And the difference is that the Motorola patents are part of a standard, and part of being included in that standard is that they agree to license under FAIR and REASONABLE terms. The amount they asked for was not fair, nor reasonable even by **Motorola's own admission**.
While I can see an argument that the industry norm is too high and the courts need to bring it down, it's completely untrue that the amount Motorola was asking for was not fair nor reasonable. That's just BS made up by Apple and Microsoft to try to make Motorola look like the bad guy. The amount Motorola requested was within the industry norm, which absent a government-mandated rate is the best measure we have of "fair and reasonable."
I've always maintained that passing laws to protect our privacy is a losing battle. If you make a law to make someone stop doing something they want to do, all that usually ends up happening is they figure out a way to do the exact same thing while skirting around the law.
Instead, we should pollute their data. Create programs which can run when you're not using your computer, which look like multiple browsers and access websites in a random but quasi-human-like fashion. They'll amass tracking cookies, but the cookies will be tracking bots rather than real people. Decrease their signal to noise ratio so much that it's no longer cost-effective to collect people's private data, at least from monitoring people's browsing habits.
Why should a rental store/Netflix have to pay full price to replace a broken DVD? You paid full price to license the movie, not the plastic disc. If the disc is broken, that doesn't nullify the license you already paid for. You should be able to just send the studio the pieces, pay a nominal fee, and get a replacement. That's what Disney does. If the other studios don't offer a similar service, they should be sued for breach of contract (violating the terms of their license where they give you the right to do certain things with the movie in exchange for your money).
It's physical evidence in much the same way that a letter confessing to a crime is physical evidence, and not just ink lines on a piece of paper. Although the content, the meaning, of the writing or data may be virtual, the medium on which they're stored is physical. Hence they're physical evidence. For that matter, the same goes for fingerprints and DNA. The grease or DNA molecules are just the medium. The pattern of lines and pattern of C/T/A/G molecules are what's important, but they are virtual (can exist independently of the medium).
While it's regarded as a rich man's sport, the race has been a major driving force behind research into the use and manufacture of carbon fiber composite structures, and methods for determining computational solutions for the Navier-Stokes equation (which is still unsolved, and is not even known if there is/isn't an algorithmic solution). The race creates an incentive for the super-rich to become early adopters of these technologies. Without the race they'd probably piss their money away on gold toilet seats or who could make the biggest megayacht. At least this way they're spending money on advancing the state of the art for technologies which will eventually benefit you and me.
"Never" is a strong word. It was allowed in the EU up until 2005. The timeframe of the delay before compensation is required was clarified (3 hours) by courts in Oct 2012 (before then, airlines would say a delay wasn't long enough to require compensation). And the EU clarified the rules regarding when the airlines could claim the delay wasn't their fault (and thus they wouldn't have to pay) just two months ago. So what you're describing is actually a very recent development in the EU.
You have to remember the Shuttles were designed in the 1970s. The only thing the military really wanted from the Shuttle was to be able to fly up there, dock with a spy satellite, and refuel it and load fresh film into it. The whole thing became obsolete for their purposes in the 1980s with the advent of digital imaging, and solar-powered reaction wheels to change orientation (fuel is only burned to change the orbit to change when a spy satellite passes over a certain area). In terms of launching military payloads, they were doing just fine before the Shuttle, and they've been doing just fine after. The shuttle never even launched into the polar orbit used for spy satellites.
The original, ambitious, plan for the Shuttles were to launch about 50 a year - one a week. That's the figure the accounting estimates used to amortize the cost of development and maintenance facilities and personnel. If you assume 50 Shuttle launches a year, then it really does end up being cheaper than conventional rockets. Unfortunately, they ended up averaging a bit over 8 launches a year. At that level they were horrendously more expensive than conventional rockets.
U.S. spending on education per student is the second-highest among OECD countries (PPP so no, the higher cost of living here isn't a factor). Money for education is not scarce. If anything, we spend too much money on education.
The problem is that it's spent ineffectively. A class of 30 kids gets over a quarter million dollars a year. In days past that would've been enough to build a new one-room schoolhouse for the kids, then teach them in it. Every year. If the teachers are complaining about having to buy their own supplies for their kids after you account for their $75k (with benefits) salary, you have to ask yourself where is the other $200k going?
It's mostly administrators. They eat up nearly twice as much money as teachers (the remainder pays for things like infrastructure). They are the middlemen of the public education system. They've situated themselves between the money and the teachers/kids, and make sure they get the biggest slice of the pie. If the education budget is ever cut, they make sure that it's the teachers and kids who bear the brunt of it so they'll complain and berate the government for cutting funding. If the budget is ever increased, they'll consume the lion's share of it while letting just enough of it trickle down that the public feels like it's getting something for its money.
His point is that despite all the doom and gloom stories about excess CEO pay, the amount of money the CEOs are making compared to the entire economy is peanuts. Here's a commonly cited paper" on CEO pay in the U.S. The average CEO here makes 273x more than the typical worker, with an average compensation of $14.1 million/yr. The horror!
