What counts here is the number of works created/filmed, not the number of copies made.
Don't measure apples with oranges. Unpaid copies provide no financial incentive to the filmer and the existance of alternative means of supply only depresses their pricing power.
I wonder if this is why the feds don't prosecute P2P'ed ordinary porn with any vigor.
The RIAA wouldn't agree with you. Devaluing child porn by making bootleg copies is going to diminish any financial incentives to make more, since producers' have a harder time selling their for-profit copies.
Just look at drugs. If marajuana was $15/ton wholesale and $75/ton retail, then it wouldn't attract all the criminal elements into distribution and dealing.
Profit is a great incentive to commit illegal acts.
I second that. Heck, even a good fraction of underage sex (no less porn) is entirely or mostly benign. Humans are wired with a sex drive from around age 14 or so (puberty). I can see no reason for sex between two sexually mature people to be any different because one (or both) is/are under 18.
Even when that's not the case, most of the real tradgedies are either traditional rapes, or the police themselves. The latter tends to be particularly true if the kids involved respect the adults involved.
Regarding computer generated child porn, hasen't that been stricken down by the Supreme Court numerous times on first amendment grounds? Or has a new law been passed that the court upheld?
People have gone to jail for obviously innocent pictures. Perhaps some judges have a little common sense, but when it comes to demonized things like child porn, drugs, and terrorism, there will be plenty of innocents caught up. Even if found innocent in a court of law (which is quite likely in the case of kitchen sink photos), the stigma with being even an acquitted sex offender makes holding or finding a job nearly impossible and one can forget about ever running for public office.
It was a joke. The parent post was implying that the no-fly list was an entirely corporate creation and thus outside of the 4th (and various other) amendments. My post was to bring that implication to it's logically absurd conclusion.
Anyone who learned how to use them the way an adult learns -- by understanding the underlying abstract concepts, rather than by simple blind repetition which is the way a child learns -- should be just fine with the alternatives.
Funny you mention it. When children are taught through rote memorization and repitition, it's called teaching for the test and the kids hate it (and have little to show for it). When adults learn through rote memorization, they're considered as being practical (and also have little to show for it).
To avoid all advertisements entails giving up a great deal and is probably downright impossible in this day and age. Here's what you'd have to give up.
- Most TV. Shows that have had commercials removed and have no product placement in them are okay though.
- Same for radio.
- Going outside. Billboards and corporate graffitti are everywhere.
- Purchase or possess most merchandise. Nearly all goods that a consumer purchases are heavily branded and have advertising-riddled packaging. Exceptions are piped natural gas, piped water, electricity (from electric lines, not batteries), and other similar goods. The stores in which such merchandise is sold is even more packed with advertising.
- Talking to some people. It's amazing how easily some people will try to get you to buy the same crap they just bought.
However, society would be far better off without all those decision-distorting and resource guzzling advertisements.
Then why isn't the government cracking down on their use of no fly lists? It's a blatant form of discrimination against people who have not been convicted or even charged with any crimes.
I must have missed that part. I see no error correcting codes or titanium disks or requirements for the seller to provide a replacement copy at cost if yours breaks or gets scratched or any other provisions that would protect your copy.
It's essentially irreversible because it takes far more political power to pass a law than to prevent one from getting passed. That software patents come so close to being made into law is evidence that there are some very politically powerful influences pushing for them. The EU is very undemocratic, which makes it all the easier to buy them.
The 'stealing' term can be applied both ways, and if there weren't big patent interests lobbying, then it would be 'stealing' to enact patents, because it's an unfair restriction on what companies can produce or use.
A stock can be half the price/revenues or price/book ratio of dot.bombs and still be rediculously overvalued. Google looks like it should be garnering a lower P/E this year than last as mounting competition and market saturation are set to sharply curtail earnings and revenue growth in the future. A P/E of 30 would be the top end of what I'd consider sane, with a P/E of 10 being the bottom end of the range.
