it seems like this part of the patent application would be as much a target for obfuscation as everything else. I'm less worried about obfuscation and more worried about companies that never had and never will have an operational product getting patent royalties on an "idea" that they wouldn't be able to develop. Requiring a working model would fix that problem. It would also help limit the scope of the patent. If the working model can't make coffee, then you can't sue an automated coffee maker for infringing your patent on boiling water and adding a mix of some sort. If the model can make tea, you could still sue an automatic tea maker. That wouldn't fix the patent system, but the resulting system would be better than the one that we have now.
The original reason why the patent office stopped requiring working models was that they were getting too many. Is that really a problem in software? US$5 will buy years of archived storage for a gigabyte. Most source code is going to be much smaller.
But that self-selected group of subscribers is probably not statistically representative of the broader viewing public. I'm not sure that that's true. According to http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623007 -- 12% of households have a DVR. Sure, there's skew there, but if anything, it's a good skew. DVR owners:
Have enough money to afford a luxury like a DVR.
Actually purchase said luxury.
Isn't that the advertiser friendly demographic? Has money and wants to spend it on the latest labor saving toys?
Nielsen has the reverse skew. It requires people to be willing to accept the inconvenience of an outside service that brings them no individual benefit. This skews *away* from the advertiser friendly demographic of people willing to spend money to reduce time wasted. Also, Nielsen gets confused by technology. If you record a show to watch later, that's more work to count. By contrast, TiVo is the technology; what they count is the use of the technology.
Further, TiVo collects data that isn't in the plain vanilla Nielsens. For example, do you fast forward the commercial? The Nielsen equivalent is getting up and going to the bathroom. They can only track that by survey. People lie to surveys (I watch all the commercials during my favorite show) or simply do not bother to fill them out correctly (aren't you supposed to mark the bathroom break? I can't find the pen; I'll get it later).
What do you think would happen if you used Tivo and your viewing habits were included in the data? Maybe they'll show more of the stuff that I actually watch. I want people to have the aggregate data. The only problem that I have with TiVo selling aggregate data is that I might get more benefit from it if they gave it away. If the GP doesn't want advertisers to know what shows actually get watched, fine; the GP can get stuck watching what I like.
Now, if they were selling my individual data, that would tick me off.
$3 million per year comes out to be $15,000 per employee/year. That's a bit steep. Google is paying $600 million for the data center, including property. Annualized (estimating the annual rent/lease as 10% of the price to sell), that comes out to about $60 million a year. $3 million of that is 5%. A 5% tax rate does not sound that extreme. Property taxes usually start closer to 10%.
Now, you could wonder why facilities cost $300,000 per employee per year, but they are already saying that they think that that's a good deal. Presumably this is because Google is heavily automated, so each employee covers a lot of ground. Note that Google has 7942 employees and $6 billion in revenues in 2005 (note: I think that's 2007 employees, presumably the number was lower in 2005). That's about $750,000 in revenue per employee. That's a tax rate of 2%...
A final point is that data centers support *remote* operations. As such, it's not just the local 200 employees. It's also the thousands of employees at headquarters who are making revenue from the facilities there.
If only we had some way to signal the computer about the form of text, without cluttering up the reader's content. Yeah, but if we had that, people would just abuse it to draw traffic to their sites, so we'd get a new kind of search engine. The new kind of search engine would figure that people want to find search terms where the content matches the search terms rather than where the meta-information matches the search terms. This new type of search engine would give more credit to headings (which are bigger and easier to read). Further, it might lower pages in its search rankings if the meta-information does not match the content. The search company could also give extra points for having links to the page having text match the search keywords. Call it link scoring or pigeon ranking or something. Because the people who start the search engine would need to be kind of nerdy, they should name it after a really big number, e.g. infinity or Infiniti (misspellings are kewl).
Too bad Infiniti's already taken, so I guess we'll just have to stick with Google...
One of these days she'll figure out how to lie to her bosses about how long it takes, I suppose. Better would be to truthfully represent how long it will take her and up her salary appropriately. Then pull a Travis McGee and retire for a while.
I find this particular transgression on Microsoft's part difficult to rationalize. Actually, it's relatively easy to rationalize this. What would be difficult would be rationalizing them suing BlueJ for violating this patent.
Since the patent system is broken, the only way to defend yourself against patent trolls is to patent *everything* that you use. Why? Because if you don't someone else could patent BlueJ's stuff and sue *you* for violating their patent. Sure, eventually you might be able to overturn this. However, in the meantime, you have to spend millions on legal fees (standard cost to reverse a patent after it has been granted).
The fact that Microsoft stole this from BlueJ makes them even more vulnerable than normal: "Your honor, we did not steal this from NTP; we stole it from BlueJ. As such, we feel that NTP has no standing to bring this suit and move for dismissal."
NTP: "We have the patent!"
Judge: "Motion denied."
"Our patent is earlier than theirs" is a much stronger argument and much more likely to lead to a dismissal of the patent suit than "we stole it from someone else who never patented it."