But if you read the fine print, you see that it only looked at the top 350 companies. If we were to cut these CEOs down to size and confiscated all the money they made last year and redistributed it to the 145 million workers in the U.S., each worker would end up getting ($14.1 million)*(350 CEOs)/(145 million workers) = $34 each. If you divide it by the number of workers in the Fortune 500 (24 million), it's $205 each.
The authors of the paper came up with the methodology for tracking trends in CEO pay over the years. Unfortunately it's been hijacked and misreported to fit the narrative that CEOs in general are siphoning off substantial amounts of money our economy is generating, and if it were fixed everything would be much better. That simply isn't the case. While the top CEOs may make enough money to afford themselves a lavish lifestyle, in terms of the overall economic output of their companies it's peanuts.
If you want a better, broader measure of income inequality, you should be looking at things like Gini coefficient. But "Income inequality 50% worse in U.S. than other Western countries" isn't as great a headline as "CEOs make 273x more than their workers."
Alas the NY Times seems intent on making sure nobody reads the story and has put your link behind a login page too.
Here's the video at least. Not the down-ressed YouTube version included in the NYT article, but the original HD version posted by the National Park Service. http://vimeo.com/73310936
Any time someone talks about a power facility in terms of "terawatt-hours per year", they're either confused themselves, or they're trying to confuse you. (Or both.) If they're talking about "terawatt-hours of power", they're the ones who are confused.
No they're not confused, both terms refer to different things.
Terawatts (or more frequently, megawatts) refers to the so-called nameplate capacity - the peak generating capacity of the plant.
Terawatt-hours per year refers to the actual energy generated over the course of a year.
Basically, TWh per year is (nameplate capacity)*(capacity factor). Capacity factor being the fraction of the nameplate capacity that the plant actually produces on average. Unfortunately, most people don't know the capacity factors for the different technologies off the top of their head (nuclear is around 0.9, coal/oil around 0.6, hydro about 0.4-0.5, offshore wind about 0.3-0.4, onshore wind bout 0.2-0.25, and solar about 0.15).
Dunno what the capacity factor is for wave generation, but in terms of assessing the real capability of a power plant, TWh per year is the more useful figure since it's directly comparable between different technologies (and against power consumption). Nameplate capacity is (ab)used by solar and wind proponents to exaggerate how much those systems actually generate. If you installed 6 kW worth of solar panels in your home, I'm sorry but it doesn't actually generate 6 kW. That's how much it'll generate on a sunny day at noon if the sun happens to be angled perfectly with the panels. On average (after you factor in night, clouds, angle of the sun, etc) it'll generate 1.1 kW if you're in the desert southwest U.S., 870 watts for most of the rest of the country.
The paper specifically talks about providing scaffolding to those who find themselves with funds, instead of just expecting them to act like an average person with enough money.
Good luck with that. We don't even provide a scaffolding for the average person with money. Everything I learned about opening/using a banking account, getting/repaying a loan, budgeting, interest rates, etc, I learned on my own. I wasn't taught any of it in school (aside from "one of the places you can use this is to calculate finances" in math class). This despite the fact that it's one of the only things nearly everyone needs to know to get by in life (exception being gold diggers who manage to marry a rich spouse).
I worked at a company which hired a lot of low-income and minimum wage employees. From talks with them over lunch, it was clear the majority of them didn't even know how much money they had. They'd just deposit their paycheck, spend until the ATM told them they had no more money, then try to make it to their next paycheck. And if they couldn't make it, they'd get one of those payday loans that "everyone" knows are a bad idea.
I still maintain that a lot of our economic woes would disappear if we (the U.S.) simply added a 1 week required course in personal finances and budgeting to our high school curriculum.
While that's a plausible hypothesis, that's not at all what happened recently. Bush's science research budget increases focused on medicine, and NIH specifically. NASA's research budget actually shrank under Bush (though their overall budget went up slightly once you factor in the D in R&D).
The whole idea that budget trends can be tied to a Presidential administration is flawed anyway. Much of the science budget cuts under Clinton were done at the behest of a Republican Congress who insisted on balancing the budget (yup, the budget surplus under Cliton's administration was the Republicans' doing, not Clinton's, though Clinton to his credit went along with their budget cuts). Likewise, the Democrats in Congress went along with Bush's science budget increases. The President simply says what he wants; it's up to Congress to make it happen (or not happen). If in addition to the Presidential administration, you include which party controls the House and Senate, most of these party-correlated "patterns" in the budget simply vanish.
Would that lead to fewer class action suits? It seems likely, if you reduce the incentive for lawyers to make those suits. If it does lead to fewer class action suits, would that reduce their deterrence of bad behavior by companies? If it does reduce the deterrence effect, could that cost consumers overall more than they lose to class action lawyers today?
