed in the Civil War, or WWII, was minor and nothing to worry about, while the current budget crisis is 1,000 times worse? These are implied by your assertion that it's the absolute magnitude of the deficit rather than the deficit relative to GDP that counts. They are not correct.
Another way to look at this is that even with the increased spending, there would still be a budget surplus if the economy had proceeded on the course it was on from 1992 - 2000. So the whole government fiscal picture relies heavily on GDP. I don't like it anymore than you do, but GDP is the pool of money the government draws upon to pay their debts.
"And why is that? Well it's because the intrest rate and debt have been spireling out of control for years now. Imageing what our GNP would be like if we did not have to be constanly paying intrest on what our goverment was doing. What if our goverment was able to balance it's books."
The interest rate has been near an all-time-low for about 2 years now, so I don't think it's been "spireling [sic] out of control" at all. And GNP (or GDP) probably wouldn't be any higher simply by alleviating debt. But the point that less of our earned money would go towards paying interest on the debt is quite true. I'm all for a balanced budget. I just don't see that this has any relevance to the issue of how the deficit should be viewed: in absolute dollars, or relative to GDP.
This chart doesn't give a realistic picture. What matters more than the total $ value of the debt/surplus is the debt/surplus as a percentage of GDP.
You can find such a thing
here. (warning! PDF)
The basic point is that, yes, the budget looks bad, but not orders of magnitude worse than ever before, as it appears in the graph linked by the parent post. That's statistics lying for you. In fact, the current budget deficit is only about 2/3 as bad as it was in 1983. Although it is still getting worse now, and that was the trough in '83.
For a rudimentary comparison to explain why this matters: if you borrow $10,000, that might be a big debt to take on if you only make $18,000 a year, but if you make $100,000 a year, it's no big deal. How much debt you should assume is relative to your income, or at least your expected income.
That's ridiculous. I doubt even a quarter of the people reading Slahdot even know who Steven Wright is, and even less have ever heard that particular joke before, and even less would be able to attribute it to him.
The joke wouldn't have lost anything if he'd put Steven Wright's name in the posting. As it is, most people will think it's him being funny when it's stolen from a stand-up commedian. Thinking that plaigarism's only wrong on a school paper is fundamentally wrong-headed. If anything, I think it's more important to give people credit out in the real world, where the potential audience is bigger than just a teacher.
Also, I can't beleive I was moderated "Off Topic" for sighting the source of a quote someone else posted. I hope that gets meta-moderated.
Just for the heck of making a huge image, I once scanned a palm leaf on my flatbed. It was big, so I scanned it in two sections and stitched it.
My scanner scans at 2400 x 2400 dpi without interpolation, and it's 8.5" x 11.75", yielding two uncropped images, each at 20,400 pixels x 28,200. Cropped, my final image was about 30,000 * 28,000. OK, only.84 GigaPixels, because I intentionally scaled it to work in Photoshop. But it would be a piece of cake to make images way bigger, when you can capture 575 Mega Pixels at a time with a sub-$200 scanner. Someone else out htere must have done this already, right? Even if not, I don't see it as such a big milestone, since many thousdands of people across the US have the equptment to do this at their fingertips. Sure, it only works for flat images, but actually, you can turn your scanner into a camera- see here or here.
Additionally, I would like to argue with him about the potential of film to match this. I scan 35mm slides shot on films like Ektachrome 100. It's worth scanning a good sharp image on this film at 2400 ppi. The image size on 35 mm film is 24 x 36 mm, or about 1 1/3 square inches, yielding about 7.6 MegaPixels.
100 speed films are commonly available in 8 x 10 size, which should yield 460 megapixels.
But wait! We can go higher than this. Konica Impressa 50 should be much finer grained than this. There's a reason drum scanners go up to 4,000 x 4,000 ppi- to suck the resolution out of really fine-grained films. So an 8 x 10 scanned at 4,000 x 4,000 ppi can yield 1.28 GigaPixels- more than this image. And that's not even getting very exotic yet.
Polariod used to make a viewcamera that took 16" x 20" negatives. If you special order uncut sheet film from Kodax or Konica and cut your own 16 * 20 negatives, this could take you into the 5 GigaPixel range. The two issues that aren't clear here are 1. if any lenses have high-enough resolving power to deal with this, and 2. how the hell you scan it. Scanning it probably will boil down to cutting it, scanning it, and re-stitching it on the computer. Still, the image would have been captured all at once, probably in a lot less than 13 minutes depending on the maximum aperture of your lens.
In terms of affordability and portability, the digitals are really nice, and it's mostly the way I've gone. I still shoot 4 * 5 black and white negatives sometimes, and they make great 16" x 20" prints, but that's mostly for the fun of it. Digital panoramas are great. I'll not deny that digital is where the future is.