Someone will point out that publishing is also a valid way to establish prior art. However, a patent is safer and easier. It avoids any argument about the validity of the publication. Further, legal would have already done the patent search to establish that it doesn't violate existing patents. As such, the patent application is dead simple to file. Publication in a respected journal would require them to actually write something worth publishing in a respected journal. Finally, patent applications come with a clear and immediate date. It might take months to appear in a journal. Meanwhile, someone else could file a patent application that will show an earlier date than does the published journal.
Of course, the real test of this would be if we started a public domain registry that could be used in the same way as a patent application. The Ben Franklins of the world could list their stoves in it and prevent others from filing subsequent patent applications. Since the public domain registry would be managed by the government, it would be a peer with a patent application. Thus, there would be no argument about validity or effective date; both would be established by the registry. Would Microsoft use this? If not, my rationalization falls down...
There is an economic benefit in having a megawatt of electricity generated. So each power company should be given a subsidy for putting that megawatt into the grid. There already is. It's called your electric bill. That's the part of the system that generally works. Adding a pollution tax that truly covered the costs of the externalities is a fine idea. The problem is that such taxes tend to be regressive (the poor and middle class pay more as a percentage of their income). Rather than subsidizing electricity generation to counteract this, wouldn't it make more sense to subsidize individuals in a way that helps the poor more than the middle class more than the well to do? E.g. increase the base tax deduction and make it cover social security taxes as well.
Taxing one kind of energy and subsidizing another adds an externality of its own. You are now encouraging energy consumption (by keeping it artificially cheap). The world would be better off if people found ways to use less energy. For example, why do people drive twenty or thirty miles to work? Why not simply work closer to home? This was the great weakness of the fuel economy standards. Instead of reducing fuel use, they correlated with an increase in distance traveled.
A system like yours that uses a pollution tax to subsidize less polluting alternatives has just as much of an externality effect as one that ignores pollution. Yes, it shifts generation from heavy polluters to lighter polluters. However, it doesn't reduce pollution as much as a system that does not have the subsidy. Without the subsidy, there would be strictly less electrical generation. There are no non-polluting solutions, just lower impact solutions. For example, hydropower interferes with aquatic migration patterns. Solar panels are made of poisonous materials. Windmills kill birds.
The problem is that employees are not responsible for the companies actions. Instead, corporations are now "people" who are responsible for the actions that the employees take. There's an obvious disconnect there; the "person" responsible is not the person actually doing the crime. That has nothing to do with being a corporation. That's just as true of a sole proprietorship or a partnership. I.e. take away the "personhood" of the corporation and instead of the corporation being responsible for the employees behavior, the owners would be. It's basic tort law, respondeat superior: the supervisor is responsible for the actions of the employee (and this works transitively up to the top). A corporation's personhood makes responsibility stop with the corporation. Otherwise, responsibility would go to the shareholders.
Respondeat superior is not absolute. If you commit a criminal act (e.g. murder), you are *both* responsible. In other words, if the Godfather tells you to whack someone and you do, then both you and he are subject to criminal prosecution.
A lot of the complaints against corporations are not criminal but civil. Microsoft was not "convicted of criminal restraint of trade" as you put it. It was found civilly liable for antitrust violations.
Europe fined Microsoft a half million euros for not unbundling their media player from the OS. Should they have put Bill Gates in jail? Instead? Or in addition to the fine? Should they have sued Gates instead of Microsoft? What if they did so right after he donated his stock to his foundation. Should they take the money back from the charity? Since he's not a European citizen, should the US arrest him and send him to Europe? What if he never set foot in Europe? Should he still be subject to European law?
The registered voters would then "pay" the party they want to vote for with this currency. The parties would then take their votes, and "bid" on the election. The one who can "pay" the most voting certificates, wins. And then the richer party (i.e. the Republicans) would always win. All they'd have to do is pay people for their votes. Since 50% of eligible voters don't vote anyway, they'd probably be happy to sell their vote certificate (rather than throw it away). Heck, what if they do throw it away? Homeless people would go dumpster diving and get certificates to sell.
This is why voting is anonymous, so people can't sell their votes this way. Adding a certificate that voters turn into a party rather than a vote official is asking for vote buying.
I also think that you are underestimating the costs of fraud in the monetary system. I'm not so sure that the monetary system is more secure than the current voting system. The difference is that counterfeit money is a continual cost, where vote fraud only shows up every six months (and only gets real traction every four years when a President is selected). Further, a vote is a mostly binary decision. Note that the margin of victory for the 2000 President came down to around a thousand votes in Florida. Counterfeit money doesn't have that much impact. It's not like you counterfeit $20,000 of twenties and win a billion dollars. If you counterfeit $20,000, you get $20,000. Fraudulently hide a thousand votes in Florida in 2000 and you win the election.
Your analysis would be far better spent on figuring out how to make votes less binary. For example, what if we replaced the single Presidency with a dual Presidency, where either President could issue vetoes? What if we aggregated across states rather than only voting within them (straight popular vote)? What if we switched to a Prime Ministry (essentially the Speaker of the House would be President). What if we had proportional voting (where if 1% of the population voted Libertarian, 1% of the Congressional seats would be filled by Libertarians)? What if we had true democracy rather than a republic? Those kind of proposals reduce the *impact* of individual votes. As such, they would make the system more like a network, where we simply don't care that some packets don't get through.
