If you have 3 lines, you'd think that 2/3rds of the time there's another line which moves faster. But if you're in a slower line, you're spending more time in that line. So with three lines, you're only in the fastest line for 1/3rd of your purchases. But you're in the fastest line less than 1/3rd of the time. The way Fry's does it with a single queue is pretty much the best way (I can think of an exception for those 10 items or fewer lines).
The term was coined in 1950 by Henry A. Landsberger[3] when analysing older experiments from 1924-1932 at the Hawthorne Works (a Western Electric factory outside Chicago). Hawthorne Works had commissioned a study to see if its workers would become more productive in higher or lower levels of light. The workers' productivity seemed to improve when changes were made and slumped when the study was concluded. It was suggested that the productivity gain was due to the motivational effect of the interest being shown in them.
See Rambus and their previous lawsuit wins and their current business operations which are still based on those same patents.
That's the first thing that came to my mind too. But the courts didn't decide in Rambus' favor. They decided that Rambus did violate JEDEC's rules for participation. Unfortunately JEDEC's rules didn't specify a punishment for a member violating its rules. Meanwhile the rules for violating patent law were very clear on their punishments under U.S. law.
Basically, hiding patents while participating in a standards body is not illegal per se. It's the fact that it violates the rules of the standards body which makes it illegal. But since that legality stems from the standards body's rules, the punishment also has to be specified in those rules. JEDEC didn't specify those punishments, so even though Rambus illegally violated their rules, there was no legal punishment they could impose on Rambus for that violation. At best, all they could get Rambus on was breach of contract, and rescind Rambus' membership in JEDEC. But that wouldn't affect any of Rambus' patents.
On line photos which could be downloaded for a fee (or free) were incorporated on the net before there even was a net.
Which is long before Kodak even wised up to the fact that their world was coming to an end.
Kodak owns so many patents on digital photography and digital imaging precisely because they wised up to the fact that the film world was coming to an end. They wised up to it probably before most of you were even born. They made the first digital camera in 1975. They had professional digital camera gear for the press at market in 1991, the 1.3 MP DCS-100. Consumer digital cameras as we know them today (with a rear LCD) didn't show up until 1995, with the 0.25 MP Casio CV-10. The reason Kodak is still around despite the death of film and their lack of success with digital products is because just about everyone making digital cameras and camcorders pays them hefty royalties to license their patents.
While what they're doing may seem patent-trollish due to them being unable to successfully market a product based on their patents, they were in fact pioneers in the field of digital imaging. Their patent portfolio was legitimately earned through R&D, and they have marketed products using those technologies. They're not trolls buying up patents from defunct companies, sitting on them until someone else develops a product based on the idea, waiting for it to become successful, then suing. They are using patents the way they were intended to be used.
Good point, the free market can sort this out. I'll just dump comcast and sign up with my local dial up. That'll show them.
I don't know why so many people insist on calling government-mandated monopolies or duopolies like Comcast a free market. If anything, they're a textbook example of how government can screw up a free market in the name of some other good. The local governments artificially limited the market for these services to one or two suppliers under the misguided belief that if they didn't do so, companies wouldn't build out the necessary infrastructure, and wouldn't cover the lower income areas.
Back before the courts overturned the FCC requirement that phone companies lease their lines to anyone offering DSL service, I could shop around for DSL service from a dozen or so different companies. All had different features, rates, customer service, guarantees, and prices. That was the closest thing we've had to a free market in network service.
After a lot of discussion with people from across the political spectrum, the best solution IMHO would be to treat network bandwidth like a public utility. A single company contracts with the government to wire up your hose and the neighborhood. But they are prohibited from providing Internet service themselves. All they can do is lease their lines (at rates monitored and approved by the government) to other companies which provide the actual service. This avoids the waste of wiring up multiple connections to the same house (unless they're different technologies), while preserving competition among service providers.
So what the hell does clearing a check mean? I always assumed that this means that the bank verified that the check was good and they received the funds from the other bank. How much later can a bank claim that a check is no good after it has cleared it?
That's what it used to mean. But (1) some people got upset over having to wait for how long it took to verify certain checks, and (2) many banks were abusing it to hold the customer's money for a few extra days and make interest off of it. As a result, laws were passed which mandated the banks credit your account for a deposit within a certain amount of time (usually a day). Unfortunately, those laws make this type of scam possible for those who mistakenly think that when a check clears, that means the money is yours.