Oh, and about printing, per the question on his site. For the highest quality image per inch, hire someone with a Durst Lambda 130. It can make continuous photographic prints up to 60" x 164' (yes, that's feet) in a resolution equivalent to 4,000 x 4,000 dpi in inkjet terms, and continuous tone.
A ColorSpan Displaymaker Mach12 can get you up to 72" wide by effectively unlimited length, and it prints with a 12-color ink set. Not as high quality as the Lambda per square inch, but impressive.
And if what you really want is just plain big, HP DesignJets go up to 96" wide now. The quality's still good.
Where do you find people with these kinds of machines? Here are a couple of suggestions, but there are lots more:
Harvest Productions or
Design Image.
Everything on the Mac seems to use the Quicktime API's for its image handeling, and like Photoshop, it caps pictures to 30,000 pixels sqaure. Does anyone know of any image viewer for Mac that doesn't?
Here I am, with "The Graphic Arts Machine" on my desk, and I can't view a JPEG. OK, ok, it's sort of a big JPEG, but still.
I agree with the other posters here- who cares about this PC BS about terminology.
What I want to see banned is the use of the IDE chain's terribly discriminatory master/slave relationship between drives!
This travesty has gone on long enough! One drive gets control of the IDE chain, and the other one's just supposed to put up with being secondary all the time, constantly submitting to the control of some dominant, "Master" drive?
There's not even any objective basis for determining who's to be the "Master" and who's to be in the inferior "Slave" roll. It's not necessarily the newer, larger, faster, or more reliable drive that is "Master." There is no objective basis whatsoever that is standardly applied- this subjugation is forced upon the poor "slaves" arbitrarily, through no fault of their own. Who can walk around this great world of hours and hold their head high with this travesty in our midst! How can anyone allowing a drive to work for them all day under these slave-like conditions, in a hot, cramped, stuffy computer case, no less, and call themselves a moral being.
I'd like to see all nations sign international resolutions mandating changing to more egalatarian, SCSI-based systems that don't force this sort of subserviance on any computer part. I'm sure my fellow geeks will stand strong with me in a new solidarity movement to ban this abonimable practice! Be strong, and we shall prevail!
eMacs, which include a Sony 17" totally flat 1280 * 1024 monitor built in that runs $250 seperately, start at $799. And that comes with a Combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW a 32 MB ATI Radeon 7500, Firewire ports, a large included suite of software, and many other things that would be expensive add-ons for the $300 Lindows machines.
Of course, if you don't want the better OS, optical drive, included monitor, fast graphics processor, connectivity, etc, then the Mac's a bad deal. Apple's never gone for the low-end market, and the $300 Lindows Microtel machine is low-end. Add on the extra stuff the Mac comes with, even using price-watch prices, and you quickly approach the price of the Mac, and that's for a cobbled together system of third party stuff vs. an engineered, out-of-the-box machine with the best relaibaility record and customer service of any computer manufacturer. (According to Consumer reports, for several years in a row.)
Don't try to make it sound like you're in for $1800 to get a comparable mac, and don't pretend that because lower-end macs come with monitors, that somehow professional Macs are the real alternative to cheap PC's. My guess is that most buyers do end up using a monitor anyway. Get whatever system best suits your needs, and Macs don't come without lots of extras. I haven't seen any computers with similiar extras for much less though.
Goodness, I don't even know where to start responding to this.
I guess I'll try to take things in order.
1. The idea that CEO's of well-performing companies are overpaid, specifically, Michael Eisner.
Disney's value is about $60 billion according to Yahoo finance, and they reported $1.3 billion in profit last year. So Eisner's in charge, he makes all the big decisions or decides who does, he guides the ship, and he gets about 50% of profits, at least for one year. A lot of companies pay a lot more than that to whoever's in charge, for example, a lot of small companies that pay 100% of profits to the owner. So they scale it down a lot for a big company. Still, Eisner's making a lot more and a much larger percent of profits than most comparable big-wigs, so maybe he is overpaid. But how can we tell?
Is he worth 50%? Well, look at all the huge companies that don't do so well. I mean, Disney's making a lot of money. But Time Warner, which made 1.8 billion dollars profit in 2000, lost $54 billion last year. So that's what can happen with the wrong management. Disney's board of directors probably took into account the possibility of Eisner leaving Disney, what some other companies might offer him in compensation, and how they thought it would impact the company to hire their next best choice for CEO, as compared to retaining Eisner. If they thought it was reasonably likely that maintaining Eisner would bring in at least $700 million more than their next best option, and reasonably likely Eisner might leave if they didn't pay him that, then the number looks like a reasonable choice.