The truth is that mechanically counted paper ballots (where the voter gets to run the ballot through the counter before putting it in a secure box) are about as secure as any system possibly could be. That's why they aren't used. They require a black hat to compromise the poll workers. Machines only require hardware compromise, which is much easier.
Microsoft's (international) revenues are less than a third of a percent of US GDP. Check, that's true.
Adding Microsoft's revenues to those of two other companies can total *almost* one percent of GDP. Check, I can believe that too. Not sure why you picked 3M and P&G -- too lazy to search for a relationship. Therefore I'm simply going to assume that you picked two other decent sized but not huge companies (Microsoft is only 48th on the Fortune 500; Exxon Mobil is first with profits of about $36 billion -- i.e. almost the size of Microsoft's revenues; at #13, Berkshire Hathaway is more than twice as big as Microsoft). Combined, your three companies are smaller than Citigroup (8th on the Fortune 500). Not sure what your point was. Why combine those three companies? Is there some reason that breaking up the Microsoft monopoly would automatically affect the other two?
If Microsoft's revenues went to zero, it would significantly harm the US economy. Basis? I don't believe that. Consider that defense use to make up about 6% (6.2% in 1986) of US GDP. It dropped from 4.8% to 3.7% between 1992 and 1995. In general, those were considered to be good economic years. From 1995 to 1999, it dropped a further.7% to 3%. Yet somehow, despite this, those were considered to be great economic years. The 1992-5 era is especially interesting, as spending dropped from 297 billion to 259 billion. That's about 38 billion dollars. I.e. roughly the same magnitude as Microsoft (albeit in more valuable 90s dollars rather than the relatively depreciated 2005 dollars). In other words, the defense shrinkage from 1992 to 1995 was actually larger in magnitude than Microsoft's revenues. Yet somehow the economy not only survived but prospered.
Of the twenty-nine agencies and departments listed in the 2005 federal budget, thirteen are larger than Microsoft's revenues.
The green line represents marginal revenue. The red line represents consumer demand. The blue line represents marginal cost of supply. Note that marginal revenue is positive for at least part of the distance between the monopoly quantity produced and the competitive price. Also note the yellow region. This is the area where the economy *gains* as a result of switching from a monopoly to a competitive market. It comprises the benefits of increased production minus the costs. The blue rectangle (i.e. the part above the Pc line) is gain shifted from producer (Microsoft) to consumers.
To reiterate:
1. Microsoft is not really that big a part of the US economy in terms of revenue. 2. Even if it were, no on is seriously argui
They should make a movie about his career delivering pizzas (which basically ends in the opening of the book). I.e. the Snow Crash plot might have trouble in translation. However, the Snow Crash setting would be incredible.
Ok, I admit it. I just want a chance to win the Deliverator's car.
My sweet spot would be 1.5 miles from work, a little over half an hour's walk. The ideal would be to live uphill from work. That way, I have an easy down hill walk to work. The uphill part would be on the homeward leg, when I'm motivated and not worried about coworkers holding their noses to avoid smelling my sweat.
In Massachusetts (which I would suspect is maybe second only to California in stuff like this), total tax is only about 40 cents per gallon, or approximately 15% of the price. You would suspect incorrectly. A quick google finds http://www.massachusettsgasprices.com/tax_info.asp x which says that the average gas tax is 62 cents per gallon. I.e., at 41.9 cents per gallon (23.5 cents from the state, 18.4 federal), Massachusetts actually has a below average gas tax.
It's also worth noting that while 40 cents may be 15% of the price *now*, it would have been much more of the price in 1998. 35%? Some states were probably around 50% in 1998.
And how does one align equations properly without tables? Or include a matrix? How does one align equations properly with a table? Given an example of the effect that you want, someone can probably suggest a superior alternative. Possible example: http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/superscri pts.html
By matrix, do you mean something like
816 357 492
? Hmm...I see rows and columns. Since this is data that is *supposed* to be tabular, you would use a table for semantic reasons. By contrast, in a three column layout with a header and a footer, the data is not organized semantically. If I move the data from the header into the left column and move the data from the footer into the right column, it still makes sense. There is no characteristic of the data that makes the header inherently need to appear above the content and the footer below.
FLOSS is like the olden days community barn raisings. I think that this analogy still misses it. With a barn raising by twenty people, at the end, just one family has the barn. No one else uses that barn.
The problem with all these analogies is that software is not analogous to physical things. Software is more analogous to the design of the barn. If I decide that it would make more sense to have a barn with two doors rather than one door, it doesn't hurt me in any way for every other barn to have two doors.
Open source relies on the following:
1. Software is near free to duplicate but comparatively expensive to design.
2. Software is individual. My current needs are different than your current needs. Thus, even with the same base, both of us need to do additional work.
3. Needs change. Thus, the needs that I have tomorrow may match the needs that you have today. Therefore, giving you my work today may save me work tomorrow.