Ideally, the money should become available the instant the bank verifies that the check is legit, at which point it should become the bank's problem if it turns out not to be legit. In this type of fraud, the bank should be acting as a collective insurance service for its depositers. When a bank gets robbed, the bank doesn't say "I'm sorry Mr. Smith, I'm afraid the robber took off with $60k in bills, including all $36,427 in your account." Instead, they eat the initial hit and redistribute the losses to their customers in the form of service fees, spreading out the losses in the same way as insurance.
Indeed, this fallacy keeps popping up. If I commit severe crimes and attempt to cover it up you have the right, and I would even dare to say *duty*, to violate my privacy for justice.
Not without sufficient evidence of the crimes to convince a judge that it's worth violating your privacy for justice. If you skip that step, even if you do uncover crimes, the evidence is inadmissible in court in most progressive countries.
You have to remember that any procedures you come up with for dealing with crimes have to function both when the suspect is guilty and when he's innocent, since you cannot know before-hand whether or not the suspect is guilty or innocent.
You know, once upon a time, the G in 2G, 3G, and 4G meant "generation". As in 2nd generation technology, 3rd generation technology, etc. Why do we even care what generation technology a phone provider is using? Just require them to publish, or have the government conduct tests and publish, the average and peak down/upload speeds you get on their networks.
Since WWII, there are have been precisely two periods where the ratio of U.S debt to GDP rose in a sustained way. The first was under Reagan/Bush, when under Reagan especially, the (democratic) congress consistently approved a budget that was lower than what the president recommended. The second was under Bush Jr./Obama.
That's a bit of a deceptive way to view it since it makes it appear that debt was shrinking most of the time, when in fact it was growth in GDP (inflation) which is causing existing debt to become a smaller share, not fiscal responsibility.
If you look at the historical revenue vs. outlays, you'll see that Washington has an almost completely pathetic record of spending within their means. Except for a brief period in the 1950s and during the 1990s when Clinton and a Republican Congress coupled with the tech bubble managed to achieve budget surpluses, every administration and session of Congress since WWII has had a budget deficit. It's not a matter of some years being good and some being bad. Nearly all were bad, just some were worse than others. (Raw numbers here if you want.)
Yes, it's been said on/. a million times before: end the freakin' wars. Stop the runaway military spending. It's that simple.
No it's not that simple. I wish the people saying this would go to the Congressional Budget Office web site and actually try reading some of the budget projections instead of parroting some line which happens to fit their worldview.
In a nutshell, U.S. military spending has more or less been steadily declining as a percentage of the GDP and percentage of the budget, up until 9/11. After 9/11 it started to tick upwards, but is still near the lowest it's been since WWII. It's actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been getting smaller over the last 50 years.
What's killing the budget are the social programs. Specifically Medicare/Medicaid, though Social Security rears its head every now and then. Medicare and Medicaid are projected to grow so much and so quickly that if we completely eliminated all military spending - dropped it to zero - within about 20-25 years the growth in Medicare/Medicaid will have consumed all of the savings.
This isn't a conservative problem, this isn't a liberal problem. It's a straight-up accounting/math problem, and I know most of the folks here are pretty good at math. Put aside any preconceptions you may have. Go read the the CBO report on the budget. See for yourself where the problems in the budget are.
Wedding photographers already went through this. They used to charge a nominal amount or nothing for shooting the wedding, but would charge you big bucks to order prints of the photos. Naturally, when scanners and photo printers became cheap, people would just scan the prints they had already bought (or sometimes even scan the ordering contact sheets), and print out their own copies.
Today, wedding photographers charge big bucks to shoot your wedding. But the prints are usually free or at-cost. Some of them will even give you the raw files (digital "negatives") of the shoot so you can process the photos on your own in the future if you wish.
When reality meets an outdated business model, there's a lot of inertia on the side of reality.
I don't think Assange deserved it. While Wikileaks has been big news, there's nothing really new or innovative about it that hasn't been done before. It just happened to be the recipient of the news scoop of the decade. If we look back in a few years, after we've had some time to digest all the events of this year, I think that in hindsight the obvious choice for Person of the Year, the person who for better or worse has done the most to influence the events of the year, will be: Bradley Manning.
I assume you're taking into account being hit by an SUV while driving a different car.