The real problem is the disconnect between actual cost to perform the work and the percentage payment. Being paid a percentage is appropriate when the work that needs to be done or the risk assumed (e.g. money invested in a start-up) scales with the money involved. When the work does not scale, being paid a percentage is inappropriate (e.g. 33% lawyer fee for class-action lawsuits, 6% realtor commission, etc).
For the class action lawsuit case in particular, the whole point of a class action lawsuit is to maintain a flat cost by lumping a bunch of similar lawsuits into one. That is, filing the case on behalf of a thousand plaintiffs costs about the same as filing it on behalf of a million of them. If the cost is going to remain flat, it is completely inappropriate to then charge a percentage fee.
If the complaint is true, that means a traditional limo company pays drivers $8 per hour plus tips plus half the FICA tax, and Uber is out there paying people at what amounts to $4 per hour as an "independent contractor" plus no tips and none of the taxes. And those "independent contractors" are in fact the victims of that policy and should be the plaintiffs in the suit.
I helped run a company where we had a couple a couple graphic designers on staff who started as part-time contractors, but whose work duties and hours made them eligible to be employees IMHO. I sat them down, explained the situation and the tax ramifications of both options to them. How even though their take-home pay was higher as an independent contractor, once they paid self-employment tax it'd be the same. And the job benefits (company paid 75% health insurance) would tip the scales in favor of being an employee. Then asked them if they'd like to become employees or remain as contractors.
Both opted to remain independent contractors. I didn't understand why, still don't. Maybe they were used to contracting and wanted to stick with what was familiar to them. Maybe they wanted to retain the independence and self-direction that comes with a contracting role (one of the distinctions the IRS uses is that an employee can be told how to perform a certain task, while a contractor can do it however they like as long as the end product meets the employer's specifications). Maybe they didn't understand the tax situation and still thought they were getting more money as a contractor (I've found a lot of the artist-types have a poor grasp of math).
But not all independent contractors are "victims" of companies trying to take advantage of them. I dunno what's going on in this case, but just because you or I have a preference for being an employee, that doesn't mean any time a company classifies its workers as contractors that it's automatically doing something nefarious. Given how cab drivers operate on their own without supervision, I could see a pretty good argument for them being contractors especially if they're using their own vehicle.
> Vista wasn't particularly bad. It mostly had serious bugs on launch and poor driver support. But, the system itself mainly suffered from the way the UAC worked.
Like they say, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. By the time the initial problems were fixed, we had already decided not to deploy it.
The UAC problems with Vista weren't due to Microsoft "breaking" something. Vista was when Microsoft shifted from the DOS single-user model (where programs the user is running have complete control of the computer) to the Unix multi-user model (where only privileged accounts have full control). See, back when DOS and the initial versions of Windows were first made, networking computers was a rare and expensive thing. Since it was easier to assume that the person using the computer owned it and therefore should be allowed to do anything he wanted to it, that's what they did. When networking became ubiquitous, it exposed all sorts of security flaws in this DOS/Windows single-user model. In contrast, Unix systems were always networked and multi-user (terminals connecting to a main server), so had to come up with solutions for network security from their inception. Vista was when Microsoft abandoned the single-user model and began enforcing the multi-user with different privileges model.
Unfortunately, a huge number of legacy Windows apps were written assuming the single-user model, and broke when they assumed privileges (mostly read/write) which Vista wouldn't giving them. UAC was the work-around for this - if an app requests a privilege it doesn't have, Vista asks the user if it's ok. The fact that the UAC popped up frequently enough to be an annoyance and a perceived negative of Vista was a consequence of the huge number of apps written using the DOS model. Most of these didn't actually need those elevated privileges, they were just written that way because it was easier. Now that app writers are specifically targeting Vista and Win 7/8 (which have the multi-user model), it's become less of an issue.
Unix advocates like myself had been pointing out the huge security problem in the DOS/Windows single-user model since the 1980s. But back then it was popular to tease us as being "nuts" and "geeks" for advocating a "server" OS for home use. The UAC fiasco was your (or your parents') comeuppance for ignoring us and choosing to make the inferior DOS/Windows model the market leader. Microsoft just sold you what you wanted to buy. Until Vista, when they finally wisened up and realized, no, the unruly mob that is the market is not always right. They (correctly) changed Windows to a multi-user model and forced it down the throats of the ignorant, complaining masses for their own good. (In contrast, I see no overriding need to force the Metro interface down our throats.)
Ballmer famously missed the boat on tablets and smartphones
Microsoft didn't miss the boat. They inadvertently helped create the very circumstances which led to them being excluded from the current tablet and smartphones we have today.
Back in the PDA days, it was a two-player game: Palm vs WinCE (later renamed Windows Mobile to get rid of the awful abbreviation). As with Netscape vs IE, Microsoft competed its heart out until it won, then dropped the ball. After Palm was more or less vanquished, Microsoft rested on its laurel. Windows Mobile pretty much went nowhere (and some would say it even went backwards with Microsoft trying to foist the Windows Desktop interface paradigm onto it). Everyone could see phones and PDAs were going to converge (and those who couldn't should've gotten a wake-up call from the Blackberry), but Microsoft made no real effort to add phone capabilities to Windows Mobile. So in the end PDA features ended up being added to phones, instead of phone capability being added to PDAs. And when PDAs went away, so did Windows Mobile.