4. Bugs happen. If you find a bug and fix it for me, that saves me work. This is especially true of security bugs.
Where open source falls down (relative to closed source) is that it lacks a good way for non-programmers to pool resources in large groups. Look at MS Windows XP (WinXP) for example. WinXP apparently costs about $25 per user to develop (using an average cost of $50 per user and a profit margin of 50%). Assuming 400,000,000 users, that's $10 billion to develop WinXP (given Win2000 and Win98SE). Using a cost per developer of $200,000 per year, that's 50,000 developer years.
Open source does well in areas where the software is used by technical people. For example, traditionally (albeit increasingly less so), web servers have been operated by professionals. As a result, it has made sense for those professionals to use a web server that they could modify (Apache). Office suites have traditionally been used by non-technical people. As such, most office suites do not allow modification, only extension (through macros and more modernly, VBScript).
Barn raisings worked because in small communities, it's possible to get everyone to work together (people who don't go to raise your barn don't get your help with their barn). However, that's a bad model for trying to convince a business. It lacks guarantees (me doing work for you today does not bind you to do work for me tomorrow). To convince a profit minded boss, you have to demonstrate that open source reduces costs.
More to the point, there is no need to protect a person from his own stupidity. If a person is so stupid that he cannot understand simple instructions, then his vote would likely not have been an informed vote: no vote is certainly better than an idiotic vote. You're missing the problem. Consider two groups of people: idiots and non-idiots..5% are idiots; 99.5% are non-idiots (all numbers made up). In both groups, 48.2% wanted Gore and 47.8% wanted Bush. However, idiots wanting to vote for Gore actually picked Buchanan. Net result, Gore lost.241% off his total, leaving 47.79%. Bush wins.
The problem wasn't that idiots couldn't figure out how to vote. That would have been fine. It's that Bush's idiots had less trouble voting than Gore's idiots. Either way of reading the ballot had Bush first. Misreading the ballot had Gore second (his slot was actually third). Therefore, Bush votes who misread the ballot voted for Bush while Gore voters who misread the ballot voted for Gore.
The hanging chad issue is strictly smokescreen. The real issues were the people who voted for Buchanan while intending to vote for Gore and the people who voted for both Buchanan and Gore (because they noticed their mistakes half way through).
If we had thrown out all the votes cast by idiots, Gore would have beaten Bush in Florida. If we had counted all votes intended for Gore, Gore would have beaten Bush. How Bush won Florida was through a misdesigned system that hampered Gore while not hampering Bush. The ironic thing is that those areas that were using the flawed system were run by Democrats. If they had created a readable voting form, their candidate would have won.
Of all the people with whom Microsoft has dealt, they did well by Kildall. Since their software ran on CP/M, they kept sending him customers.
IBM wanted software written to work with their new PC. A high ranking executive knew Gates' mom (Mary Gates). IBM approached Microsoft and asked for some help. As part of that talk, Microsoft told them that they were using CP/M as their OS and sent IBM to Kildall. Kildall almost screwed Microsoft here. IBM and Microsoft had a deal, which almost failed because of Kildall's failure to nail down a deal. Microsoft saved the deal by delivering a version of QDOS (which Patterson originally developed because Kildall didn't want to port CP/M to the 8088 chip). Why did they need a CP/M clone? Because their software ran on CP/M.
Microsoft handed Kildall the biggest software deal ever, and he dropped it on the floor. Note that this is discussed in your wiki link. Check out the "Oral History" of Gordon Eubanks.
Anytime Microsoft abuses its monopoly power, remember this. It's all Kildall's fault. Without him, Microsoft would never have entered the OS business. They would have stayed a compiler company and instead of using their PC OS (sales via IBM) to fund the development of Windows and Office, they would have had to have done so with just compiler sales.
Microsoft had two major events that led to the current situation:
1. Being forced to enter the OS market. 2. Betting the farm on the Windows version of Office.
Note that without the OS business, they might not have been in a financial position to develop Windows or Office. Businesses around the world might be using Word Perfect and 1-2-3 as the standards still.
The manager should not be creating the schedule. The manager should be integrating the information from the various dependencies into one. Sure, if you are foolish enough to have the manager write the schedule, a more technical manager will write a better schedule than a less technical manager. However, that's like saying that if you're going to step on the pointy end of a nail, it's better if it's clean. A better solution is to have employees set their own schedules; the manager then aggregates this information and communicates it to other interested parties.
I think that this goes to the heart of the problem. People don't have good definition of the roles of manager and engineer. Part of this is the idea that a manager is senior to an engineer. While this may be true in individual cases, this should not be seen as true in general. In programming, there is no way that every manager is going to have strictly greater domain knowledge than every person on the team. If the manager does, then that means that either the team is being used inefficiently (e.g. everyone is doing ops rather than programming) or the team is new (and one might argue that hiring an entirely new team is itself inefficient).
Programming isn't like McDonald's. On a development team, you don't have eight interchangeable cashiers and a manager who used to be a cashier. Instead, you have eight different people with different experience. The person who writes your web content (assuming a.com) will not have the same ability with databases as the DB expert. You say you want your team to only write web content? OK, does each person write their own version of your front page? Or does one person write the front page, another handles registration and login, etc.