Now, I would tend to agree with you, not being privileged to all the information the Board of Directors of Disney have access to, that this still seems like a big number. But then, we're looking at the worst case: the most highly paid CEO in the world. And we're looking at an anomalous year. Many CEO's don't have very stable income (not that they're going to run out of money or anything, it just has a high variance), and I'm sure Eisner's average compensation over his tenure as CEO is really way below $700 million/year. But I think it's conceivable that this isn't over compensation, and that a lot of CEO's with incomes that may sound awfully big aren't being paid out of line with what they're worth to the best of the board's ability to judge.
That's all about whether it's worth it or not to Disney. There's also another issue, which I think is really none-of-our business because it's their company, but is an interesting thing to speculate on: is it good for society?
I'm not going to take this on for the Disney case, because it's too hard to argue about what the value to society is of producing a good movie.
But take someone like Rockefeller. When he entered the oil industry in the early 1860's, when oil was still primarily used to make kerosene for heating and illumination, the availability and quality of kerosene were terrible, the prices were high, and many people couldn't afford the product at all due to it's high cost or low quality. The same went later for gas for cars. But when Rockefeller entered these markets, he quickly came to dominate through introducing dozens of innovations, and reliably providing a product of superior quality for lower prices. But soon the competition started to close in, and while availability and quality continued to rise, and prices continued to fall, new national corporations that primarily copied his innovative methods began to gobble national market share, so that from 1898 to 1906, Standard Oil's market share fell from 34% to 11%. It was even lower when the government first initiated anti-trust in 1908.
So who won here? Rockefeller's innovations reformed an entire industry, and the benefits this created throughout society are immeasurable- better lighting, heating, and transportation. Better safety. Better availability of the product. And prices dropped steadily from his entry until anti-trust in 1908. He only gathered a tiny portion of the eco
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me, or is anyone else worried about the incentive structure this sets up?
I mean, now an unscrupulous open source developer could intentionally insert some blatantly stolen code, claiming it's their own; some in-cahoots business with a copyright on the code can take everyone to court; the insurance will have to pay out big time, and the company slips a million to the asshole developer under the table.
The Open Source movement gets a bunch of bad PR, the code needs an emergency re-write, some scoundrels make a killing, and the insurance company rethinks its business model.
I know insurance investigators can go about investigating and trying to stop this from happening, but it seems like a very hard thing to prove, as along as the payment to the programmer is channeled very secretly.
One more similar hilarious joke site:
Creationist Science Fair
Exactly. Except it's probably even worse than that.
They don't say where they find the "average" toilet seat, but since they were surveying the bacteria in cubicles, I'll bet you they're checking office toilet seats.
If the offices they checked are anything like the comapany I used to work for, the toilet seats are cleaned with an industrial disinfectant every singly day.
The cubicles are usually cleaned when someone quits and someone else moves into the cubicle, or when departments move- I'd say between 6 months and 3 years between cleanings, on average.
And they expect people to be surprised by this?
"The initiative doesn't give the govt. more information, it just helps agencies better share the information they already have."
This does not make the new legislation harmless.
Some branch or other of the government already has almost every scrap of information on you that they want. Coordinating it between departments that otherwise wouldn't have access to it can be just as scary as gathering too much information in the first place. This is mostly what Total Information Awareness was all about; sharing information.
A particular danger associated with this is it's potential for facilitating the transition to "rule of men" instead of "rule of law" in this country.
That is, almost everyone has something that's technically illegal in their backgrounds. Unpaid parking tickets, mistakes on taxes, an unpaid bill, or any of hundreds of little things. If you want to get really technical about it, there are kinds of flashlights that are illegal to have in conjunction with a firearm, there are outdated traffic laws that are widely unknown, always ignored, and never enforced, and for a while, Tryptophan, an amino acid essential to life, was illegal to possess in the US. There are elements of the tax code where it's illegal no matter how it's done, and throwing batteries in the trash can tecnically lead to huge fines and years in jail. If they want to put the information together and be picky enough to try to get someone, everyone can be gotten for somehting. Luckily, most of the silly stuff usually goes unenforced. But that doesn't mean it's not scary that, technically, we're all criminals.
Allowing a variety of authorities- from police, sheriffs, & highway patrol, up to FBI and CIA, and down to your neighborhood precinct representative to have easy access to tons of information on you increases the possibility for selective enforcement of laws.
Maybe the officials will use this information wisely to help track down big criminals, murderers, terrorists, etc. more effectively. Or maybe they'll use it to harass good people. Or maybe they'll even use their newfound power over everyone for extortion and blackmail.