Actually, NHTSA studied fatality rates by vehicle type. SUVs do offer more protection in collisions by virtue of their greater mass. But this is almost exactly offset by their greater tendency to roll over (and higher fatality rate in roll-overs). Consequently, occupants of mid-size SUVs are only slightly safer than occupants of small cars, and occupants of full-size SUVs are slightly more likely to die than occupants of medium- and full-size sedans.
It is certainly preferable to having the corporations make those decisions.
Not in this case.
A corporation is only interested in its bottom line (they are compelled to do this by law in fact) not the national interest. So raking in large fees for service that is far below international standards is perfectly fine for them. If you believe that the Internet is important and that new industries and productive activities can grow out of state-of-the-art high speed data access then the U.S. is at a competitive disadvantage. You cable company doesn't care about this but national politicians should.
The politicians had their chance and blew it. They awarded cable and DSL contracts to a single provider and made it illegal for other companies to enter the market. That's what's causing the slow rate of broadband improvement. Get rid of those exclusive service contracts. All they do is allow ISPs to get away with spending as little money as possible by greasing some palms at city hall. Open up the ISP market to some real competition and companies will start caring more about providing the most bandwidth for the lowest price, instead of how they can game the system to make the most money while offering the least service.
Don't worry, the invisible hand of the marketplace will exert it's influence opening up more options for us. As soon as a competitor sees the opportunity to.... Oh, wait... Nevermind.
The free market isn't working in most markets because the municipal governments have selected one cable provider and one phone provider to service the area. It's illegal for a competitor to enter the market. Get rid of those exclusive contracts with the city and things should improve. When I was living in a Boston suburb, the city approved a second cable company to provide service in the area. I didn't switch, but my cable/internet bill dropped by $10/mo, and service improved (wait times on customer support and for scheduled service both decreased, and the window for what time the cable serviceman would arrive narrowed from a half-day block to a 2-hour block).
There are a lot of places where a truly free market has screwed things up, but this isn't one of them. The blame in this one rests at the feet of government.
If it can simultaneously harvest energy from two sources, then it's harvesting from light and heat. If it can only harvest from light or heat, it can't do it simultaneously. If you RTFA, you see that the latter is correct, and so the word "simultaneously" does not belong in the summary.
Along with the organic material that works as a generator from both light and heat, Fujitsu also used two different semiconductor materials so that the electrical circuits could could change from one mode to the other. Using an N-Type semiconductor, harvests energy from light. Changing to the P-Type semiconductor, harvest energy from heat.
This has always puzzled me. The passengers are thoroughly inspected, but I see many airports where you can still reach (and compromise) the planes themselves quite easily.
That's because airport security is security theater. Even with terrorism and accidents, planes are already the safest way to travel between two points. The security at the airport is just a dog and pony show to reassure fliers and give the impression that the government is "doing something about it". The effectiveness of the security measure is rather meaningless because a 50% reduction in almost-never will still be almost-never.
In fact concern over the new scanners and pat-downs at airports is probably going to kill more people than any terrorists. People uncomfortable with the invasion of privacy may choose to drive to their destination rather than fly. And you're roughly 15-20x more likely to die from an automobile accident than from a plane crash/terrorist incident over a trip of the same distance.
Such as censoring Wikileaks for being a "terrorist organization" and "subverting state power", say.
This is what I've been trying to say about the whole Wikileaks thing. Cause and effect is not a one-way street here. Wikileaks and its supports say they're doing it to help make government more transparent and root out corruption, and done properly it can do that. The problem is that many people seem to have this implicit assumption that exposing corruption automatically means it'll be fixed, and thus release of information guarantees the overall amount of corruption is lessened, and thus it's always beneficial to release information. But that's not the only possible outcome. Another possibility is that closed governments will see what Wikileaks is doing as validation of their closedness, and open governments will "see the error of their ways" and become more closed. In other words, what Wikileaks is doing can cause the opposite of what they're trying to accomplish.
Release of secret documents needs to be done in a judicious and controlled manner. There has to be very little controversy that the documents released do in fact pertain to corruption (or alleged corruption). Most of the citizens have to agree that it's a good thing the documents were made public in order to generate the socio-political will to fix the corruption. If you fail to do that, like Wikileaks is doing by indiscriminately releasing almost the entirety of the State Dept. docs, all you've done is convinced governments that they need to work harder to keep their secrets, and given them the support of a large portion of their citizens in doing it.
