Is it really that hard for you to imagine Pandora agreeing to these terms partially because it knew full well that it would further entrench its market position?
> 25% of revenue or.14 cents/song (whichever is greater)
I would love to hear the logic behind this structuring. Why is 25% of revenue OK for large stations, but for small stations with low revenue, they must pay a fixed fee?
Kind of a pointless argument, but you could easily view it as a subscription. It's just that you re-set to the lowest plan each month. If the lowest plan were $1 and the higher tier was $2, I think most people would consider that a subscription.
This would have a market, but not all games could do this. There are still a TON of gamers who for whatever reason get enjoyment out of just running through the motions and increasing the value of their character. An ever-changing game can not have walkthroughs in the same sense.
Incredible. Summary gives the credit of this innovation to the government?
> the law has become a case study of the way government regulation can > inspire technical innovation
So, the 300 million people in the market say they want incandescent. Government says no, they aren't "energy efficient enough", according to a few hundred people in DC. An industry attempts to survive by pouring money into research that they didn't do before because it didn't make sense and would only drive up consumer costs. Now they have a solution that will cost more but at least it exists.
And the credit to this innovation goes to government?
This is typical of the leftist bias. Laud the benefits and don't talk at all about the cost. In the head of the submitter, everything is black-and-white, good-or-bad and there is no need to analyze whether this is worth the cost.
The margin between the buyback price and the resell price is huge with textbook stores on campus. I noticed this during my college career and started building a site that would facilitate peer-to-peer reselling without the middleman. Since the margin was so large, it would be very easy for me to undercut the textbook stores and still make a large profit.
Alas, it was eventually filed under my 'future ideas' folder along with 20 others and I was distracted by other things... like women and beer...
> Er, when did I say anything about there being no opportunity to the graduate > students? I am no "student" of economics, but I did take basic high school > economics. I know that, by attending graduate school in physics for 5, 6 > years, I am giving up the salary I may have earned during those years.
Sir, I'm at a loss where you think I even mentioned opportunity cost. I guess in a roundabout way you could say that the students are working in assistanceships and therefore cannot work and therefore are paying an opportunity cost, but that is unnecessarily complicated, and the opportunity cost does not benefit the school. What benefits the school is the work itself. That is the tuition payment.
> However, what the GP claimed was that the international students actually > *paid* tuition. All I claimed was that they didn't actually pay any tuition.
They didn't hand over dollars or euro, but they definitely did pay tuition. Value is transferred from the student to the school, it's just not contained in currency.
> As real as opportunity cost is, it hasn't actually been actualized yet--for > one, the courts won't let you recover damages calculated in terms of > "opportunity cost" beyond wages lost (i.e. things that are absolutely for > certain, not, e.g. wages that I *might* have earned)--and it's dishonest to > talk about opportunity cost as if it's actual, real, already-happened cost.
Buddy, you don't know what you're talking about. If you stop doing your assistanceship and expect to still be able to go to school, and then sue the school when it kicks you out, you better believe the courts will uphold this. Again, it has nothing to do with opportunity cost, and I suspect you're latching onto that keyword because you don't understand it. It has to do with contract arrangements and a VERY REAL transfer of value from the student to the school. If that transfer stops, then the school is no longer obligated to offer its value in return. It's very simple...
> As for the rest of your post, it's a baloney based on a complete > misunderstanding of mine, so I don't think it deserves a response.
No, it's not baloney and it wasn't based on a misunderstanding of your post. But if you don't feel like you're able to respond, by all means feel free to ignore it.
> Hate to pull you down from your clouds, but you are way off. First of all, > none of these graduate students, at least in physical sciences, actually > "pay tuition". Usually in one way (working as teaching assistant or > research assistant) or another (grants and fellowships), they will not > only attend the school tuition-free, they will also get paid living > expenses. I should know, I'm one of these graduate students (although > not an international one).
Let me guess... you're not a grad student in the study of economics.
You are making the mistake of equating currency with the only form of payment. If I mow your lawn, whether you pay me $20 worth of paper money, gold, or chickens is completely irrelevant. This "tuition-free" school it not free at all. The school is entering into a transaction with the student to exchange schooling for research. Or, society is entering into a transaction with the student to exchange schooling for future benefits.
You are suggesting that people are handing out schooling with no expectation of any return. Not only is that unsound, it's also ridiculous. All schools would be out of business in no time.
> In fact, if it's a public institution, these foreign graduate > students actually cost the department... This is often used as a > justification for having a higher standard for foreign student admission.
Again, you essentially point out the economics at work yet seem to be completely oblivious to them at the same time. It costs the school more for international students, therefore they want more out of international students.