Somehow I'm much more of a pessimist. I think that if the pigopolist media can drum up and continue a war on drugs and a war on terrorism then they'll definitely win all their wet copyright dreams. Big media carries a very big megaphone, and they have a personal stake in the matter.
A better example would be office workers and terrorists. Workers take a risk every day that a place might come crashing down and kill them on the spot.
Now if a plane does come crashing down and they somehow survive but missing a few limbs, are they whiners for not saying "I gambled, I lost" or are the terrorists at fault for firing airplane-missiles at office buildings?
The way I see it, file sharing is right to do (socially beneficial and without causing any legitimate harm or violating anyones legitimate rights), so someone crusading against it would qualify as a bad guy. That the courts and Congress are controlled by them is proof of corruption and no more.
Considering that even under the worst case scenario, only a small fraction of tumors are caused by cell phones, using total tumor frequency has far more uncertainty than using the ratio of left and right head tumors.
I can't conceive of a way of creating a proper control for an experiment comparing total tumor counts, while a control for an experiment comparing left-right imbalances is much easier.
People using legal download RIAA download sites download only a handful of songs, while people using other services get a cornucopia full of stuff. I'm quite certain that the number of song copies created on P2P far exceeds that done by RIAA sites.
This is one more example of why Free Software is about much more than free beer. Free Software systems could never get away with the kinds of abuses Tivo gets away with, and if the program leaders tried, the program would get quickly forked.
Markups vary a lot from store to store and from product to produce. The markup on cereal (manufacturer + retailer) is about 1,000%. The markup on milk is very small, at any store. Big stores will nail you harder for staples and give better discounts for more elastic products, mom and pop stores are the opposite (amazingly, they undercut large stores by a healthy margin for some highly inelastic stuff like bolts and machine screws).
It's very rare for a retailer to lose money on a sale, and the goods that are heavily discounted by manufacturers generally have small production budgets and large marketing budgets, like cold cereal and pricey pasta sauces.
Actually, I do. When there's a company I don't like that I see advertising, I'll right click and "open in a new tab". When I'm done browsing I'll close all those windows in one fell swoop. It's about a dollar a pop for the pricier links.
Read Karl Marx sometime. It's has more to do with creating excess supply, which Capitalism cannot survive without war or something else to destroy excess capital.
That said, I believe that RFID will increase costs, not decrease them. But increasing cost is not an issue for the retailer if it allows them to increase the average selling price or give them a competitive advantage over the competition. Just look at cereal boxes. The lowest cost way to distribute cold cereal is with a big bin and people put it into a jar or bag they bring. A little more expensive is to bag the cereal. Instead they use four-color glossy carboard boxes that are twice the size needed to fit the product.
PVC might not be in short supply like copper, but it has nasty environmental consequences. It's over 50% chlorine by weight, it cannot be incinerated safely, and when put into a plastic recycling machine, it corrodes the machine by releasing free chlorine radicals. As little as 1 ppm of PVC is needed to damage recycling machines.
Perhaps iron or aluminum pipe would be a better replacement. Likewise, aluminum is a better conductor than copper and with properly crimped ends, it is just as safe as copper wiring.
Hopefully this will change when Verizon rolls out FiOS -- then they'll be selling a triple play that is far superior to anything the cable providers can offer on their network.
At least in my neighborhood, Verizon services are ultra-shitty. You almost never get your advertised 256kbps rate (up rate, down rate is far higher, but it's not the limiting factor and it's even more oversold). With Time Warner, you almost always (99%+) get the advertised 384kbps rate (once again up rate, down rate is far higher, and once again not the limiting factor).
I live in NYC, a city with a population density to match anything Europe can offer, and my broadband stinks like offerings anywhere else in the US. It's definitely a political issue, not a technical one.
Should I consider myself lucky that at least I have access both both DSL and cable, so the companies stay at least a tiny bit competitive?