Be very wary of governments making sweeping or vague laws, and of classifying lots of things as illegal. Also be worried when they gather or consolidate information. I'll agree the information gathering's/access is potentially useful, and it's the overflow of laws and regulations that scares me much more. But the two in conjunction can be a dangerous combination.
"...it includes neither an e-mail account nor voice phone service."
But it does sustain rates around 500 kbps or over...
Voice over IP, anyone? It seems like they're practically begging that application- why carry and pay for a cell phone too, especially if you can get this service on a PDA some day?
Who's going to trust the results of this election? Everyone knows computer voting systems aren't secure.
At least the Alphaville ones probably weren't designed by Diebold.
Of course!
iDVD
Or does that not work for you?
Hey-find anywone with access to a machine shop- one second in a milling machine will give you a nice flat side on that nut. Re-polish it, and you're ready to go.
Or, just buy a tiny mirror from someone like Edmund Scientific and glue it on, it'll make you life much easier.
-Phat Tony
It's true a lot of Mac users don't want to know what goes on behind the scenes (behind the finder), but this book is perfect for me and a lot other Mac geeks.
I started using the Mac with system 6.x on Mac Pluses and SE's, and have been owning/using/supporting Macs ever since. I worked in Mac tech support (not for Apple) part time in high school, and in college people came to me with their Mac problems. I knew almost everything to know about the Mac GUI- where all the control panel settings were, how to catch extension conflicts and which ones were likely, all the little-known utilities, how to mess around with programs in ResEdit and change resources. We used to use ResEdit, HexEdit, Telnet, and keystroke loggers to break into all the machines in my high school no matter what sort of stupid protection program they put on them, and for April Fool's Day we had all the computers in the Mac lab singing "99,999 Bottle of Beer on the wall" all day, and we put "Sproing" on all the cursors, and the guy in charge of the lab couldn't take any of it off all day. We had LAN parties using LocalTalk with node boxes connected to our printer ports, and shared software and played network games like Bolo. I wrote little utilities and programs with Applescript and Facespan. We upgraded the RAM, hard drives, processors, video cards, and interface cards in our machines. We had accounts on local BBS's andd traded files. First Class Client was the best. We also had freenet accounts and used the internet from 1994-99. We had access to lots of different hardware at school, and hung around after school moving components around and rebuilding machines. We segmented our HD's and ran multiple OS installations. One of my friends actually put together a (sometimes) working Mac entirely from scrap parts being tossed out. It didn't even have a case.
Anyway, we were mac geeks, and there were many of us, and I met many more in college. We'd all used PC's and some of us had used UNIX to varying degrees, but basically we only knew, owned, and used Macs.
Now OSX came out, and I feel like an idiot. Suddenly, the one line of computers I knew everything about, I know nothing about. I mean, sure, I picked up all the GUI widgets very quickly and know a lot more than the average user, but as soon as I try to get under the hood, I have no idea what's going on. That's why I'm going to buy this book. I suspect many of my old high school and college friends who have stuck with Macs will get it too.
-Phat Tony.
Here's my input to the President's comission, if anyone's interested:
The cost of large-capacity space launches currently runs around $5,000/pound. None of the serious plans on NASA's drawing board are going to have any chance of taking that below $500 per pound.
Every aspect of space exploration would benefit immeasurably from lowering this cost significantly. There is only one technologically feasible plan for achieving greatly lowered costs to space: a space elevator. Due to great advances in materials science, the technology to achieve this is clearly right around the corner, and our drive toward that curve in the road could be greatly accelerated by NASA funding. The marginal cost of moving material into space could fall to $10 per pound. Suddenly, space would be wide-open. The most serious limitations we face would be removed.
Please try this: have a panel estimate the lowest total number of pounds it is roughly feasible that Bush's proposed mission could possibly require. That is, roughly the least number of pounds, in a best-case scenario, for construction of a manned moon base, plus launching a mission to Mars that could take a minimal crew all the way there, land them, and return them to earth. Multiply this by the lowest realistic price per pound you hope to be able to achieve in time to do the mission. Multiply the pounds by the cost per pound and tell me if there's any way this can be done under your budget constraints. I think this basic accounting will make it clear to anyone that this mission is not happening in the next 20 years using any conventional launch technology, including possible new launch vehicles to replace the shuttle.
To make a serious attempt at achieving these goals under budgetary constraints, the construction of a space elevator is the only viable course.