Microsoft was a major driving force behind the Tablet PC. The Tablet versions of Windows were actually pretty good, especially the handwriting recognition. But where they erred was they wanted to make sure every tablet sold was also a copy of Windows sold. So they focused on making sure tablets were high-end PC notebooks which converted into the tablet form factor. While companies were ok with buying a $2500 tablet, regular people weren't. The immense popularity of netbooks should've been a wake-up call that there was a huge untapped market for a small, (relatively) cheap consumption-only device. But Microsoft did its best to steer manufacturers away from these low-end devices which didn't use Windows (and in fact killed off the Linux-based netbooks by making "Starter" versions of Windows). So tablets were relegated to high-end high-cost devices.
When you manipulate a market like this and steer people away from the direction the market wants to go, you create a lot of invisible pent-up demand. Apple managed to latch onto that demand with a tablet which neither used Windows nor Intel CPUs. Microsoft (and Intel) only have themselves to blame for trying to steer the market in a direction more favorable to themselves, rather than producing what the market wanted. That may have worked in the 1980s when computers were predominantly bought by businesses who could justify their high price by the additional profit they'd help generate. But once people began buying them for home use, the market became much more price-sensitive. I mean what was the point of buying a $2500 tablet PC, when you could buy a $800 laptop and a $500 iPad?
I used to work near a retirement community. 55+, nearby golf course and supermarket shopping mall. Most of the residents had electric golf carts instead of cars and they worked just fine. And that's all this is - a glorified electric golf cart.
I do. One of the courses I took read a lot of short stories from anthologies. The prof only wanted us to read about 5-10 pages per book, and felt that didn't warrant making all of us buy the book. So she reserved the 3 copies at the library for our class and gave us about 2 months to check it out and read it.
Unfortunately, some students checked them out and held onto them for a weeks to read the 5-10 pages. So the next such book, the prof just had the library reserve the book but not make it available for checkout (you could show your ID and request it, read it in the library, and return it). For good measure she also had the library run off a few photocopies of the pages (probably violating copyright) and also had those on reserve.
Nice! I'd love to see a time-lapse video over the course of the next million years watching this black sheep star get flung out of its little flock.
Interesting bit of trivia - the first computational solution discovered for the 3-body problem ended with one of the stars being flung out while the remaining two orbited each other as a binary system. It's since been found that most solutions end up this way. Here's a video of one such system ending with the middle-mass star being flung off.
US Deaths caused by illicit drug overdose - ~5,000 per year
WAR ON DRUGS!!!!
US Deaths caused by automobile accidents - 30,000 per year
umm...
We'll get back to you on that.
Without getting into whether the war on drugs is justified, it's worth pointing out that a fraction of those 34,677 automobile accident deaths are due to illicit drug use. How much is difficult to say since the stats I was able to find last time I looked simply classified those accidents as caused by "driving under the influence" without distinguishing between alcohol and controlled substances. For reference, alcohol alone is responsible for about a third of the automobile accident fatalities. So you should expect a problem on a similar scale of illicit drugs were legalized. (Not saying this is justification for the war on drugs, just pointing out that it's a factor you need to consider.)
And for the people trying to make this a gun control issue, of the 31,718 firearm-caused deaths in 2011, (p18-19) 11,101 (35%) were homicides, 851 (3%) were accidental discharges. The vast majority, 19,766 (62%), were suicides. The U.S. is right in the middle for suicide rates in OECD countries, so it's reasonable to believe most of those suicides would have been successful even without access to guns.
It seems to me that music for which a written score exists is open source by definition, the score being the "source code" for the music.
That's what you'd think, but it's not. If you go look at the composer's original manuscript, it's a bit of a mess. Courts have decided that the process of interpreting it and cleaning it up for typesetting and publication is creative enough to warrant its own copyright. As a result, pretty much any printed music since the early 1900s on is still under copyright. Music publishers pull many of the same tricks you hear about in printed books - a font with a quirk, an occasional typo or flourish added to fingerprint that particular score as theirs, and which if duplicated exactly can be used to prove it was copied.
IMSLP has a huge repository of sheet music which has gone out of copyright and is thus freely distributable. What's really needed is OCR software for sheet music which can then convert those public domain scores to an electronic format, then do a diff with various sources to remove stuff added by the publishers and reverse-engineer what was written by the original composer. Then you'd have something equivalent to "source code" for the music.
." The problem for Prenda being that initiating the torrent would give anyone who grabbed it an implied license.
Good luck using that idea in court.......
The reasoning seems pretty sound to me:
If Prenda did not have the right to distribute the media, then you could make a fairly convincing argument that those who took part in the torrent cannot be fined more than the copyright owners choose to fine Prenda for committing the exact same crime.