> It's easy to talk about "intellectual freedom" and "freedom of information" > (BTW, none of these are fundamental rights protected by the Constitution,
You are right and you are wrong. You are right in that it is not an explicit right laid out. However, if it was not granted by the Constitution, it probably wouldn't exist. The truth is, the very structure of our government (short-term, elected officials) coupled with some power remaining with the states (2nd Amendment, 9th Amendment, 10th Amendment) creates a need for transparency, for the sake of the elected officials. If the people and the states do not trust what the federal government is doing, they will rebel (by refusing to enforce federal laws, by refusing to collect federal tax dollars, or by force).
> liberals to talk about "spreading the wealth" and having a "safety net" > that lets the unemployed live in luxury, as long as they ignore the > realities of the real world economics.
The irony of you pointing out ignorance to economics is a bit amusing.
> Do you think Lockheed-Martin should freely share information about all > the bombers and stealth fighters they build?
It depends on who owns the intellectual property and/or the terms of the contract. This is not a question of morality, as you imply with the question including the word "should". LM has every right to give information they own to anyone they want, until that right is restricted by contract, to which both parties agree.
Don't be an idiot. He is guilty and should go to jail. The government acted in accordance with the Constitution and good sense. Your attempt to politicize this only shows that you have no real grasp of the arguments of the critics of the government and instead blindly dismiss them with little thought.
People do stupid things, and there are consequences. I know plenty of people who paid $50 for a tattoo and years later wish they had never done it, and now it will cost them $7,000 to take it off. Should we outlaw tattoos?
Seriously, your entire anecdote completely misses the point. Here you have willing people engaging in pornography. You also have willing people paying these willing people money in order to have a copy of this pornography. Then the government steps in and throws the producers in the slammer.
What?
Your argument is basically that stupid people sometimes willingly and freely decide to do things they don't really want to do. If there is no force, that isn't possible. What you are saying is really a euphemism for people not fully considering the potential consequences of their actions before they do them, and then regretting the actions after they see the full consequences. It is not government's job to protect us from this. Indeed, they can't, without outlawing everything.
Every time the government engages in "protecting" a few stupid people from being stupid, it tramples on the freedom of the majority of us.
What about everyone else who kills themselves? Are the people who cause those suicides not responsible because the blame is less concentrated? What's the threshold? What if 2 people cause me to kill myself? 3? 15?
You can call me whatever names you want. I'm not going to kill myself. If it's persistent and annoying and disruptive, perhaps I have the police talk to you about harassment. But going beyond that is kind of ridiculous, in my humble opinion.
That's fine idealism, but the problem with every implementing browser ignoring a portion of the spec is that is discredits the spec as a whole. At the end of the day, this is a voluntary agreement amongst vendors to adhere to this thing. If the spec starts departing from reality too much, you risk losing the bigger game.
No, actually the path to prosperity is to save every job and protect the status quo. In fact, if you can support the status quo on the backs of taxpayers and our future taxpayers (debt), even better for prosperity. Get with the times, man.
Save me, government!!! My doctor and I are unable to determine the proper dosage of medications for me based on my illness, physical condition, other medications, diet, and financial situation. But I believe that a few hundred bureaucrats in DC can establish a blanket rule that applies to me and everyone else!!! Save me from my and my doctor's incompetence!
You seem to have stumbled upon the wisdom of the framers when they laid out a decentralized system in the Constitution, where the centralized federal government ONLY involved itself in matters where the individual states could not (this does not include: education, energy, intrastate commerce, various construction/transportation projects, etc.).
You know, I want to agree with you. I really do. My ideology calls me to agree with you.
But, as someone who contracts with the government and understands how much of a pain in the ass it is, $52m/year for a nationwide program is absolute peanuts.
The problem is that government officials are elected to do stuff. Doing nothing is not an option, if they want to be re-elected. That's why the government will "fix" pollution, "fix" health care, and "fix" the economy. Because if they aren't the ones who "fix" these things, then why do you need them?
> What I am trying to say is that cap-and-trade is not some sort of > socialist contraption. Rather, it is one of the most natural ways > of dealing with a negative externality in a free market system.
How is it natural? Who is setting the supply? If we know the demand already, and we then set the supply, then that is the same as the government setting the price. You say the free market sets prices ignoring externalities (positive and negative), but you then imply that government should set the price. The government cannot possibly know the correct price of pollution. The "trade" part of "cap-and-trade" is a head-fake, making it look like the market is involved, but the market can only react to the arbitrary supply provided by the government.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it really that hard for you to imagine Pandora agreeing to these terms partially because it knew full well that it would further entrench its market position?
This article is so true. Relatedly, I don't remember how to churn butter anymore, either.
If I play each song 1 time only, I still pay 25% of revenue if my total revenue is high enough.
