The problem is that while $1 or $2 million is a lot of money by most standards, it's not hard to have a family farm or a family business that's worth more than that. That means the heirs often can't take over the family business, and must instead break it up or sell out to some bigger business that can afford to buy it, simply to pay the inheritance taxes. So a tax aimed at the super-rich ends up killing family farms and medium-sized businesses.
(Not that this sort of consequence is new: when the current income tax was created, voters were assured it would only apply to the rich, and the average working man would never pay it. Riiiiight....)
But here's what I wish Buffett had done: set up a foundation devoted to private enterprise in space, then hire Burt Rutan. We'd probably have hotels in orbit and on the moon within 15 years.
The evening of December 24th, 1995 I was soaking in one of the famous cliffside hot tubs at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. I heard a jetlike roar coming towards us from over the hills to the east. I looked up and saw, nearly overhead, what looked like the flame of welding torch, looking roughly an inch and a half or so long at arm's length, and quite low, perhaps 500-600 feet. At first I thought it was a jet fighter on afterburner, but I couldn't see a silhouette of an aircraft against the stars. As it passed over and out to sea, I saw it break into at least two pieces just before the flame went out. The pieces must have fallen into the water, but I didn't see or hear any splashes. Then I realized it was a meteor, and that I'd been close enough to hear it!
Sadly, I was also the only person in the hot tubs geeky enough to look up and see the whole thing and to be totally thrilled by this experience....
The information itself may be classified but the fact of whether or not they collected it shouldn't be.
Really? Isn't that like saying circa 1943: "The information itself may be classified but the fact that there is a secret project at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and Hanford involving uranium shouldn't be"? Or perhaps "The photos themselves should be classified, but the fact that many photo recon missions are being flown over the Normandy coast shouldn't be?"
Sometimes keeping secret the fact that information is being collected is as important, or even more important, than the information itself.
It's *YOUR* ISP. They say to Google: Hey - we have a million users, unless you pay us $X, they'll get 1Kbytes/second to Google and 1Mbytes/second to Yahoo.
I see your points, but I don't see that sort of threat working against Google (or any search engine). Google's response to the ISP might well be: "And if you do, nobody will ever find any website hosted by you within the first 1,000 results of a Google search." That should cool the ISP's jets.
In fact, I wonder about the practicality of that kind of "extortion" at all. It might be that the larger, more lucrative targets are also those with the ability to fight back in that way or some other, while the smaller targets (Wikipedia, etc.) are too small to pay enough to make the "extortion" worthwhile. But I admit that does leave the "some sites pay for a speed advantage" problem.
Most of the rest of the world follows the "loser pays" principle, which helps to discourage questionable litigation. Apparently the American bar doesn't like the idea, though.
For more info see this paper (PDF) Patents and Loser Pays: Why Not? by Solveig Singleton for the Progress and Freedom Foundation.
I'd nominate the scientists portrayed in Brainstorm. It did have the cliché subplot of the nefarious military who want to turn the discovery into a weapon, but the characters clearly loved what they were doing, and their scenes at work were far more convincing than the average Hollywood film.
You're missing an important point, and one of the main reasons Macs took off in the design arena. In typography and layout, there are 6 points per pica and 12 picas per inch. This also works out to 72 points per inch. The display on the first few Macs were also 72dpi/ppi, which meant that there was a nice simple 1:1 mapping between points and pixels.
Not to be a pedant here, but it's actually a bit more complicated than that. The typographic point has had various definitions. The standard American printer's point was actually 72.27000072 to the inch. When they developed PostScript, Warnock and Geschke decided that was overly computationally intensive and rounded it to 72 to the inch. As I recall this caused some traditionalist grumbling and problems in the early PostScript days of the mid-to-late '80s, but the new standard seems to be fully accepted now.
No, you're looking at it backwards: think of all the excess fat we have available for automobile fuel! Every liposuction could be like a little oil well....
For whatever it's worth, back in January Cringely wrote that Burst does have something worthwhile:
The reason Apple changed its MacWorld announcements at the last minute was because the company sued little Burst.com a few days before, trying to invalidate the Burst patents. But since Apple sued Burst, Burst shares have gone UP by 30 percent. The market is rarely wrong. Suing Burst was an enormous mistake for Apple, casting a pall on their video strategy and potentially costing the company strategic alliances with networks and movie studios. Apple realizes this now and is struggling internally to find a way to change course and put a positive spin on the course correction. Apple will lose and Burst will win, and Apple won't be able to afford to wait for the courts to decide anything, since time is critical in staking out Internet video turf. I predict that Apple will eventually take a license from Burst, that is UNLESS SOME OTHER COMPANY (Google? Real? Yahoo?) doesn't snatch up Burst first.