If Prenda had the right to distribute the media and chose to distribute it via bittorrent where they knew people would grab a copy for free, then they were implicitly giving away the media for free and anyone who participated in the torrent did not infringe the copyright. If I stand on a street corner and hand out copies of my book, I cannot then turn around and sue anyone who takes a copy for theft. It's only when someone I did not authorize stands on a street corner handing out copies of my book that I can sue him (and the recipients if they knew the book giveaway wasn't legal) for theft.
The only way I can see this going in Prenda's favor is if the court decides that if you willingly give away your stuff to people who believe it's stolen, then they can be sued for theft. But that makes no sense because you'd be suing people for theft when no stealing occurred, even if the people believed they were stealing. If the speed limit is 55 mph, and I think the speed limit is 45 mph and go 55 mph, a cop can't write me a ticket for breaking the speed limit.
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The 2.25% Motorola was asking for was within the norm charged for other standards-essential patents (0.8% - 3.25%).
While I can see an argument that the industry norm is too high and the courts need to bring it down, it's completely untrue that the amount Motorola was asking for was not fair nor reasonable. That's just BS made up by Apple and Microsoft to try to make Motorola look like the bad guy. The amount Motorola requested was within the industry norm, which absent a government-mandated rate is the best measure we have of "fair and reasonable."
I've always maintained that passing laws to protect our privacy is a losing battle. If you make a law to make someone stop doing something they want to do, all that usually ends up happening is they figure out a way to do the exact same thing while skirting around the law.
Instead, we should pollute their data. Create programs which can run when you're not using your computer, which look like multiple browsers and access websites in a random but quasi-human-like fashion. They'll amass tracking cookies, but the cookies will be tracking bots rather than real people. Decrease their signal to noise ratio so much that it's no longer cost-effective to collect people's private data, at least from monitoring people's browsing habits.
Why should a rental store/Netflix have to pay full price to replace a broken DVD? You paid full price to license the movie, not the plastic disc. If the disc is broken, that doesn't nullify the license you already paid for. You should be able to just send the studio the pieces, pay a nominal fee, and get a replacement. That's what Disney does. If the other studios don't offer a similar service, they should be sued for breach of contract (violating the terms of their license where they give you the right to do certain things with the movie in exchange for your money).
It's physical evidence in much the same way that a letter confessing to a crime is physical evidence, and not just ink lines on a piece of paper. Although the content, the meaning, of the writing or data may be virtual, the medium on which they're stored is physical. Hence they're physical evidence. For that matter, the same goes for fingerprints and DNA. The grease or DNA molecules are just the medium. The pattern of lines and pattern of C/T/A/G molecules are what's important, but they are virtual (can exist independently of the medium).
While it's regarded as a rich man's sport, the race has been a major driving force behind research into the use and manufacture of carbon fiber composite structures, and methods for determining computational solutions for the Navier-Stokes equation (which is still unsolved, and is not even known if there is/isn't an algorithmic solution). The race creates an incentive for the super-rich to become early adopters of these technologies. Without the race they'd probably piss their money away on gold toilet seats or who could make the biggest megayacht. At least this way they're spending money on advancing the state of the art for technologies which will eventually benefit you and me.
"Never" is a strong word. It was allowed in the EU up until 2005. The timeframe of the delay before compensation is required was clarified (3 hours) by courts in Oct 2012 (before then, airlines would say a delay wasn't long enough to require compensation). And the EU clarified the rules regarding when the airlines could claim the delay wasn't their fault (and thus they wouldn't have to pay) just two months ago. So what you're describing is actually a very recent development in the EU.
You have to remember the Shuttles were designed in the 1970s. The only thing the military really wanted from the Shuttle was to be able to fly up there, dock with a spy satellite, and refuel it and load fresh film into it. The whole thing became obsolete for their purposes in the 1980s with the advent of digital imaging, and solar-powered reaction wheels to change orientation (fuel is only burned to change the orbit to change when a spy satellite passes over a certain area). In terms of launching military payloads, they were doing just fine before the Shuttle, and they've been doing just fine after. The shuttle never even launched into the polar orbit used for spy satellites.
The original, ambitious, plan for the Shuttles were to launch about 50 a year - one a week. That's the figure the accounting estimates used to amortize the cost of development and maintenance facilities and personnel. If you assume 50 Shuttle launches a year, then it really does end up being cheaper than conventional rockets. Unfortunately, they ended up averaging a bit over 8 launches a year. At that level they were horrendously more expensive than conventional rockets.
U.S. spending on education per student is the second-highest among OECD countries (PPP so no, the higher cost of living here isn't a factor). Money for education is not scarce. If anything, we spend too much money on education.
The problem is that it's spent ineffectively. A class of 30 kids gets over a quarter million dollars a year. In days past that would've been enough to build a new one-room schoolhouse for the kids, then teach them in it. Every year. If the teachers are complaining about having to buy their own supplies for their kids after you account for their $75k (with benefits) salary, you have to ask yourself where is the other $200k going?