Programmers should be broadcasting their tech decisions *up* rather than having tech decisions pushed down. The "downward" decisions should be things like, given the choice of getting A in two months or B in two months, I want B. Not things like, do A in one month and then B in one month because I want both in two months.
I would agree that the best of both worlds is a manager who has the technical know how to help employees explore technical options. However, it is important not to accept substandard management just because the "manager" is technically sound. In general, the thing to do with good engineers is not to make them managers but to promote them as engineers. Make them team leads or promote them off the team and have them report to more senior managers (i.e. managers who have managers report to them). The engineer who should be moved into the management track is rare, as many of the management skills are the antithesis of the desired engineering skill.
Engineer:
1. Needs to focus on one thing; completely understand it and solve it. 2. Avoids meetings, as that's time away from doing real work. 3. Should be machine oriented such that the tech works.
Manager:
1. Has to juggle multiple priorities and lacks the time to focus on one. 2. Uses meetings to aggregate and disseminate information. 3. Needs to be people oriented, so as to get results from the team, other teams, and upward management.
While not impossible, it's rare to be good with both people and tech. The manager needs to be good with people. Tech is gravy if you can get it but should not be a blocker if not.
"any automatic identification using this system is not somehow considered 100% reliable in court."
They already have systems like this for fingerprints: local police send fingerprints to the FBI; the FBI puts them in computer; computer spits out a possible match or matches; a real person then looks at the submitted fingerprint and the stored fingerprint and makes a decision. If it goes to court, a real person who is locally available will testify as to the match (well first, you can see both have a tented arch here...).
It's also worth noting that this is probably aimed more at finding suspects than at convictions. I.e. a match starts an investigation. If you're already investigating someone, you don't need to compare security photos to their license photo--you can just compare to the actual person. I would be very surprised to see the results of this used in court.
"The Firebird guys would have been better off renaming their project,"
How so? I doubt that/. would have posted this story if it weren't for the name confusion. I certainly wouldn't have know what Firebird was if not for Mozilla.
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The original reason why the patent office stopped requiring working models was that they were getting too many. Is that really a problem in software? US$5 will buy years of archived storage for a gigabyte. Most source code is going to be much smaller.
- Have enough money to afford a luxury like a DVR.
- Actually purchase said luxury.
Isn't that the advertiser friendly demographic? Has money and wants to spend it on the latest labor saving toys?Nielsen has the reverse skew. It requires people to be willing to accept the inconvenience of an outside service that brings them no individual benefit. This skews *away* from the advertiser friendly demographic of people willing to spend money to reduce time wasted. Also, Nielsen gets confused by technology. If you record a show to watch later, that's more work to count. By contrast, TiVo is the technology; what they count is the use of the technology.
Further, TiVo collects data that isn't in the plain vanilla Nielsens. For example, do you fast forward the commercial? The Nielsen equivalent is getting up and going to the bathroom. They can only track that by survey. People lie to surveys (I watch all the commercials during my favorite show) or simply do not bother to fill them out correctly (aren't you supposed to mark the bathroom break? I can't find the pen; I'll get it later).
Now, if they were selling my individual data, that would tick me off.
Now, you could wonder why facilities cost $300,000 per employee per year, but they are already saying that they think that that's a good deal. Presumably this is because Google is heavily automated, so each employee covers a lot of ground. Note that Google has 7942 employees and $6 billion in revenues in 2005 (note: I think that's 2007 employees, presumably the number was lower in 2005). That's about $750,000 in revenue per employee. That's a tax rate of 2%...
A final point is that data centers support *remote* operations. As such, it's not just the local 200 employees. It's also the thousands of employees at headquarters who are making revenue from the facilities there.
Too bad Infiniti's already taken, so I guess we'll just have to stick with Google...
Since the patent system is broken, the only way to defend yourself against patent trolls is to patent *everything* that you use. Why? Because if you don't someone else could patent BlueJ's stuff and sue *you* for violating their patent. Sure, eventually you might be able to overturn this. However, in the meantime, you have to spend millions on legal fees (standard cost to reverse a patent after it has been granted).
The fact that Microsoft stole this from BlueJ makes them even more vulnerable than normal: "Your honor, we did not steal this from NTP; we stole it from BlueJ. As such, we feel that NTP has no standing to bring this suit and move for dismissal."
NTP: "We have the patent!"
Judge: "Motion denied."
"Our patent is earlier than theirs" is a much stronger argument and much more likely to lead to a dismissal of the patent suit than "we stole it from someone else who never patented it."
Someone will point out that publishing is also a valid way to establish prior art. However, a patent is safer and easier. It avoids any argument about the validity of the publication. Further, legal would have already done the patent search to establish that it doesn't violate existing patents. As such, the patent application is dead simple to file. Publication in a respected journal would require them to actually write something worth publishing in a respected journal. Finally, patent applications come with a clear and immediate date. It might take months to appear in a journal. Meanwhile, someone else could file a patent application that will show an earlier date than does the published journal.