Here's something I've noticed lately: Big companies believe in patents as long as they are talking about THEIR patents. Because Burst is three guys in an office in Santa Rosa, companies like Microsoft and Apple tend not to take them seriously. They forget that Burst spent 21 years and $66 million developing that IP, and the company has code that is still better than anything else on the market -- code not even Microsoft has seen. Unless someone buys the company first, Burst is going to win this and eventually license the world. They are in the right, for one thing, and in practical terms they now have as much money for legal bills as any of their opponents. Apple can't win this one.
It's in Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman:
From 1933 to the outbreak of World War II, [Winston] Churchill was not
permitted to talk over the British radio, which was, of course, a government
monopoly administered by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Here was a
leading citizen of his country, a Member of Parliament, a former cabinet
minister, a man who was desperately trying by every device possible to
persuade his countrymen to take steps to ward off the menace of Hitler's
Germany. He was not permitted to talk over the radio to the British people
because the BBC was a government monopoly and his position was too
"controversial."
...will make SF a key example of what more metro areas need to be.
Well, maybe. But isn't anyone worried about turning cities into ISPs? Will they be faster and better at fixing net problems than potholes? What happens when the city supervisors decide some websites and newsgroups represent "hate" and must be banned? What happens when spammers bring their laptops to SF and spew out millions of spams? It seems to me there's a lot starry-eyed optimism about wireless access that's "free" (really taxpayer-financed) and not much thought given to possible downsides.
Let's not jump to doomsday conclusions about civil liberties just yet! Set aside the breathless tone of the article and recall that Pentagon planners (just like the military planners in all countries) spend a lot of time planning for a wide variety of potential situations. I'm sure they have plans for the invasion of Canada, too, but I don't think that means Canada needs to increase their defense alert level.
The real question, of course, is when and how such plans are put into practice, if ever. If they are, and it does erode civil liberties in some way, then we have something to talk about. But the fact that the Pentagon "has plans" for many scary-sounding things isn't really news or anything to get alarmed about.
Because in the last couple of years the quality of writing on The Simpsons has taken a noticable drop. Too often the jokes are merely silly and almost random, and lack the inspired cleverness and connection to the characters and plots that made me a big fan of the show in the first place.
Yes, I know people have been complaining about a drop in quality for many years, but I felt that was arguable. The 2004-2005 season, though, really was pretty weak.
Yes, patents can be abused, as with submarine patents. And patents can slow technological progress, as with the wing warpingpatent battles. But I don't think it logically follows that patents are always bad, and that technological progress would be faster without them. After all, the patent system was created to reduce trade secrecy and and encourage invention, and it certainly does that, however imperfectly.
My dear A. Coward, in your second reference, which estimates a 79.6 meter rise if both the Greenland and the Antarctic sheets melt, I find this:
Strictly speaking, the calculations assume that the oceans and seas have vertical sides, with the area
covered by water remaining constant throughout the process of sea level rise. Instead, as sea levels
rise, the area covered by water would increase, which would reduce the magnitude of the rise.
Which is exactly my original point. (Oh, and I'm 6 feet, 175 lbs. Do I look fat to you?)
The USGS study Doc Ruby cites estimates a 79.87 meter rise in the same circumstance, so it seems likely they are using the same oceans-have-vertical-sides assumption. Which is, again, my point.
When the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Greenland have melted, the seas will be 35' higher, which will be the end of the world for the majority of humans
Sorry, I want to see some evidence to support this figure. It sounds way to large to me. As Isaac Asimov once pointed out, sloppy calculations are too often used regarding sea level increases. You can't just assume all the non-floating ice in the world melts to form X cubic meters of water, which ends up on top of the Y area of the oceans, and thus increasing sea level by Z and flooding everything below that level. The sides of the oceans aren't vertical, so as the sea level increases, it also increases its area.
So sure, there will be some flooding, but it's important to know exactly how much. Are we talking about losing the Maldives, Manhattan, all of Florida, what? Hopefully someone in this thread has the math chops to give a carefully estimated figure for maximum possible sea level rise, but I'll bet it's a ot less than 35 feet.
I'm not vouching for the science behind the Sky Ramp, but it's similar to what you're proposing. The idea is to use a ramp and sled instead of a first stage. Beware: the website design is painful.
You beat me to it. But for the full "If Only" effect, check out the contemporary John Carter of Mars comic strip drawn by John Coleman Burroughs, which would probably have been the basis for the look of the film, and meditate on the fact that if they had been able to make it, it might become the first full-length animated U.S. feature film, instead of Snow White.
Those of you who do the "yesbutNOCACHEtag" dance have got it backwards to: it's not the responsibility of the copyrightholder to sing to the tune of whatever the latest fad is.
Ah, but it is. IANAL, but my understanding is that the copyrightholder is required to take steps to protect his work, by getting a copyright in the first place, for example. Also, trademark owners can lose trademark protection by not trying to prevent infringement. So I'd say the plaintiff's case is silly, given that a NOCACHE tag would have prevented the "infringement" in the first place.