Bush/congress would have to increase NASA's budget to a trillion dollars a year to undertake this mission using conventional launch technology, which isn't going to happen, making the proposed mission impossible. Whatever administration we have over the next 20 years, and the press, will probably make this look like NASA's failure, saying there were terrible cost overruns and such that prevented the mission outlined in Bush's 20-year timeline from becoming a reality. It won't matter than that the numbers never added up in the first place and the mission was only a pretense all along. The time is now for NASA to complete a feasibility study making public the numbers I suggested above, and make it clear right now that this mission can't be expected to be done under the proposed budget the way Bush is asking NASA to do it. But obviously you can't let the American public down, and just sit around being the nay-sayers, saying "it can't be done," when you're supposed to be the visionaries. Say it can be done, but you need a lot of money now for a space elevator, and that will make everything else possible. NASA will come out the clear visionaries, the space elevator will be the obvious world gateway to space that makes far-out plans like Bush's feasible when they were otherwise impossible.
Additionally, if one of the goals is to demonstrate US dominance in space, a space elevator would instantly move us beyond compare. No country paying thousands of dollars per pound for space missions could compete in any way with a space program that's paying a marginal cost of $10 per pound.
Kick all available funding into space elevator research. It's an inevitable step if we are to begin serious, long-term, visionary space exploration. No other technologically feasible method can achieve a price per pound ratio that makes large manned trips possible. The sooner this step is taken, the sooner significant space exploration can really begin.
I do not have the time or resources available to me now to argue the technological case for how possible a space elevator is. But I'm sure you need to do this kind of feasibility study in-house anyway.
Best of luck in your endeavors.
I agree with everyone else here: you're an idiot. Don't blow $7k on a soon to be obsolete technology for the benefit of your neighbors whom you'll soon move away from and never see again, meanwhile subjecting yourself to a whole bunch of work and trouble, and the possible wrath of your landlord.
That being said, here's how I'd do it: Get a laptop with an 802.11 card and an external directional antenna hooked up to it, and get a friend with another laptop with an 802.11 base station hooked up to it via a long ethernet cord. Get on the phone with each other, and walk around various apartments, him moving the base station and telling you where it is, and you walking around with the laptop, pointing the antenna as close as you can to the base station, and checking reception. Do this basic thing in several different apartments, and draw a little "reception map."
Depending on what your floors and walls are made of, you may find you can do this whole thing without too many base stations, so that means not having to run too many wires. Puzzle out the minimum number of base stations required.
Then run cat-5 from wherever your high-speed wire enters the building into a fast ethernet hub, and then to wherever you calculated the base stations should go. Tell all your rich game-playing friends to go buy themselves 802.11 G cards (no "B" cards to slow you all down, as long as you're going to all this trouble) and, as necessary, to buy themselves directional antennas. Then tell them to split the bill on your dedicated T5, or whatever you're getting.
Alternatly, depending on where your apartment is and how you tenants and your landlords feel about it, save yourself a lot of time & money and go the dorm cable route- run cat5 in & out of your windows from apartment to apartment. -Phat Tony
So, the computer has a task the CPU is poor at performing, so they offload that procedure to specialized "wetware" that's more efficient at handling that kind of processing. The people are being used like FPU's or GPU's. Paid in porn, instead of run on electricity.
How'd you like to have a job as a coprocessor? Is this the computer-age version of dehumanizing assembly line drones- soon people will sit in front of computers all day long handling the offloaded processing tasks computers are poor at handling?
Come to think of it, this is already going on a lot. Computers process all the transactions at most companies, but they have certain "flags" they catch that offload certain transactions-ones that are exceptional for some reason (complex, may involve fraud, etc)- for people to handle personally. I just hadn't thought of people as coprocessing drones handeling certain exceptions a computer program comes across and offloads for biological processing.
The matrix won't happen all at once with a war. It will creep up on us so we hardly notice it. We won't be subjugated, we'll volunteer.
-Phat Tony
"If I do a search for 'playmate,' and a banner ad pops up for a non-Playboy adult-oriented site, how is that not trademark infringement?"
It seems to me that this has to do with what you think a search engine is. I think of it as advice on how to find something. As such, I think they should pretty much be allowed to point you toward whatever they want to, and if you don't like it, get advice somewhere else. But don't sue them because you don't like where their advice leads.
If you went into a grocery store and asked a clerk "do you sell playboy?," and he said, "no, but over here's the nudy magazine section, and we've got Penthouse, Hustler, Maxim, and Cosmopolitan," should that be illegal to use the Playboy brand name to identify that the person's looking for adult oriented material, and then point the to something else?
What if they come in and ask for a Kleenex, or ask if they can make a Xerox copy, and the store only carries Scott Tissues and Puffs, and has a Canon copier. Are they legally obliged to send the person away to another store, instead of pointing them toward a different brand-name product?
Along the advice line of thinking, if a friend tells you he's thinking of getting a new Windows machine, should Microsoft be able to sue you if you try to talk him into switching to Linux? You only brought up Linux specifically because he brought up Windows. You're using the Windows copyright as a que in order to prostheletize Linux.