It's mostly administrators. They eat up nearly twice as much money as teachers (the remainder pays for things like infrastructure). They are the middlemen of the public education system. They've situated themselves between the money and the teachers/kids, and make sure they get the biggest slice of the pie. If the education budget is ever cut, they make sure that it's the teachers and kids who bear the brunt of it so they'll complain and berate the government for cutting funding. If the budget is ever increased, they'll consume the lion's share of it while letting just enough of it trickle down that the public feels like it's getting something for its money.
His point is that despite all the doom and gloom stories about excess CEO pay, the amount of money the CEOs are making compared to the entire economy is peanuts. Here's a commonly cited paper" on CEO pay in the U.S. The average CEO here makes 273x more than the typical worker, with an average compensation of $14.1 million/yr. The horror!
But if you read the fine print, you see that it only looked at the top 350 companies. If we were to cut these CEOs down to size and confiscated all the money they made last year and redistributed it to the 145 million workers in the U.S., each worker would end up getting ($14.1 million)*(350 CEOs)/(145 million workers) = $34 each. If you divide it by the number of workers in the Fortune 500 (24 million), it's $205 each.
The authors of the paper came up with the methodology for tracking trends in CEO pay over the years. Unfortunately it's been hijacked and misreported to fit the narrative that CEOs in general are siphoning off substantial amounts of money our economy is generating, and if it were fixed everything would be much better. That simply isn't the case. While the top CEOs may make enough money to afford themselves a lavish lifestyle, in terms of the overall economic output of their companies it's peanuts.
If you want a better, broader measure of income inequality, you should be looking at things like Gini coefficient. But "Income inequality 50% worse in U.S. than other Western countries" isn't as great a headline as "CEOs make 273x more than their workers."
Maybe they just pay their employees more, instead of paying them less and "giving" them a portion of the CEO's bonus at the end of the fiscal year?
Here we go. Google to the rescue.
Alas the NY Times seems intent on making sure nobody reads the story and has put your link behind a login page too.
Here's the video at least. Not the down-ressed YouTube version included in the NYT article, but the original HD version posted by the National Park Service.
http://vimeo.com/73310936
No they're not confused, both terms refer to different things.
Terawatts (or more frequently, megawatts) refers to the so-called nameplate capacity - the peak generating capacity of the plant.
Terawatt-hours per year refers to the actual energy generated over the course of a year.
Basically, TWh per year is (nameplate capacity)*(capacity factor). Capacity factor being the fraction of the nameplate capacity that the plant actually produces on average. Unfortunately, most people don't know the capacity factors for the different technologies off the top of their head (nuclear is around 0.9, coal/oil around 0.6, hydro about 0.4-0.5, offshore wind about 0.3-0.4, onshore wind bout 0.2-0.25, and solar about 0.15).
Dunno what the capacity factor is for wave generation, but in terms of assessing the real capability of a power plant, TWh per year is the more useful figure since it's directly comparable between different technologies (and against power consumption). Nameplate capacity is (ab)used by solar and wind proponents to exaggerate how much those systems actually generate. If you installed 6 kW worth of solar panels in your home, I'm sorry but it doesn't actually generate 6 kW. That's how much it'll generate on a sunny day at noon if the sun happens to be angled perfectly with the panels. On average (after you factor in night, clouds, angle of the sun, etc) it'll generate 1.1 kW if you're in the desert southwest U.S., 870 watts for most of the rest of the country.
Good luck with that. We don't even provide a scaffolding for the average person with money. Everything I learned about opening/using a banking account, getting/repaying a loan, budgeting, interest rates, etc, I learned on my own. I wasn't taught any of it in school (aside from "one of the places you can use this is to calculate finances" in math class). This despite the fact that it's one of the only things nearly everyone needs to know to get by in life (exception being gold diggers who manage to marry a rich spouse).
I worked at a company which hired a lot of low-income and minimum wage employees. From talks with them over lunch, it was clear the majority of them didn't even know how much money they had. They'd just deposit their paycheck, spend until the ATM told them they had no more money, then try to make it to their next paycheck. And if they couldn't make it, they'd get one of those payday loans that "everyone" knows are a bad idea.
I still maintain that a lot of our economic woes would disappear if we (the U.S.) simply added a 1 week required course in personal finances and budgeting to our high school curriculum.
While that's a plausible hypothesis, that's not at all what happened recently. Bush's science research budget increases focused on medicine, and NIH specifically. NASA's research budget actually shrank under Bush (though their overall budget went up slightly once you factor in the D in R&D).
The whole idea that budget trends can be tied to a Presidential administration is flawed anyway. Much of the science budget cuts under Clinton were done at the behest of a Republican Congress who insisted on balancing the budget (yup, the budget surplus under Cliton's administration was the Republicans' doing, not Clinton's, though Clinton to his credit went along with their budget cuts). Likewise, the Democrats in Congress went along with Bush's science budget increases. The President simply says what he wants; it's up to Congress to make it happen (or not happen). If in addition to the Presidential administration, you include which party controls the House and Senate, most of these party-correlated "patterns" in the budget simply vanish.