> 25% of revenue or .14 cents/song (whichever is greater)
I would love to hear the logic behind this structuring. Why is 25% of revenue OK for large stations, but for small stations with low revenue, they must pay a fixed fee?
Kind of a pointless argument, but you could easily view it as a subscription. It's just that you re-set to the lowest plan each month. If the lowest plan were $1 and the higher tier was $2, I think most people would consider that a subscription.
This would have a market, but not all games could do this. There are still a TON of gamers who for whatever reason get enjoyment out of just running through the motions and increasing the value of their character. An ever-changing game can not have walkthroughs in the same sense.
So don't use it. But I'd like to check it out.
They used the wrong term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager#X_window_managers
Easy for those countries to say, when they outsource their national security to the US.
Did you not read parent before responding? He said what is highly unlikely is that name and SSN combination is a collision.
Incredible. Summary gives the credit of this innovation to the government?
> the law has become a case study of the way government regulation can
> inspire technical innovation
So, the 300 million people in the market say they want incandescent. Government says no, they aren't "energy efficient enough", according to a few hundred people in DC. An industry attempts to survive by pouring money into research that they didn't do before because it didn't make sense and would only drive up consumer costs. Now they have a solution that will cost more but at least it exists.
And the credit to this innovation goes to government?
This is typical of the leftist bias. Laud the benefits and don't talk at all about the cost. In the head of the submitter, everything is black-and-white, good-or-bad and there is no need to analyze whether this is worth the cost.
The margin between the buyback price and the resell price is huge with textbook stores on campus. I noticed this during my college career and started building a site that would facilitate peer-to-peer reselling without the middleman. Since the margin was so large, it would be very easy for me to undercut the textbook stores and still make a large profit.
Alas, it was eventually filed under my 'future ideas' folder along with 20 others and I was distracted by other things... like women and beer...
> Er, when did I say anything about there being no opportunity to the graduate
> students? I am no "student" of economics, but I did take basic high school
> economics. I know that, by attending graduate school in physics for 5, 6
> years, I am giving up the salary I may have earned during those years.
Sir, I'm at a loss where you think I even mentioned opportunity cost. I guess in a roundabout way you could say that the students are working in assistanceships and therefore cannot work and therefore are paying an opportunity cost, but that is unnecessarily complicated, and the opportunity cost does not benefit the school. What benefits the school is the work itself. That is the tuition payment.
> However, what the GP claimed was that the international students actually
> *paid* tuition. All I claimed was that they didn't actually pay any tuition.
They didn't hand over dollars or euro, but they definitely did pay tuition. Value is transferred from the student to the school, it's just not contained in currency.
> As real as opportunity cost is, it hasn't actually been actualized yet--for
> one, the courts won't let you recover damages calculated in terms of
> "opportunity cost" beyond wages lost (i.e. things that are absolutely for
> certain, not, e.g. wages that I *might* have earned)--and it's dishonest to
> talk about opportunity cost as if it's actual, real, already-happened cost.
Buddy, you don't know what you're talking about. If you stop doing your assistanceship and expect to still be able to go to school, and then sue the school when it kicks you out, you better believe the courts will uphold this. Again, it has nothing to do with opportunity cost, and I suspect you're latching onto that keyword because you don't understand it. It has to do with contract arrangements and a VERY REAL transfer of value from the student to the school. If that transfer stops, then the school is no longer obligated to offer its value in return. It's very simple...
> As for the rest of your post, it's a baloney based on a complete
> misunderstanding of mine, so I don't think it deserves a response.
No, it's not baloney and it wasn't based on a misunderstanding of your post. But if you don't feel like you're able to respond, by all means feel free to ignore it.
> Hate to pull you down from your clouds, but you are way off. First of all,
> none of these graduate students, at least in physical sciences, actually
> "pay tuition". Usually in one way (working as teaching assistant or
> research assistant) or another (grants and fellowships), they will not
> only attend the school tuition-free, they will also get paid living
> expenses. I should know, I'm one of these graduate students (although
> not an international one).
Let me guess... you're not a grad student in the study of economics.
You are making the mistake of equating currency with the only form of payment. If I mow your lawn, whether you pay me $20 worth of paper money, gold, or chickens is completely irrelevant. This "tuition-free" school it not free at all. The school is entering into a transaction with the student to exchange schooling for research. Or, society is entering into a transaction with the student to exchange schooling for future benefits.
You are suggesting that people are handing out schooling with no expectation of any return. Not only is that unsound, it's also ridiculous. All schools would be out of business in no time.
> In fact, if it's a public institution, these foreign graduate
> students actually cost the department... This is often used as a
> justification for having a higher standard for foreign student admission.