I'm sure people will respond saying that it's different when a company tells you. Why, because they're making money? What if OSDL offered to pay you to try to talk people into using Linux, then should it be illegal to do so if you find out they're already using Windows? It srikes me that this is freedom of speech. If someone comes to you for advice, you should be able to give them any advice you want. If someone's paying you to give out certain advice, as long as it's understood that that's what's going on, which it should be for "featured" links, I don't see why that should be illegal. And if it is illegal, don't give anyone advice when there are brand names involved.
-Phat Tony
Yes!
I was just sitting around thinking "the world seems so fair and just, and people try so hard to do the right thing, it's really getting me depressed. Boy I could use some SCO news, to restore my faith in people being jerks!"
You know what would really hit the spot right now? A story about both SCO and a DDOS attack. Now that would hit the spot. That's what I need.
This story seemed fine for slashdot, but in general, I don't think lack of news on a topic is a good reason to post something.
This is a really impotant issue. I used to go to the University of Chicago, and a friend there who worked in the library (Regenstein) told be they think that as much as 5% of the collection cold be missing due to mis-shelving. Millions of dollars worth of books. They try to audit the shelves one by one to find these, but it takes them something like 20 years to do a full circuit on the book-by-book auditing at the rate they go. At least that's what he told me, don't know if it's true.
What I do know is true is a guy in my dorm who was a complete asshole who used to have a job at the library reshelving books, and every day he'd go in, check out his cart of books to return, and ditch all of them in any space he could find on the nearest shelves, and leave. He got paid for 2 hours of reshelving a day for this. All those books will be lost for up to twenty years. They'll show that they're in, until someone goes to try to find one. He single handedly lost thousands of books from the collection. -Phat Tony
"The GNP reflects the product as the US as a whole, not what the goverment produces. The goverment itself is responsable for printing and mantaining the money supply but does that not mean that they should simple be able to barrow on what is my work because they feel it will be in my best intrest without asking."
This has to do with total government expenditure. I strongly agree that the government shouldn't be able to go around spending (wasting) all this money that we, the people, are generating- but the sad fact of the matter is that they can. They can come take our money away via taxes, and they can spend all they want to, regardless of whether they have it or not. But the issue of the government's right or ability to tax and spend has no bearing on what is a realistic way to view the deficit.
"While this is a republic, and many socialiast aspects of other govements have taken a hold here it does not follow that they govement should be allowed to use the GNP, a product of it's citizans work -- not it's work, as a credit rateing as to what it should be allowed to barrow on."
They don't use GNP as a "credit rating" for what they're "allowed to spend." They can spend all they want to, and run deficits as high as they want, in nominal dollars or percent of GDP. They don't need a credit rating to spend. When a bill for another $100 billion in pork-barrel spending comes before congress, they don't say "gee, the debt's $7 trillion dollars, but that's only 66% of GDP, let's add on some more." They just do it. But again, what you're saying has no bearing on what is a good way to view the budget situation. Are you saying that our deficit of $7 trillion would be a problem of the same magnitude if it were assumed by a country like Angola, with a GDP of $7 billion instead of our $10 trillion? Do you really believe that the debt assumed in the Civil War, or WWII, was minor and nothing to worry about, while the current budget crisis is 1,000 times worse? These are implied by your assertion that it's the absolute magnitude of the deficit rather than the deficit relative to GDP that counts. They are not correct.
Another way to look at this is that even with the increased spending, there would still be a budget surplus if the economy had proceeded on the course it was on from 1992 - 2000. So the whole government fiscal picture relies heavily on GDP. I don't like it anymore than you do, but GDP is the pool of money the government draws upon to pay their debts.
"And why is that? Well it's because the intrest rate and debt have been spireling out of control for years now. Imageing what our GNP would be like if we did not have to be constanly paying intrest on what our goverment was doing. What if our goverment was able to balance it's books."
The interest rate has been near an all-time-low for about 2 years now, so I don't think it's been "spireling [sic] out of control" at all. And GNP (or GDP) probably wouldn't be any higher simply by alleviating debt. But the point that less of our earned money would go towards paying interest on the debt is quite true. I'm all for a balanced budget. I just don't see that this has any relevance to the issue of how the deficit should be viewed: in absolute dollars, or relative to GDP.
This chart doesn't give a realistic picture. What matters more than the total $ value of the debt/surplus is the debt/surplus as a percentage of GDP. You can find such a thing here. (warning! PDF)
The basic point is that, yes, the budget looks bad, but not orders of magnitude worse than ever before, as it appears in the graph linked by the parent post. That's statistics lying for you. In fact, the current budget deficit is only about 2/3 as bad as it was in 1983. Although it is still getting worse now, and that was the trough in '83.