So while a model file showing all the dimensions of a part may be freely tradeable, the machine path required to build that part in the least time or least material may well be copyrightable under current laws.
I would think that while a generic machine path could be copyrightable, the least-time or least-material paths for a specific model would be unique, and thus mathematical facts, and not copyrightable. Now, an algorithm to determine the least-time or least-material paths given a model file as input, that may be copyrightable.
(I'm not even sure a model file showing all the dimensions of a part would be freely tradeable, unless the original creator designated it so, or someone else reverse-engineered an original to create the model file.)
It's a joke. It's funny. It's not people gaming a system, it's people being funny.
If you haven't yet read the top review on the Tuscan milk, it is easily one of the most brilliant pieces of writing on the Internet. And done anonymously too.
Revealing the corruption in publicly owned businesses and in the government and seeing which politicians are bought and paid for by whom is responsible journalism. [...]
Completely agreed.
Maybe future leaders will re-think their actions when they not only realize that future generations will consider them to be scumbags and tyrants, but there can be a very real and immediate danger to their own lives in the here and now.
Corruption is widespread and it needs to be revealed - names and all. It will serve as excellent deterrent in the future.
See, this is where I and probably others, have some issues with what Wikileaks is doing. Unlike many in the anti-US crowd, I've seen what a totalitarian government can do. A REAL totalitarian government, not the mostly-democratic but just-corrupt-enough-to-upset-the-idealists government the US has. Are you upset someone who publicly humiliated the U.S. government to the entire world is being jailed on trumped-up charges? How about being executed and your entire family sent to a labor camp because you talked to a neighbor wondering if your country's style of government could be improved.
Unfortunately, a good portion of the world still lives under such such governments. When you do something whose main purpose seems to be to embarrass the U.S. rather than actually expose corruption, what happens? The U.S. loses influence in the world. But who do you think gains influence? Sure some of the less-corrupt democracies do, except their openness means they're vulnerable to the same blind-eye type releases of secrets Wikileaks is conducting. No, the real winners here are totalitarian states which keep a tight lid on their secrets. They gain the most from a system which predominantly exposes the secrets of open societies. You seem to think exposing slight-to-moderate levels of corruption means it'll automatically be replaced by less corruption. It doesn't - it can be replaced by even worse corruption.
We're still fighting a war here. Not the war on terrorism, not a war against corruption. A war to free the remaining peoples of the world who live under totalitarianism (real totalitarianism). On that front, the U.S., the EU, Wikileaks, and people like you and me are on the same side. Yes rooting out corruption is good. And as your opening sentence says, journalism revealing such corruption is necessary. It allows the open society to excise the corruption, resulting in a stronger society. That's what makes an open society work better than a closed (totalitarian) society.
But to accomplish that requires a proper and controlled release of information pertaining to true corruption. The Wikileaks-style widescale release of everything an open government is keeping secret doesn't do that. In fact it does the opposite, by diminishing US influence and allowing the influence of totalitarian states to fill the void created. Yes a lot of things the US does is bad. But try to keep some perspective. Sometimes you have to make deals with a party you don't entirely agree with in order to combat a greater evil. Roosevelt and Churchill did that during WWII, allying with Stalin to defeat Hitler. Did that mean they supported Stalin and his system of government? No. But they kept things in perspective and did what needed to be done to insure the greater threat was wiped out first. Then they set about opposing Stalin.
Going through the leaked documents, finding instances of corruption or wrong-doing, and releasing them would be responsible journalism. Making a cursory review to filter out ones which might put lives at risk, then saying you don't have the resources to deal with the rest in more detail and releasing them en masse to the world is irresponsible journalism. If you don't have the resources to conduct such a review, give the docs to a news organization which does.
The Times vs. U.S. decision was with regards to prior restraint. i.e. Could the government prevent the press from publishing a classified document solely on the basis that doing so would harm national security? It did not address whether such publication was in and of itself legal. And indeed the NY Times was charged with espionage after the publication. As much as I dislike quoting wikipedia, they have a succinct summary of the legal ramifications of the case:
Times v. United States is generally considered a victory for an extensive reading of the First Amendment, but as the Supreme Court ruled on whether the government had made a successful case for prior restraint, its decision did not void the Espionage Act or give the press unlimited freedom to publish classified documents. A majority of the justices ruled that the government could still prosecute the Times and the Post for violating the Espionage Act by publishing the documents. Ellsberg and Russo were not acquitted of violating the Espionage Act; they were freed due to a mistrial from irregularities in the government's case.