Of course, the real test of this would be if we started a public domain registry that could be used in the same way as a patent application. The Ben Franklins of the world could list their stoves in it and prevent others from filing subsequent patent applications. Since the public domain registry would be managed by the government, it would be a peer with a patent application. Thus, there would be no argument about validity or effective date; both would be established by the registry. Would Microsoft use this? If not, my rationalization falls down...
Taxing one kind of energy and subsidizing another adds an externality of its own. You are now encouraging energy consumption (by keeping it artificially cheap). The world would be better off if people found ways to use less energy. For example, why do people drive twenty or thirty miles to work? Why not simply work closer to home? This was the great weakness of the fuel economy standards. Instead of reducing fuel use, they correlated with an increase in distance traveled.
A system like yours that uses a pollution tax to subsidize less polluting alternatives has just as much of an externality effect as one that ignores pollution. Yes, it shifts generation from heavy polluters to lighter polluters. However, it doesn't reduce pollution as much as a system that does not have the subsidy. Without the subsidy, there would be strictly less electrical generation. There are no non-polluting solutions, just lower impact solutions. For example, hydropower interferes with aquatic migration patterns. Solar panels are made of poisonous materials. Windmills kill birds.
Respondeat superior is not absolute. If you commit a criminal act (e.g. murder), you are *both* responsible. In other words, if the Godfather tells you to whack someone and you do, then both you and he are subject to criminal prosecution.
Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were convicted. Criminal acts occurred.
A lot of the complaints against corporations are not criminal but civil. Microsoft was not "convicted of criminal restraint of trade" as you put it. It was found civilly liable for antitrust violations.
Europe fined Microsoft a half million euros for not unbundling their media player from the OS. Should they have put Bill Gates in jail? Instead? Or in addition to the fine? Should they have sued Gates instead of Microsoft? What if they did so right after he donated his stock to his foundation. Should they take the money back from the charity? Since he's not a European citizen, should the US arrest him and send him to Europe? What if he never set foot in Europe? Should he still be subject to European law?
This is why voting is anonymous, so people can't sell their votes this way. Adding a certificate that voters turn into a party rather than a vote official is asking for vote buying.
I also think that you are underestimating the costs of fraud in the monetary system. I'm not so sure that the monetary system is more secure than the current voting system. The difference is that counterfeit money is a continual cost, where vote fraud only shows up every six months (and only gets real traction every four years when a President is selected). Further, a vote is a mostly binary decision. Note that the margin of victory for the 2000 President came down to around a thousand votes in Florida. Counterfeit money doesn't have that much impact. It's not like you counterfeit $20,000 of twenties and win a billion dollars. If you counterfeit $20,000, you get $20,000. Fraudulently hide a thousand votes in Florida in 2000 and you win the election.
Your analysis would be far better spent on figuring out how to make votes less binary. For example, what if we replaced the single Presidency with a dual Presidency, where either President could issue vetoes? What if we aggregated across states rather than only voting within them (straight popular vote)? What if we switched to a Prime Ministry (essentially the Speaker of the House would be President). What if we had proportional voting (where if 1% of the population voted Libertarian, 1% of the Congressional seats would be filled by Libertarians)? What if we had true democracy rather than a republic? Those kind of proposals reduce the *impact* of individual votes. As such, they would make the system more like a network, where we simply don't care that some packets don't get through.
The truth is that mechanically counted paper ballots (where the voter gets to run the ballot through the counter before putting it in a secure box) are about as secure as any system possibly could be. That's why they aren't used. They require a black hat to compromise the poll workers. Machines only require hardware compromise, which is much easier.
Microsoft's (international) revenues are less than a third of a percent of US GDP. Check, that's true.
.7% to 3%. Yet somehow, despite this, those were considered to be great economic years. The 1992-5 era is especially interesting, as spending dropped from 297 billion to 259 billion. That's about 38 billion dollars. I.e. roughly the same magnitude as Microsoft (albeit in more valuable 90s dollars rather than the relatively depreciated 2005 dollars). In other words, the defense shrinkage from 1992 to 1995 was actually larger in magnitude than Microsoft's revenues. Yet somehow the economy not only survived but prospered.
Adding Microsoft's revenues to those of two other companies can total *almost* one percent of GDP. Check, I can believe that too. Not sure why you picked 3M and P&G -- too lazy to search for a relationship. Therefore I'm simply going to assume that you picked two other decent sized but not huge companies (Microsoft is only 48th on the Fortune 500; Exxon Mobil is first with profits of about $36 billion -- i.e. almost the size of Microsoft's revenues; at #13, Berkshire Hathaway is more than twice as big as Microsoft). Combined, your three companies are smaller than Citigroup (8th on the Fortune 500). Not sure what your point was. Why combine those three companies? Is there some reason that breaking up the Microsoft monopoly would automatically affect the other two?
See http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/ full_list/index.html for Fortune 500 data.
If Microsoft's revenues went to zero, it would significantly harm the US economy. Basis? I don't believe that. Consider that defense use to make up about 6% (6.2% in 1986) of US GDP. It dropped from 4.8% to 3.7% between 1992 and 1995. In general, those were considered to be good economic years. From 1995 to 1999, it dropped a further
Of the twenty-nine agencies and departments listed in the 2005 federal budget, thirteen are larger than Microsoft's revenues.