For a rudimentary comparison to explain why this matters: if you borrow $10,000, that might be a big debt to take on if you only make $18,000 a year, but if you make $100,000 a year, it's no big deal. How much debt you should assume is relative to your income, or at least your expected income.
Nevermind. I used the GIMP.
Thanks, though.
-Phat Tony
That's ridiculous. I doubt even a quarter of the people reading Slahdot even know who Steven Wright is, and even less have ever heard that particular joke before, and even less would be able to attribute it to him.
The joke wouldn't have lost anything if he'd put Steven Wright's name in the posting. As it is, most people will think it's him being funny when it's stolen from a stand-up commedian. Thinking that plaigarism's only wrong on a school paper is fundamentally wrong-headed. If anything, I think it's more important to give people credit out in the real world, where the potential audience is bigger than just a teacher.
Also, I can't beleive I was moderated "Off Topic" for sighting the source of a quote someone else posted. I hope that gets meta-moderated.
Just for the heck of making a huge image, I once scanned a palm leaf on my flatbed. It was big, so I scanned it in two sections and stitched it.
My scanner scans at 2400 x 2400 dpi without interpolation, and it's 8.5" x 11.75", yielding two uncropped images, each at 20,400 pixels x 28,200. Cropped, my final image was about 30,000 * 28,000. OK, only
Additionally, I would like to argue with him about the potential of film to match this. I scan 35mm slides shot on films like Ektachrome 100. It's worth scanning a good sharp image on this film at 2400 ppi. The image size on 35 mm film is 24 x 36 mm, or about 1 1/3 square inches, yielding about 7.6 MegaPixels.
100 speed films are commonly available in 8 x 10 size, which should yield 460 megapixels.
But wait! We can go higher than this. Konica Impressa 50 should be much finer grained than this. There's a reason drum scanners go up to 4,000 x 4,000 ppi- to suck the resolution out of really fine-grained films. So an 8 x 10 scanned at 4,000 x 4,000 ppi can yield 1.28 GigaPixels- more than this image. And that's not even getting very exotic yet.
Polariod used to make a viewcamera that took 16" x 20" negatives. If you special order uncut sheet film from Kodax or Konica and cut your own 16 * 20 negatives, this could take you into the 5 GigaPixel range. The two issues that aren't clear here are 1. if any lenses have high-enough resolving power to deal with this, and 2. how the hell you scan it. Scanning it probably will boil down to cutting it, scanning it, and re-stitching it on the computer. Still, the image would have been captured all at once, probably in a lot less than 13 minutes depending on the maximum aperture of your lens.
In terms of affordability and portability, the digitals are really nice, and it's mostly the way I've gone. I still shoot 4 * 5 black and white negatives sometimes, and they make great 16" x 20" prints, but that's mostly for the fun of it. Digital panoramas are great. I'll not deny that digital is where the future is.
Oh, and about printing, per the question on his site. For the highest quality image per inch, hire someone with a Durst Lambda 130. It can make continuous photographic prints up to 60" x 164' (yes, that's feet) in a resolution equivalent to 4,000 x 4,000 dpi in inkjet terms, and continuous tone.
A ColorSpan Displaymaker Mach12 can get you up to 72" wide by effectively unlimited length, and it prints with a 12-color ink set. Not as high quality as the Lambda per square inch, but impressive.
And if what you really want is just plain big, HP DesignJets go up to 96" wide now. The quality's still good.
Where do you find people with these kinds of machines? Here are a couple of suggestions, but there are lots more: Harvest Productions or Design Image.
Everything on the Mac seems to use the Quicktime API's for its image handeling, and like Photoshop, it caps pictures to 30,000 pixels sqaure. Does anyone know of any image viewer for Mac that doesn't?
Here I am, with "The Graphic Arts Machine" on my desk, and I can't view a JPEG. OK, ok, it's sort of a big JPEG, but still.
Thanks for any useful sugestions,
Phat Tony.
Stolen from Steven Wright! Please credit sources.
-Phat Tony.
I agree with the other posters here- who cares about this PC BS about terminology.
What I want to see banned is the use of the IDE chain's terribly discriminatory master/slave relationship between drives!
This travesty has gone on long enough! One drive gets control of the IDE chain, and the other one's just supposed to put up with being secondary all the time, constantly submitting to the control of some dominant, "Master" drive?
There's not even any objective basis for determining who's to be the "Master" and who's to be in the inferior "Slave" roll. It's not necessarily the newer, larger, faster, or more reliable drive that is "Master." There is no objective basis whatsoever that is standardly applied- this subjugation is forced upon the poor "slaves" arbitrarily, through no fault of their own. Who can walk around this great world of hours and hold their head high with this travesty in our midst! How can anyone allowing a drive to work for them all day under these slave-like conditions, in a hot, cramped, stuffy computer case, no less, and call themselves a moral being.