So in a nutshell, what Times vs. U.S. decided was that it might or might not be illegal to publish certain classified documents. But the U.S. government couldn't practice prior restraint, couldn't bar the press from publishing any classified documents, solely on the grounds of national security. They would have to be published, then the courts could decide case-by-case whether such publication was illegal. It wasn't a blanket pass that all such publication is legal (though to my understanding, nobody in the press has successfully been prosecuted for espionage for such publications).
The publishing industry, being the sole supplier of many popular magazines and newspapers, refused to release those magazines and newspapers in ebook format until a hardware manufacturer agreed to all their onerous DRM requirements. Apple was the only one who took them up on the offer, and the iPad was the result. Now they're finding out some of the problems that come with having to deal with a sole supplier (in this case, for the hardware platform on which your electronic publications are distributed). Serves them right I say. Pot, meet kettle.
Remember there's a different standard of evidence and all that. I'm not saying this judge wasn't an exceptionally good jurist, just that part of the reason is probably because all the *AA shit we've been hearing about has been civil. Given that there's no presumption of responsibility or lack thereof and the standard is more or less "Whoever had a slightly more convincing case," that is probably part of the reason they stayed out of it more.
If the guy was facing jail time and felony charges, then it was a criminal trial. The only punishment you can get from a civil trial is a fine.
Many TVs have features that allow you to level out the sound from programming to commercials (kind of an old school ad blocker). That is how the market has seen fit to address this problem.
The market doesn't correct this "problem" because it's not a market problem. The viewer is not the customer; they are the product. They're not the ones directly paying for the TV shows so they get very little say in what gets broadcast. The advertisers are the ones paying - they are the customer. So the market tries to give them what they want - louder commercials to better get the attention of viewers.
The only say the viewers have in this is that unlike most other products, the TV broadcasters cannot manufacture them at will. They have to be captured with bait (engrossing TV shows). The broadcasters recognize that the advertising needs to be tolerable so as not to completely counter the effectiveness of the bait or they'd lose too many viewers. So they'll make a token effort to keep volume in commercials somewhat reasonable. But their primary incentive is to please the advertisers.
The volume-lowering feature shows up in TV sets because when buying a TV, the viewer is the customer.
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If you have 3 lines, you'd think that 2/3rds of the time there's another line which moves faster. But if you're in a slower line, you're spending more time in that line. So with three lines, you're only in the fastest line for 1/3rd of your purchases. But you're in the fastest line less than 1/3rd of the time. The way Fry's does it with a single queue is pretty much the best way (I can think of an exception for those 10 items or fewer lines).
That's the first thing that came to my mind too. But the courts didn't decide in Rambus' favor. They decided that Rambus did violate JEDEC's rules for participation. Unfortunately JEDEC's rules didn't specify a punishment for a member violating its rules. Meanwhile the rules for violating patent law were very clear on their punishments under U.S. law.
Basically, hiding patents while participating in a standards body is not illegal per se. It's the fact that it violates the rules of the standards body which makes it illegal. But since that legality stems from the standards body's rules, the punishment also has to be specified in those rules. JEDEC didn't specify those punishments, so even though Rambus illegally violated their rules, there was no legal punishment they could impose on Rambus for that violation. At best, all they could get Rambus on was breach of contract, and rescind Rambus' membership in JEDEC. But that wouldn't affect any of Rambus' patents.
Kodak owns so many patents on digital photography and digital imaging precisely because they wised up to the fact that the film world was coming to an end. They wised up to it probably before most of you were even born. They made the first digital camera in 1975. They had professional digital camera gear for the press at market in 1991, the 1.3 MP DCS-100. Consumer digital cameras as we know them today (with a rear LCD) didn't show up until 1995, with the 0.25 MP Casio CV-10. The reason Kodak is still around despite the death of film and their lack of success with digital products is because just about everyone making digital cameras and camcorders pays them hefty royalties to license their patents.
While what they're doing may seem patent-trollish due to them being unable to successfully market a product based on their patents, they were in fact pioneers in the field of digital imaging. Their patent portfolio was legitimately earned through R&D, and they have marketed products using those technologies. They're not trolls buying up patents from defunct companies, sitting on them until someone else develops a product based on the idea, waiting for it to become successful, then suing. They are using patents the way they were intended to be used.