This doesn't strike me as any surprise. A major part of a website's quality, in my opinion, is the layout. If it's 80% images (which will not be loaded, but which give a distinctive patten as the page starts loading), it'll often be a poorly laid out site, often stuffed with ads. If the text puts up and fills the screen, then it's a text only or mostly text site, and unless the text is an awful font or color scheme, I'll like it.
All this is simple enough to be a reflex, and I do hit Alt+Left very, very fast sometimes, a little too fast to consciously think it through. Not 50 milliseconds, but around 300 milliseconds, but once you include the time for signals to be sent and interpreted by my fingers, it seems to make sense.
It is extremely expensive to go into space with conventional rockets beacause it's near the limit of what's physically possible. Had our gravitational well (product of surface gravity and planet diameter) been twice as deep, we'd might as well forget about launching conventional rockets into orbit.
Spaceship One didn't go into orbit. It had enough oomph to get about 100km of altitude. That's only a few percent of what's needed to get into space, and the cost increases exponentially as the delta-g needed increases, with a doubling constant of about 2km/sec or so, the exact figure depending on the reduction and oxidizing agents used with hydrogen and oxygen giving the largest constant.
Additionally, for-profit businesses have virtually no incentive to invest in long term research. Their discount rates tend to be around 10% (even in this era of uber-low interest rates) and that's for a sure bet investment. Risky multi-decade investments that might or might have a huge payoff in 30 years are not what they like. Governments and non-profits (like the Mars Society) are the only groups that have the necessary long-term thinking to develop this field, and even then they miss more often than hit. There are plenty space shuttle-type boondoggles for one Sputnik or Soyuz or Apollo victory.
As far as I know, private space research is either lightly encouraged, or treated neutrally. It's more that few people are so foolhardy to invest in it at this point. Rutan might make money because of publicity and there being a limited tourist potential for sub-orbital flights, but his research is a dead-end that will not bring us any closer to routine orbital space flight.
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What counts here is the number of works created/filmed, not the number of copies made.
Don't measure apples with oranges. Unpaid copies provide no financial incentive to the filmer and the existance of alternative means of supply only depresses their pricing power.
I wonder if this is why the feds don't prosecute P2P'ed ordinary porn with any vigor.
The RIAA wouldn't agree with you. Devaluing child porn by making bootleg copies is going to diminish any financial incentives to make more, since producers' have a harder time selling their for-profit copies.
Just look at drugs. If marajuana was $15/ton wholesale and $75/ton retail, then it wouldn't attract all the criminal elements into distribution and dealing.
Profit is a great incentive to commit illegal acts.
I second that. Heck, even a good fraction of underage sex (no less porn) is entirely or mostly benign. Humans are wired with a sex drive from around age 14 or so (puberty). I can see no reason for sex between two sexually mature people to be any different because one (or both) is/are under 18.
Even when that's not the case, most of the real tradgedies are either traditional rapes, or the police themselves. The latter tends to be particularly true if the kids involved respect the adults involved.
Regarding computer generated child porn, hasen't that been stricken down by the Supreme Court numerous times on first amendment grounds? Or has a new law been passed that the court upheld?
People have gone to jail for obviously innocent pictures. Perhaps some judges have a little common sense, but when it comes to demonized things like child porn, drugs, and terrorism, there will be plenty of innocents caught up. Even if found innocent in a court of law (which is quite likely in the case of kitchen sink photos), the stigma with being even an acquitted sex offender makes holding or finding a job nearly impossible and one can forget about ever running for public office.
It was a joke. The parent post was implying that the no-fly list was an entirely corporate creation and thus outside of the 4th (and various other) amendments. My post was to bring that implication to it's logically absurd conclusion.
Sorry if I was too subtle about it.
Anyone who learned how to use them the way an adult learns -- by understanding the underlying abstract concepts, rather than by simple blind repetition which is the way a child learns -- should be just fine with the alternatives.