Again, you essentially point out the economics at work yet seem to be completely oblivious to them at the same time. It costs the school more for international students, therefore they want more out of international students.
> It's easy to talk about "intellectual freedom" and "freedom of information"
> (BTW, none of these are fundamental rights protected by the Constitution,
You are right and you are wrong. You are right in that it is not an explicit right laid out. However, if it was not granted by the Constitution, it probably wouldn't exist. The truth is, the very structure of our government (short-term, elected officials) coupled with some power remaining with the states (2nd Amendment, 9th Amendment, 10th Amendment) creates a need for transparency, for the sake of the elected officials. If the people and the states do not trust what the federal government is doing, they will rebel (by refusing to enforce federal laws, by refusing to collect federal tax dollars, or by force).
> liberals to talk about "spreading the wealth" and having a "safety net"
> that lets the unemployed live in luxury, as long as they ignore the
> realities of the real world economics.
The irony of you pointing out ignorance to economics is a bit amusing.
> Do you think Lockheed-Martin should freely share information about all
> the bombers and stealth fighters they build?
It depends on who owns the intellectual property and/or the terms of the contract. This is not a question of morality, as you imply with the question including the word "should". LM has every right to give information they own to anyone they want, until that right is restricted by contract, to which both parties agree.
This isn't hard stuff.
Don't be an idiot. He is guilty and should go to jail. The government acted in accordance with the Constitution and good sense. Your attempt to politicize this only shows that you have no real grasp of the arguments of the critics of the government and instead blindly dismiss them with little thought.
People do stupid things, and there are consequences. I know plenty of people who paid $50 for a tattoo and years later wish they had never done it, and now it will cost them $7,000 to take it off. Should we outlaw tattoos?
Seriously, your entire anecdote completely misses the point. Here you have willing people engaging in pornography. You also have willing people paying these willing people money in order to have a copy of this pornography. Then the government steps in and throws the producers in the slammer.
What?
Your argument is basically that stupid people sometimes willingly and freely decide to do things they don't really want to do. If there is no force, that isn't possible. What you are saying is really a euphemism for people not fully considering the potential consequences of their actions before they do them, and then regretting the actions after they see the full consequences. It is not government's job to protect us from this. Indeed, they can't, without outlawing everything.
Every time the government engages in "protecting" a few stupid people from being stupid, it tramples on the freedom of the majority of us.
What about everyone else who kills themselves? Are the people who cause those suicides not responsible because the blame is less concentrated? What's the threshold? What if 2 people cause me to kill myself? 3? 15?
You can call me whatever names you want. I'm not going to kill myself. If it's persistent and annoying and disruptive, perhaps I have the police talk to you about harassment. But going beyond that is kind of ridiculous, in my humble opinion.
That's fine idealism, but the problem with every implementing browser ignoring a portion of the spec is that is discredits the spec as a whole. At the end of the day, this is a voluntary agreement amongst vendors to adhere to this thing. If the spec starts departing from reality too much, you risk losing the bigger game.
No, actually the path to prosperity is to save every job and protect the status quo. In fact, if you can support the status quo on the backs of taxpayers and our future taxpayers (debt), even better for prosperity. Get with the times, man.
Save me, government!!! My doctor and I are unable to determine the proper dosage of medications for me based on my illness, physical condition, other medications, diet, and financial situation. But I believe that a few hundred bureaucrats in DC can establish a blanket rule that applies to me and everyone else!!! Save me from my and my doctor's incompetence!
Well, this guy is evidence that somebody can.
You seem to have stumbled upon the wisdom of the framers when they laid out a decentralized system in the Constitution, where the centralized federal government ONLY involved itself in matters where the individual states could not (this does not include: education, energy, intrastate commerce, various construction/transportation projects, etc.).
You know, I want to agree with you. I really do. My ideology calls me to agree with you.
But, as someone who contracts with the government and understands how much of a pain in the ass it is, $52m/year for a nationwide program is absolute peanuts.
The problem is that government officials are elected to do stuff. Doing nothing is not an option, if they want to be re-elected. That's why the government will "fix" pollution, "fix" health care, and "fix" the economy. Because if they aren't the ones who "fix" these things, then why do you need them?
> What I am trying to say is that cap-and-trade is not some sort of
> socialist contraption. Rather, it is one of the most natural ways
> of dealing with a negative externality in a free market system.
How is it natural? Who is setting the supply? If we know the demand already, and we then set the supply, then that is the same as the government setting the price. You say the free market sets prices ignoring externalities (positive and negative), but you then imply that government should set the price. The government cannot possibly know the correct price of pollution. The "trade" part of "cap-and-trade" is a head-fake, making it look like the market is involved, but the market can only react to the arbitrary supply provided by the government.