I don't know why so many people insist on calling government-mandated monopolies or duopolies like Comcast a free market. If anything, they're a textbook example of how government can screw up a free market in the name of some other good. The local governments artificially limited the market for these services to one or two suppliers under the misguided belief that if they didn't do so, companies wouldn't build out the necessary infrastructure, and wouldn't cover the lower income areas.
Back before the courts overturned the FCC requirement that phone companies lease their lines to anyone offering DSL service, I could shop around for DSL service from a dozen or so different companies. All had different features, rates, customer service, guarantees, and prices. That was the closest thing we've had to a free market in network service.
After a lot of discussion with people from across the political spectrum, the best solution IMHO would be to treat network bandwidth like a public utility. A single company contracts with the government to wire up your hose and the neighborhood. But they are prohibited from providing Internet service themselves. All they can do is lease their lines (at rates monitored and approved by the government) to other companies which provide the actual service. This avoids the waste of wiring up multiple connections to the same house (unless they're different technologies), while preserving competition among service providers.
That's what it used to mean. But (1) some people got upset over having to wait for how long it took to verify certain checks, and (2) many banks were abusing it to hold the customer's money for a few extra days and make interest off of it. As a result, laws were passed which mandated the banks credit your account for a deposit within a certain amount of time (usually a day). Unfortunately, those laws make this type of scam possible for those who mistakenly think that when a check clears, that means the money is yours.
Ideally, the money should become available the instant the bank verifies that the check is legit, at which point it should become the bank's problem if it turns out not to be legit. In this type of fraud, the bank should be acting as a collective insurance service for its depositers. When a bank gets robbed, the bank doesn't say "I'm sorry Mr. Smith, I'm afraid the robber took off with $60k in bills, including all $36,427 in your account." Instead, they eat the initial hit and redistribute the losses to their customers in the form of service fees, spreading out the losses in the same way as insurance.
Not without sufficient evidence of the crimes to convince a judge that it's worth violating your privacy for justice. If you skip that step, even if you do uncover crimes, the evidence is inadmissible in court in most progressive countries.
You have to remember that any procedures you come up with for dealing with crimes have to function both when the suspect is guilty and when he's innocent, since you cannot know before-hand whether or not the suspect is guilty or innocent.
You know, once upon a time, the G in 2G, 3G, and 4G meant "generation". As in 2nd generation technology, 3rd generation technology, etc. Why do we even care what generation technology a phone provider is using? Just require them to publish, or have the government conduct tests and publish, the average and peak down/upload speeds you get on their networks.
That's a bit of a deceptive way to view it since it makes it appear that debt was shrinking most of the time, when in fact it was growth in GDP (inflation) which is causing existing debt to become a smaller share, not fiscal responsibility.
If you look at the historical revenue vs. outlays, you'll see that Washington has an almost completely pathetic record of spending within their means. Except for a brief period in the 1950s and during the 1990s when Clinton and a Republican Congress coupled with the tech bubble managed to achieve budget surpluses, every administration and session of Congress since WWII has had a budget deficit. It's not a matter of some years being good and some being bad. Nearly all were bad, just some were worse than others. (Raw numbers here if you want.)
No it's not that simple. I wish the people saying this would go to the Congressional Budget Office web site and actually try reading some of the budget projections instead of parroting some line which happens to fit their worldview.
In a nutshell, U.S. military spending has more or less been steadily declining as a percentage of the GDP and percentage of the budget, up until 9/11. After 9/11 it started to tick upwards, but is still near the lowest it's been since WWII. It's actually one of the few parts of the budget which has been getting smaller over the last 50 years.
What's killing the budget are the social programs. Specifically Medicare/Medicaid, though Social Security rears its head every now and then. Medicare and Medicaid are projected to grow so much and so quickly that if we completely eliminated all military spending - dropped it to zero - within about 20-25 years the growth in Medicare/Medicaid will have consumed all of the savings.
This isn't a conservative problem, this isn't a liberal problem. It's a straight-up accounting/math problem, and I know most of the folks here are pretty good at math. Put aside any preconceptions you may have. Go read the the CBO report on the budget. See for yourself where the problems in the budget are.
Wedding photographers already went through this. They used to charge a nominal amount or nothing for shooting the wedding, but would charge you big bucks to order prints of the photos. Naturally, when scanners and photo printers became cheap, people would just scan the prints they had already bought (or sometimes even scan the ordering contact sheets), and print out their own copies.