The real problem is the disconnect between actual cost to perform the work and the percentage payment. Being paid a percentage is appropriate when the work that needs to be done or the risk assumed (e.g. money invested in a start-up) scales with the money involved. When the work does not scale, being paid a percentage is inappropriate (e.g. 33% lawyer fee for class-action lawsuits, 6% realtor commission, etc).
For the class action lawsuit case in particular, the whole point of a class action lawsuit is to maintain a flat cost by lumping a bunch of similar lawsuits into one. That is, filing the case on behalf of a thousand plaintiffs costs about the same as filing it on behalf of a million of them. If the cost is going to remain flat, it is completely inappropriate to then charge a percentage fee.
I helped run a company where we had a couple a couple graphic designers on staff who started as part-time contractors, but whose work duties and hours made them eligible to be employees IMHO. I sat them down, explained the situation and the tax ramifications of both options to them. How even though their take-home pay was higher as an independent contractor, once they paid self-employment tax it'd be the same. And the job benefits (company paid 75% health insurance) would tip the scales in favor of being an employee. Then asked them if they'd like to become employees or remain as contractors.
Both opted to remain independent contractors. I didn't understand why, still don't. Maybe they were used to contracting and wanted to stick with what was familiar to them. Maybe they wanted to retain the independence and self-direction that comes with a contracting role (one of the distinctions the IRS uses is that an employee can be told how to perform a certain task, while a contractor can do it however they like as long as the end product meets the employer's specifications). Maybe they didn't understand the tax situation and still thought they were getting more money as a contractor (I've found a lot of the artist-types have a poor grasp of math).
But not all independent contractors are "victims" of companies trying to take advantage of them. I dunno what's going on in this case, but just because you or I have a preference for being an employee, that doesn't mean any time a company classifies its workers as contractors that it's automatically doing something nefarious. Given how cab drivers operate on their own without supervision, I could see a pretty good argument for them being contractors especially if they're using their own vehicle.
The UAC problems with Vista weren't due to Microsoft "breaking" something. Vista was when Microsoft shifted from the DOS single-user model (where programs the user is running have complete control of the computer) to the Unix multi-user model (where only privileged accounts have full control). See, back when DOS and the initial versions of Windows were first made, networking computers was a rare and expensive thing. Since it was easier to assume that the person using the computer owned it and therefore should be allowed to do anything he wanted to it, that's what they did. When networking became ubiquitous, it exposed all sorts of security flaws in this DOS/Windows single-user model. In contrast, Unix systems were always networked and multi-user (terminals connecting to a main server), so had to come up with solutions for network security from their inception. Vista was when Microsoft abandoned the single-user model and began enforcing the multi-user with different privileges model.
Unfortunately, a huge number of legacy Windows apps were written assuming the single-user model, and broke when they assumed privileges (mostly read/write) which Vista wouldn't giving them. UAC was the work-around for this - if an app requests a privilege it doesn't have, Vista asks the user if it's ok. The fact that the UAC popped up frequently enough to be an annoyance and a perceived negative of Vista was a consequence of the huge number of apps written using the DOS model. Most of these didn't actually need those elevated privileges, they were just written that way because it was easier. Now that app writers are specifically targeting Vista and Win 7/8 (which have the multi-user model), it's become less of an issue.
Unix advocates like myself had been pointing out the huge security problem in the DOS/Windows single-user model since the 1980s. But back then it was popular to tease us as being "nuts" and "geeks" for advocating a "server" OS for home use. The UAC fiasco was your (or your parents') comeuppance for ignoring us and choosing to make the inferior DOS/Windows model the market leader. Microsoft just sold you what you wanted to buy. Until Vista, when they finally wisened up and realized, no, the unruly mob that is the market is not always right. They (correctly) changed Windows to a multi-user model and forced it down the throats of the ignorant, complaining masses for their own good. (In contrast, I see no overriding need to force the Metro interface down our throats.)
Microsoft didn't miss the boat. They inadvertently helped create the very circumstances which led to them being excluded from the current tablet and smartphones we have today.
Back in the PDA days, it was a two-player game: Palm vs WinCE (later renamed Windows Mobile to get rid of the awful abbreviation). As with Netscape vs IE, Microsoft competed its heart out until it won, then dropped the ball. After Palm was more or less vanquished, Microsoft rested on its laurel. Windows Mobile pretty much went nowhere (and some would say it even went backwards with Microsoft trying to foist the Windows Desktop interface paradigm onto it). Everyone could see phones and PDAs were going to converge (and those who couldn't should've gotten a wake-up call from the Blackberry), but Microsoft made no real effort to add phone capabilities to Windows Mobile. So in the end PDA features ended up being added to phones, instead of phone capability being added to PDAs. And when PDAs went away, so did Windows Mobile.