Defense % of GDP from http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative- size.php
Historical budget numbers from http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/ (in particular, http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/hi st.pdf ).
It's also worth noting that no one is talking about sending Microsoft's revenue to zero. In fact, because of the way monopolies work, the normal result would be to *increase* revenues while decreasing profits. A monopoly only produces up to the point where marginal revenue (from sales) exceeds marginal cost (of production). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly -- in particular, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e f/Monopoly-surpluses.svg/250px-Monopoly-surpluses. svg.png
The green line represents marginal revenue. The red line represents consumer demand. The blue line represents marginal cost of supply. Note that marginal revenue is positive for at least part of the distance between the monopoly quantity produced and the competitive price. Also note the yellow region. This is the area where the economy *gains* as a result of switching from a monopoly to a competitive market. It comprises the benefits of increased production minus the costs. The blue rectangle (i.e. the part above the Pc line) is gain shifted from producer (Microsoft) to consumers.
To reiterate:
1. Microsoft is not really that big a part of the US economy in terms of revenue.
2. Even if it were, no on is seriously argui
They should make a movie about his career delivering pizzas (which basically ends in the opening of the book). I.e. the Snow Crash plot might have trouble in translation. However, the Snow Crash setting would be incredible.
Ok, I admit it. I just want a chance to win the Deliverator's car.
Maybe Apple didn't apply. This isn't the best 100 companies. It's the best ranked 100 out of 446 choices. See http://money.cnn.com/.element/ssi/sections/mag/for tune/bestcompanies/2007/box_how.popup.html
n om-100best.php
Instructions for applying for next year at http://www.greatplacetowork.com/best/nominations/
I've resolved to eat more and exercise less.
I'm hoping to have the same success with these as with past resolutions. If so, I could lose twenty pounds, easy!
My sweet spot would be 1.5 miles from work, a little over half an hour's walk. The ideal would be to live uphill from work. That way, I have an easy down hill walk to work. The uphill part would be on the homeward leg, when I'm motivated and not worried about coworkers holding their noses to avoid smelling my sweat.
It's also worth noting that while 40 cents may be 15% of the price *now*, it would have been much more of the price in 1998. 35%? Some states were probably around 50% in 1998.
Gas tax rates: http://www.gaspricewatch.com/usgastaxes.asp
By matrix, do you mean something like
816
357
492
? Hmm...I see rows and columns. Since this is data that is *supposed* to be tabular, you would use a table for semantic reasons. By contrast, in a three column layout with a header and a footer, the data is not organized semantically. If I move the data from the header into the left column and move the data from the footer into the right column, it still makes sense. There is no characteristic of the data that makes the header inherently need to appear above the content and the footer below.
The problem with all these analogies is that software is not analogous to physical things. Software is more analogous to the design of the barn. If I decide that it would make more sense to have a barn with two doors rather than one door, it doesn't hurt me in any way for every other barn to have two doors.
Open source relies on the following:
1. Software is near free to duplicate but comparatively expensive to design.
2. Software is individual. My current needs are different than your current needs. Thus, even with the same base, both of us need to do additional work.
3. Needs change. Thus, the needs that I have tomorrow may match the needs that you have today. Therefore, giving you my work today may save me work tomorrow.
4. Bugs happen. If you find a bug and fix it for me, that saves me work. This is especially true of security bugs.
Where open source falls down (relative to closed source) is that it lacks a good way for non-programmers to pool resources in large groups. Look at MS Windows XP (WinXP) for example. WinXP apparently costs about $25 per user to develop (using an average cost of $50 per user and a profit margin of 50%). Assuming 400,000,000 users, that's $10 billion to develop WinXP (given Win2000 and Win98SE). Using a cost per developer of $200,000 per year, that's 50,000 developer years.
Open source does well in areas where the software is used by technical people. For example, traditionally (albeit increasingly less so), web servers have been operated by professionals. As a result, it has made sense for those professionals to use a web server that they could modify (Apache). Office suites have traditionally been used by non-technical people. As such, most office suites do not allow modification, only extension (through macros and more modernly, VBScript).
Barn raisings worked because in small communities, it's possible to get everyone to work together (people who don't go to raise your barn don't get your help with their barn). However, that's a bad model for trying to convince a business. It lacks guarantees (me doing work for you today does not bind you to do work for me tomorrow). To convince a profit minded boss, you have to demonstrate that open source reduces costs.
The problem wasn't that idiots couldn't figure out how to vote. That would have been fine. It's that Bush's idiots had less trouble voting than Gore's idiots. Either way of reading the ballot had Bush first. Misreading the ballot had Gore second (his slot was actually third). Therefore, Bush votes who misread the ballot voted for Bush while Gore voters who misread the ballot voted for Gore.
The hanging chad issue is strictly smokescreen. The real issues were the people who voted for Buchanan while intending to vote for Gore and the people who voted for both Buchanan and Gore (because they noticed their mistakes half way through).