Today, wedding photographers charge big bucks to shoot your wedding. But the prints are usually free or at-cost. Some of them will even give you the raw files (digital "negatives") of the shoot so you can process the photos on your own in the future if you wish.
When reality meets an outdated business model, there's a lot of inertia on the side of reality.
I don't think Assange deserved it. While Wikileaks has been big news, there's nothing really new or innovative about it that hasn't been done before. It just happened to be the recipient of the news scoop of the decade. If we look back in a few years, after we've had some time to digest all the events of this year, I think that in hindsight the obvious choice for Person of the Year, the person who for better or worse has done the most to influence the events of the year, will be: Bradley Manning.
Actually, NHTSA studied fatality rates by vehicle type. SUVs do offer more protection in collisions by virtue of their greater mass. But this is almost exactly offset by their greater tendency to roll over (and higher fatality rate in roll-overs). Consequently, occupants of mid-size SUVs are only slightly safer than occupants of small cars, and occupants of full-size SUVs are slightly more likely to die than occupants of medium- and full-size sedans.
Not in this case.
The politicians had their chance and blew it. They awarded cable and DSL contracts to a single provider and made it illegal for other companies to enter the market. That's what's causing the slow rate of broadband improvement. Get rid of those exclusive service contracts. All they do is allow ISPs to get away with spending as little money as possible by greasing some palms at city hall. Open up the ISP market to some real competition and companies will start caring more about providing the most bandwidth for the lowest price, instead of how they can game the system to make the most money while offering the least service.
The free market isn't working in most markets because the municipal governments have selected one cable provider and one phone provider to service the area. It's illegal for a competitor to enter the market. Get rid of those exclusive contracts with the city and things should improve. When I was living in a Boston suburb, the city approved a second cable company to provide service in the area. I didn't switch, but my cable/internet bill dropped by $10/mo, and service improved (wait times on customer support and for scheduled service both decreased, and the window for what time the cable serviceman would arrive narrowed from a half-day block to a 2-hour block).
There are a lot of places where a truly free market has screwed things up, but this isn't one of them. The blame in this one rests at the feet of government.
That's because airport security is security theater. Even with terrorism and accidents, planes are already the safest way to travel between two points. The security at the airport is just a dog and pony show to reassure fliers and give the impression that the government is "doing something about it". The effectiveness of the security measure is rather meaningless because a 50% reduction in almost-never will still be almost-never.
In fact concern over the new scanners and pat-downs at airports is probably going to kill more people than any terrorists. People uncomfortable with the invasion of privacy may choose to drive to their destination rather than fly. And you're roughly 15-20x more likely to die from an automobile accident than from a plane crash/terrorist incident over a trip of the same distance.
This is what I've been trying to say about the whole Wikileaks thing. Cause and effect is not a one-way street here. Wikileaks and its supports say they're doing it to help make government more transparent and root out corruption, and done properly it can do that. The problem is that many people seem to have this implicit assumption that exposing corruption automatically means it'll be fixed, and thus release of information guarantees the overall amount of corruption is lessened, and thus it's always beneficial to release information. But that's not the only possible outcome. Another possibility is that closed governments will see what Wikileaks is doing as validation of their closedness, and open governments will "see the error of their ways" and become more closed. In other words, what Wikileaks is doing can cause the opposite of what they're trying to accomplish.
Release of secret documents needs to be done in a judicious and controlled manner. There has to be very little controversy that the documents released do in fact pertain to corruption (or alleged corruption). Most of the citizens have to agree that it's a good thing the documents were made public in order to generate the socio-political will to fix the corruption. If you fail to do that, like Wikileaks is doing by indiscriminately releasing almost the entirety of the State Dept. docs, all you've done is convinced governments that they need to work harder to keep their secrets, and given them the support of a large portion of their citizens in doing it.
I would think that while a generic machine path could be copyrightable, the least-time or least-material paths for a specific model would be unique, and thus mathematical facts, and not copyrightable. Now, an algorithm to determine the least-time or least-material paths given a model file as input, that may be copyrightable.
(I'm not even sure a model file showing all the dimensions of a part would be freely tradeable, unless the original creator designated it so, or someone else reverse-engineered an original to create the model file.)