Microsoft was a major driving force behind the Tablet PC. The Tablet versions of Windows were actually pretty good, especially the handwriting recognition. But where they erred was they wanted to make sure every tablet sold was also a copy of Windows sold. So they focused on making sure tablets were high-end PC notebooks which converted into the tablet form factor. While companies were ok with buying a $2500 tablet, regular people weren't. The immense popularity of netbooks should've been a wake-up call that there was a huge untapped market for a small, (relatively) cheap consumption-only device. But Microsoft did its best to steer manufacturers away from these low-end devices which didn't use Windows (and in fact killed off the Linux-based netbooks by making "Starter" versions of Windows). So tablets were relegated to high-end high-cost devices.
When you manipulate a market like this and steer people away from the direction the market wants to go, you create a lot of invisible pent-up demand. Apple managed to latch onto that demand with a tablet which neither used Windows nor Intel CPUs. Microsoft (and Intel) only have themselves to blame for trying to steer the market in a direction more favorable to themselves, rather than producing what the market wanted. That may have worked in the 1980s when computers were predominantly bought by businesses who could justify their high price by the additional profit they'd help generate. But once people began buying them for home use, the market became much more price-sensitive. I mean what was the point of buying a $2500 tablet PC, when you could buy a $800 laptop and a $500 iPad?
I used to work near a retirement community. 55+, nearby golf course and supermarket shopping mall. Most of the residents had electric golf carts instead of cars and they worked just fine. And that's all this is - a glorified electric golf cart.
I do. One of the courses I took read a lot of short stories from anthologies. The prof only wanted us to read about 5-10 pages per book, and felt that didn't warrant making all of us buy the book. So she reserved the 3 copies at the library for our class and gave us about 2 months to check it out and read it.
Unfortunately, some students checked them out and held onto them for a weeks to read the 5-10 pages. So the next such book, the prof just had the library reserve the book but not make it available for checkout (you could show your ID and request it, read it in the library, and return it). For good measure she also had the library run off a few photocopies of the pages (probably violating copyright) and also had those on reserve.
Interesting bit of trivia - the first computational solution discovered for the 3-body problem ended with one of the stars being flung out while the remaining two orbited each other as a binary system. It's since been found that most solutions end up this way. Here's a video of one such system ending with the middle-mass star being flung off.
Without getting into whether the war on drugs is justified, it's worth pointing out that a fraction of those 34,677 automobile accident deaths are due to illicit drug use. How much is difficult to say since the stats I was able to find last time I looked simply classified those accidents as caused by "driving under the influence" without distinguishing between alcohol and controlled substances. For reference, alcohol alone is responsible for about a third of the automobile accident fatalities. So you should expect a problem on a similar scale of illicit drugs were legalized. (Not saying this is justification for the war on drugs, just pointing out that it's a factor you need to consider.)
And for the people trying to make this a gun control issue, of the 31,718 firearm-caused deaths in 2011, (p18-19) 11,101 (35%) were homicides, 851 (3%) were accidental discharges. The vast majority, 19,766 (62%), were suicides. The U.S. is right in the middle for suicide rates in OECD countries, so it's reasonable to believe most of those suicides would have been successful even without access to guns.
That's what you'd think, but it's not. If you go look at the composer's original manuscript, it's a bit of a mess. Courts have decided that the process of interpreting it and cleaning it up for typesetting and publication is creative enough to warrant its own copyright. As a result, pretty much any printed music since the early 1900s on is still under copyright. Music publishers pull many of the same tricks you hear about in printed books - a font with a quirk, an occasional typo or flourish added to fingerprint that particular score as theirs, and which if duplicated exactly can be used to prove it was copied.
IMSLP has a huge repository of sheet music which has gone out of copyright and is thus freely distributable. What's really needed is OCR software for sheet music which can then convert those public domain scores to an electronic format, then do a diff with various sources to remove stuff added by the publishers and reverse-engineer what was written by the original composer. Then you'd have something equivalent to "source code" for the music.
The reasoning seems pretty sound to me:
If Prenda did not have the right to distribute the media, then you could make a fairly convincing argument that those who took part in the torrent cannot be fined more than the copyright owners choose to fine Prenda for committing the exact same crime.
If Prenda had the right to distribute the media and chose to distribute it via bittorrent where they knew people would grab a copy for free, then they were implicitly giving away the media for free and anyone who participated in the torrent did not infringe the copyright. If I stand on a street corner and hand out copies of my book, I cannot then turn around and sue anyone who takes a copy for theft. It's only when someone I did not authorize stands on a street corner handing out copies of my book that I can sue him (and the recipients if they knew the book giveaway wasn't legal) for theft.
The only way I can see this going in Prenda's favor is if the court decides that if you willingly give away your stuff to people who believe it's stolen, then they can be sued for theft. But that makes no sense because you'd be suing people for theft when no stealing occurred, even if the people believed they were stealing. If the speed limit is 55 mph, and I think the speed limit is 45 mph and go 55 mph, a cop can't write me a ticket for breaking the speed limit.