Funny you mention it. When children are taught through rote memorization and repitition, it's called teaching for the test and the kids hate it (and have little to show for it). When adults learn through rote memorization, they're considered as being practical (and also have little to show for it).
To avoid all advertisements entails giving up a great deal and is probably downright impossible in this day and age. Here's what you'd have to give up.
- Most TV. Shows that have had commercials removed and have no product placement in them are okay though.
- Same for radio.
- Going outside. Billboards and corporate graffitti are everywhere.
- Purchase or possess most merchandise. Nearly all goods that a consumer purchases are heavily branded and have advertising-riddled packaging. Exceptions are piped natural gas, piped water, electricity (from electric lines, not batteries), and other similar goods. The stores in which such merchandise is sold is even more packed with advertising.
- Talking to some people. It's amazing how easily some people will try to get you to buy the same crap they just bought.
However, society would be far better off without all those decision-distorting and resource guzzling advertisements.
Then why isn't the government cracking down on their use of no fly lists? It's a blatant form of discrimination against people who have not been convicted or even charged with any crimes.
This legislation goes way beyond copy-protection.
I must have missed that part. I see no error correcting codes or titanium disks or requirements for the seller to provide a replacement copy at cost if yours breaks or gets scratched or any other provisions that would protect your copy.
It's essentially irreversible because it takes far more political power to pass a law than to prevent one from getting passed. That software patents come so close to being made into law is evidence that there are some very politically powerful influences pushing for them. The EU is very undemocratic, which makes it all the easier to buy them.
The 'stealing' term can be applied both ways, and if there weren't big patent interests lobbying, then it would be 'stealing' to enact patents, because it's an unfair restriction on what companies can produce or use.
A stock can be half the price/revenues or price/book ratio of dot.bombs and still be rediculously overvalued. Google looks like it should be garnering a lower P/E this year than last as mounting competition and market saturation are set to sharply curtail earnings and revenue growth in the future. A P/E of 30 would be the top end of what I'd consider sane, with a P/E of 10 being the bottom end of the range.
Somehow I'm much more of a pessimist. I think that if the pigopolist media can drum up and continue a war on drugs and a war on terrorism then they'll definitely win all their wet copyright dreams. Big media carries a very big megaphone, and they have a personal stake in the matter.
A better example would be office workers and terrorists. Workers take a risk every day that a place might come crashing down and kill them on the spot.
Now if a plane does come crashing down and they somehow survive but missing a few limbs, are they whiners for not saying "I gambled, I lost" or are the terrorists at fault for firing airplane-missiles at office buildings?
The way I see it, file sharing is right to do (socially beneficial and without causing any legitimate harm or violating anyones legitimate rights), so someone crusading against it would qualify as a bad guy. That the courts and Congress are controlled by them is proof of corruption and no more.
Considering that even under the worst case scenario, only a small fraction of tumors are caused by cell phones, using total tumor frequency has far more uncertainty than using the ratio of left and right head tumors.
I can't conceive of a way of creating a proper control for an experiment comparing total tumor counts, while a control for an experiment comparing left-right imbalances is much easier.
People using legal download RIAA download sites download only a handful of songs, while people using other services get a cornucopia full of stuff. I'm quite certain that the number of song copies created on P2P far exceeds that done by RIAA sites.
This is one more example of why Free Software is about much more than free beer. Free Software systems could never get away with the kinds of abuses Tivo gets away with, and if the program leaders tried, the program would get quickly forked.
Markups vary a lot from store to store and from product to produce. The markup on cereal (manufacturer + retailer) is about 1,000%. The markup on milk is very small, at any store. Big stores will nail you harder for staples and give better discounts for more elastic products, mom and pop stores are the opposite (amazingly, they undercut large stores by a healthy margin for some highly inelastic stuff like bolts and machine screws).
It's very rare for a retailer to lose money on a sale, and the goods that are heavily discounted by manufacturers generally have small production budgets and large marketing budgets, like cold cereal and pricey pasta sauces.