If we had thrown out all the votes cast by idiots, Gore would have beaten Bush in Florida. If we had counted all votes intended for Gore, Gore would have beaten Bush. How Bush won Florida was through a misdesigned system that hampered Gore while not hampering Bush. The ironic thing is that those areas that were using the flawed system were run by Democrats. If they had created a readable voting form, their candidate would have won.
Of all the people with whom Microsoft has dealt, they did well by Kildall. Since their software ran on CP/M, they kept sending him customers.
IBM wanted software written to work with their new PC. A high ranking executive knew Gates' mom (Mary Gates). IBM approached Microsoft and asked for some help. As part of that talk, Microsoft told them that they were using CP/M as their OS and sent IBM to Kildall. Kildall almost screwed Microsoft here. IBM and Microsoft had a deal, which almost failed because of Kildall's failure to nail down a deal. Microsoft saved the deal by delivering a version of QDOS (which Patterson originally developed because Kildall didn't want to port CP/M to the 8088 chip). Why did they need a CP/M clone? Because their software ran on CP/M.
Microsoft handed Kildall the biggest software deal ever, and he dropped it on the floor. Note that this is discussed in your wiki link. Check out the "Oral History" of Gordon Eubanks.
Anytime Microsoft abuses its monopoly power, remember this. It's all Kildall's fault. Without him, Microsoft would never have entered the OS business. They would have stayed a compiler company and instead of using their PC OS (sales via IBM) to fund the development of Windows and Office, they would have had to have done so with just compiler sales.
Microsoft had two major events that led to the current situation:
1. Being forced to enter the OS market.
2. Betting the farm on the Windows version of Office.
Note that without the OS business, they might not have been in a financial position to develop Windows or Office. Businesses around the world might be using Word Perfect and 1-2-3 as the standards still.
The manager should not be creating the schedule. The manager should be integrating the information from the various dependencies into one. Sure, if you are foolish enough to have the manager write the schedule, a more technical manager will write a better schedule than a less technical manager. However, that's like saying that if you're going to step on the pointy end of a nail, it's better if it's clean. A better solution is to have employees set their own schedules; the manager then aggregates this information and communicates it to other interested parties.
.com) will not have the same ability with databases as the DB expert. You say you want your team to only write web content? OK, does each person write their own version of your front page? Or does one person write the front page, another handles registration and login, etc.
I think that this goes to the heart of the problem. People don't have good definition of the roles of manager and engineer. Part of this is the idea that a manager is senior to an engineer. While this may be true in individual cases, this should not be seen as true in general. In programming, there is no way that every manager is going to have strictly greater domain knowledge than every person on the team. If the manager does, then that means that either the team is being used inefficiently (e.g. everyone is doing ops rather than programming) or the team is new (and one might argue that hiring an entirely new team is itself inefficient).
Programming isn't like McDonald's. On a development team, you don't have eight interchangeable cashiers and a manager who used to be a cashier. Instead, you have eight different people with different experience. The person who writes your web content (assuming a
Programmers should be broadcasting their tech decisions *up* rather than having tech decisions pushed down. The "downward" decisions should be things like, given the choice of getting A in two months or B in two months, I want B. Not things like, do A in one month and then B in one month because I want both in two months.
I would agree that the best of both worlds is a manager who has the technical know how to help employees explore technical options. However, it is important not to accept substandard management just because the "manager" is technically sound. In general, the thing to do with good engineers is not to make them managers but to promote them as engineers. Make them team leads or promote them off the team and have them report to more senior managers (i.e. managers who have managers report to them). The engineer who should be moved into the management track is rare, as many of the management skills are the antithesis of the desired engineering skill.
Engineer:
1. Needs to focus on one thing; completely understand it and solve it.
2. Avoids meetings, as that's time away from doing real work.
3. Should be machine oriented such that the tech works.
Manager:
1. Has to juggle multiple priorities and lacks the time to focus on one.
2. Uses meetings to aggregate and disseminate information.
3. Needs to be people oriented, so as to get results from the team, other teams, and upward management.
While not impossible, it's rare to be good with both people and tech. The manager needs to be good with people. Tech is gravy if you can get it but should not be a blocker if not.
"any automatic identification using this system is not somehow considered 100% reliable in court."
They already have systems like this for fingerprints: local police send fingerprints to the FBI; the FBI puts them in computer; computer spits out a possible match or matches; a real person then looks at the submitted fingerprint and the stored fingerprint and makes a decision. If it goes to court, a real person who is locally available will testify as to the match (well first, you can see both have a tented arch here...).
It's also worth noting that this is probably aimed more at finding suspects than at convictions. I.e. a match starts an investigation. If you're already investigating someone, you don't need to compare security photos to their license photo--you can just compare to the actual person. I would be very surprised to see the results of this used in court.
"The Firebird guys would have been better off renaming their project,"
/. would have posted this story if it weren't for the name confusion. I certainly wouldn't have know what Firebird was if not for Mozilla.
How so? I doubt that
I think that it's mostly
e for more info on time spent on his grandfather's Texas ranch in his youth.
(0) Bezos is from Texas. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_lif
Other factors may enter into it, but I suspect that he saw the list of potential places and picked Texas as his favorite.