I'd like to see all nations sign international resolutions mandating changing to more egalatarian, SCSI-based systems that don't force this sort of subserviance on any computer part. I'm sure my fellow geeks will stand strong with me in a new solidarity movement to ban this abonimable practice! Be strong, and we shall prevail!
Thank you,
Phat Tony.
eMacs, which include a Sony 17" totally flat 1280 * 1024 monitor built in that runs $250 seperately, start at $799. And that comes with a Combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW a 32 MB ATI Radeon 7500, Firewire ports, a large included suite of software, and many other things that would be expensive add-ons for the $300 Lindows machines.
Of course, if you don't want the better OS, optical drive, included monitor, fast graphics processor, connectivity, etc, then the Mac's a bad deal. Apple's never gone for the low-end market, and the $300 Lindows Microtel machine is low-end. Add on the extra stuff the Mac comes with, even using price-watch prices, and you quickly approach the price of the Mac, and that's for a cobbled together system of third party stuff vs. an engineered, out-of-the-box machine with the best relaibaility record and customer service of any computer manufacturer. (According to Consumer reports, for several years in a row.)
Don't try to make it sound like you're in for $1800 to get a comparable mac, and don't pretend that because lower-end macs come with monitors, that somehow professional Macs are the real alternative to cheap PC's. My guess is that most buyers do end up using a monitor anyway. Get whatever system best suits your needs, and Macs don't come without lots of extras. I haven't seen any computers with similiar extras for much less though.
Goodness, I don't even know where to start responding to this.
I guess I'll try to take things in order.
1. The idea that CEO's of well-performing companies are overpaid, specifically, Michael Eisner.
Disney's value is about $60 billion according to Yahoo finance, and they reported $1.3 billion in profit last year. So Eisner's in charge, he makes all the big decisions or decides who does, he guides the ship, and he gets about 50% of profits, at least for one year. A lot of companies pay a lot more than that to whoever's in charge, for example, a lot of small companies that pay 100% of profits to the owner. So they scale it down a lot for a big company. Still, Eisner's making a lot more and a much larger percent of profits than most comparable big-wigs, so maybe he is overpaid. But how can we tell?
Is he worth 50%? Well, look at all the huge companies that don't do so well. I mean, Disney's making a lot of money. But Time Warner, which made 1.8 billion dollars profit in 2000, lost $54 billion last year. So that's what can happen with the wrong management. Disney's board of directors probably took into account the possibility of Eisner leaving Disney, what some other companies might offer him in compensation, and how they thought it would impact the company to hire their next best choice for CEO, as compared to retaining Eisner. If they thought it was reasonably likely that maintaining Eisner would bring in at least $700 million more than their next best option, and reasonably likely Eisner might leave if they didn't pay him that, then the number looks like a reasonable choice.
Now, I would tend to agree with you, not being privileged to all the information the Board of Directors of Disney have access to, that this still seems like a big number. But then, we're looking at the worst case: the most highly paid CEO in the world. And we're looking at an anomalous year. Many CEO's don't have very stable income (not that they're going to run out of money or anything, it just has a high variance), and I'm sure Eisner's average compensation over his tenure as CEO is really way below $700 million/year. But I think it's conceivable that this isn't over compensation, and that a lot of CEO's with incomes that may sound awfully big aren't being paid out of line with what they're worth to the best of the board's ability to judge.
That's all about whether it's worth it or not to Disney. There's also another issue, which I think is really none-of-our business because it's their company, but is an interesting thing to speculate on: is it good for society?
I'm not going to take this on for the Disney case, because it's too hard to argue about what the value to society is of producing a good movie. But take someone like Rockefeller. When he entered the oil industry in the early 1860's, when oil was still primarily used to make kerosene for heating and illumination, the availability and quality of kerosene were terrible, the prices were high, and many people couldn't afford the product at all due to it's high cost or low quality. The same went later for gas for cars. But when Rockefeller entered these markets, he quickly came to dominate through introducing dozens of innovations, and reliably providing a product of superior quality for lower prices. But soon the competition started to close in, and while availability and quality continued to rise, and prices continued to fall, new national corporations that primarily copied his innovative methods began to gobble national market share, so that from 1898 to 1906, Standard Oil's market share fell from 34% to 11%. It was even lower when the government first initiated anti-trust in 1908. So who won here? Rockefeller's innovations reformed an entire industry, and the benefits this created throughout society are immeasurable- better lighting, heating, and transportation. Better safety. Better availability of the product. And prices dropped steadily from his entry until anti-trust in 1908. He only gathered a tiny portion of the eco