If you haven't yet read the top review on the Tuscan milk, it is easily one of the most brilliant pieces of writing on the Internet. And done anonymously too.
Completely agreed.
See, this is where I and probably others, have some issues with what Wikileaks is doing. Unlike many in the anti-US crowd, I've seen what a totalitarian government can do. A REAL totalitarian government, not the mostly-democratic but just-corrupt-enough-to-upset-the-idealists government the US has. Are you upset someone who publicly humiliated the U.S. government to the entire world is being jailed on trumped-up charges? How about being executed and your entire family sent to a labor camp because you talked to a neighbor wondering if your country's style of government could be improved.
Unfortunately, a good portion of the world still lives under such such governments. When you do something whose main purpose seems to be to embarrass the U.S. rather than actually expose corruption, what happens? The U.S. loses influence in the world. But who do you think gains influence? Sure some of the less-corrupt democracies do, except their openness means they're vulnerable to the same blind-eye type releases of secrets Wikileaks is conducting. No, the real winners here are totalitarian states which keep a tight lid on their secrets. They gain the most from a system which predominantly exposes the secrets of open societies. You seem to think exposing slight-to-moderate levels of corruption means it'll automatically be replaced by less corruption. It doesn't - it can be replaced by even worse corruption.
We're still fighting a war here. Not the war on terrorism, not a war against corruption. A war to free the remaining peoples of the world who live under totalitarianism (real totalitarianism). On that front, the U.S., the EU, Wikileaks, and people like you and me are on the same side. Yes rooting out corruption is good. And as your opening sentence says, journalism revealing such corruption is necessary. It allows the open society to excise the corruption, resulting in a stronger society. That's what makes an open society work better than a closed (totalitarian) society.
But to accomplish that requires a proper and controlled release of information pertaining to true corruption. The Wikileaks-style widescale release of everything an open government is keeping secret doesn't do that. In fact it does the opposite, by diminishing US influence and allowing the influence of totalitarian states to fill the void created. Yes a lot of things the US does is bad. But try to keep some perspective. Sometimes you have to make deals with a party you don't entirely agree with in order to combat a greater evil. Roosevelt and Churchill did that during WWII, allying with Stalin to defeat Hitler. Did that mean they supported Stalin and his system of government? No. But they kept things in perspective and did what needed to be done to insure the greater threat was wiped out first. Then they set about opposing Stalin.
Going through the leaked documents, finding instances of corruption or wrong-doing, and releasing them would be responsible journalism. Making a cursory review to filter out ones which might put lives at risk, then saying you don't have the resources to deal with the rest in more detail and releasing them en masse to the world is irresponsible journalism. If you don't have the resources to conduct such a review, give the docs to a news organization which does.
So in a nutshell, what Times vs. U.S. decided was that it might or might not be illegal to publish certain classified documents. But the U.S. government couldn't practice prior restraint, couldn't bar the press from publishing any classified documents, solely on the grounds of national security. They would have to be published, then the courts could decide case-by-case whether such publication was illegal. It wasn't a blanket pass that all such publication is legal (though to my understanding, nobody in the press has successfully been prosecuted for espionage for such publications).
The publishing industry, being the sole supplier of many popular magazines and newspapers, refused to release those magazines and newspapers in ebook format until a hardware manufacturer agreed to all their onerous DRM requirements. Apple was the only one who took them up on the offer, and the iPad was the result. Now they're finding out some of the problems that come with having to deal with a sole supplier (in this case, for the hardware platform on which your electronic publications are distributed). Serves them right I say. Pot, meet kettle.
If the guy was facing jail time and felony charges, then it was a criminal trial. The only punishment you can get from a civil trial is a fine.
The market doesn't correct this "problem" because it's not a market problem. The viewer is not the customer; they are the product. They're not the ones directly paying for the TV shows so they get very little say in what gets broadcast. The advertisers are the ones paying - they are the customer. So the market tries to give them what they want - louder commercials to better get the attention of viewers.
The only say the viewers have in this is that unlike most other products, the TV broadcasters cannot manufacture them at will. They have to be captured with bait (engrossing TV shows). The broadcasters recognize that the advertising needs to be tolerable so as not to completely counter the effectiveness of the bait or they'd lose too many viewers. So they'll make a token effort to keep volume in commercials somewhat reasonable. But their primary incentive is to please the advertisers.
The volume-lowering feature shows up in TV sets because when buying a TV, the viewer is the customer.