Actually, I do. When there's a company I don't like that I see advertising, I'll right click and "open in a new tab". When I'm done browsing I'll close all those windows in one fell swoop. It's about a dollar a pop for the pricier links.
Read Karl Marx sometime. It's has more to do with creating excess supply, which Capitalism cannot survive without war or something else to destroy excess capital.
That said, I believe that RFID will increase costs, not decrease them. But increasing cost is not an issue for the retailer if it allows them to increase the average selling price or give them a competitive advantage over the competition. Just look at cereal boxes. The lowest cost way to distribute cold cereal is with a big bin and people put it into a jar or bag they bring. A little more expensive is to bag the cereal. Instead they use four-color glossy carboard boxes that are twice the size needed to fit the product.
PVC might not be in short supply like copper, but it has nasty environmental consequences. It's over 50% chlorine by weight, it cannot be incinerated safely, and when put into a plastic recycling machine, it corrodes the machine by releasing free chlorine radicals. As little as 1 ppm of PVC is needed to damage recycling machines.
Perhaps iron or aluminum pipe would be a better replacement. Likewise, aluminum is a better conductor than copper and with properly crimped ends, it is just as safe as copper wiring.
Hopefully this will change when Verizon rolls out FiOS -- then they'll be selling a triple play that is far superior to anything the cable providers can offer on their network.
At least in my neighborhood, Verizon services are ultra-shitty. You almost never get your advertised 256kbps rate (up rate, down rate is far higher, but it's not the limiting factor and it's even more oversold). With Time Warner, you almost always (99%+) get the advertised 384kbps rate (once again up rate, down rate is far higher, and once again not the limiting factor).
At least in my apartment, the button contacts aren't very good and often a single light press won't do the trick.
I live in NYC, a city with a population density to match anything Europe can offer, and my broadband stinks like offerings anywhere else in the US. It's definitely a political issue, not a technical one.
Should I consider myself lucky that at least I have access both both DSL and cable, so the companies stay at least a tiny bit competitive?
This doesn't strike me as any surprise. A major part of a website's quality, in my opinion, is the layout. If it's 80% images (which will not be loaded, but which give a distinctive patten as the page starts loading), it'll often be a poorly laid out site, often stuffed with ads. If the text puts up and fills the screen, then it's a text only or mostly text site, and unless the text is an awful font or color scheme, I'll like it.
All this is simple enough to be a reflex, and I do hit Alt+Left very, very fast sometimes, a little too fast to consciously think it through. Not 50 milliseconds, but around 300 milliseconds, but once you include the time for signals to be sent and interpreted by my fingers, it seems to make sense.
It is extremely expensive to go into space with conventional rockets beacause it's near the limit of what's physically possible. Had our gravitational well (product of surface gravity and planet diameter) been twice as deep, we'd might as well forget about launching conventional rockets into orbit.
Spaceship One didn't go into orbit. It had enough oomph to get about 100km of altitude. That's only a few percent of what's needed to get into space, and the cost increases exponentially as the delta-g needed increases, with a doubling constant of about 2km/sec or so, the exact figure depending on the reduction and oxidizing agents used with hydrogen and oxygen giving the largest constant.
Additionally, for-profit businesses have virtually no incentive to invest in long term research. Their discount rates tend to be around 10% (even in this era of uber-low interest rates) and that's for a sure bet investment. Risky multi-decade investments that might or might have a huge payoff in 30 years are not what they like. Governments and non-profits (like the Mars Society) are the only groups that have the necessary long-term thinking to develop this field, and even then they miss more often than hit. There are plenty space shuttle-type boondoggles for one Sputnik or Soyuz or Apollo victory.
As far as I know, private space research is either lightly encouraged, or treated neutrally. It's more that few people are so foolhardy to invest in it at this point. Rutan might make money because of publicity and there being a limited tourist potential for sub-orbital flights, but his research is a dead-end that will not bring us any closer to routine orbital space flight.