I certainly agree that Jobs deserves much credit as a visionary, and many of the things he's pushed (USB, FireWire, UNIX-based OSes, etc.) have been fine ideas that worked out well. His visionary nature can sometimes collide with practical reality, though, such as the first time he tried to kill floppy drives: not with the iMac but with the original NeXT cube in 1988.
Yup, the NeXT cube first shipped only a 256 MB optical drive. At the time, blanks cost about $50, and back then downloading software wasn't really an option, so software distribution was problematic. When asked about the lack of a floppy drive, he dismissed it as "'70's technology." I remember thinking: "Well, keyboards are 19th century technology, but I wouldn't want a computer without one." Jobs did relent and NeXT cubes got floppy drives in 1990.
They've got deadlines much tighter than any other animated series
No kidding! The episode in which they pulled Saddam out of his "spiderhole" was aired, as I recall, about 70 hours after the actual event. That's pretty much instant replay in the animation world.
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The problem is that while $1 or $2 million is a lot of money by most standards, it's not hard to have a family farm or a family business that's worth more than that. That means the heirs often can't take over the family business, and must instead break it up or sell out to some bigger business that can afford to buy it, simply to pay the inheritance taxes. So a tax aimed at the super-rich ends up killing family farms and medium-sized businesses.
(Not that this sort of consequence is new: when the current income tax was created, voters were assured it would only apply to the rich, and the average working man would never pay it. Riiiiight....)
But here's what I wish Buffett had done: set up a foundation devoted to private enterprise in space, then hire Burt Rutan. We'd probably have hotels in orbit and on the moon within 15 years.
Accidents while trying to evade nature photographers.
The evening of December 24th, 1995 I was soaking in one of the famous cliffside hot tubs at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. I heard a jetlike roar coming towards us from over the hills to the east. I looked up and saw, nearly overhead, what looked like the flame of welding torch, looking roughly an inch and a half or so long at arm's length, and quite low, perhaps 500-600 feet. At first I thought it was a jet fighter on afterburner, but I couldn't see a silhouette of an aircraft against the stars. As it passed over and out to sea, I saw it break into at least two pieces just before the flame went out. The pieces must have fallen into the water, but I didn't see or hear any splashes. Then I realized it was a meteor, and that I'd been close enough to hear it!
Sadly, I was also the only person in the hot tubs geeky enough to look up and see the whole thing and to be totally thrilled by this experience....
The information itself may be classified but the fact of whether or not they collected it shouldn't be.
Really? Isn't that like saying circa 1943: "The information itself may be classified but the fact that there is a secret project at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and Hanford involving uranium shouldn't be"? Or perhaps "The photos themselves should be classified, but the fact that many photo recon missions are being flown over the Normandy coast shouldn't be?"
Sometimes keeping secret the fact that information is being collected is as important, or even more important, than the information itself.
It's *YOUR* ISP. They say to Google: Hey - we have a million users, unless you pay us $X, they'll get 1Kbytes/second to Google and 1Mbytes/second to Yahoo.
I see your points, but I don't see that sort of threat working against Google (or any search engine). Google's response to the ISP might well be: "And if you do, nobody will ever find any website hosted by you within the first 1,000 results of a Google search." That should cool the ISP's jets.
In fact, I wonder about the practicality of that kind of "extortion" at all. It might be that the larger, more lucrative targets are also those with the ability to fight back in that way or some other, while the smaller targets (Wikipedia, etc.) are too small to pay enough to make the "extortion" worthwhile. But I admit that does leave the "some sites pay for a speed advantage" problem.
Most of the rest of the world follows the "loser pays" principle, which helps to discourage questionable litigation. Apparently the American bar doesn't like the idea, though.
For more info see this paper (PDF) Patents and Loser Pays: Why Not? by Solveig Singleton for the Progress and Freedom Foundation.
I'd nominate the scientists portrayed in Brainstorm. It did have the cliché subplot of the nefarious military who want to turn the discovery into a weapon, but the characters clearly loved what they were doing, and their scenes at work were far more convincing than the average Hollywood film.
You're missing an important point, and one of the main reasons Macs took off in the design arena. In typography and layout, there are 6 points per pica and 12 picas per inch. This also works out to 72 points per inch. The display on the first few Macs were also 72dpi/ppi, which meant that there was a nice simple 1:1 mapping between points and pixels.
Not to be a pedant here, but it's actually a bit more complicated than that. The typographic point has had various definitions. The standard American printer's point was actually 72.27000072 to the inch. When they developed PostScript, Warnock and Geschke decided that was overly computationally intensive and rounded it to 72 to the inch. As I recall this caused some traditionalist grumbling and problems in the early PostScript days of the mid-to-late '80s, but the new standard seems to be fully accepted now.
No, you're looking at it backwards: think of all the excess fat we have available for automobile fuel! Every liposuction could be like a little oil well....
For whatever it's worth, back in January Cringely wrote that Burst does have something worthwhile:
The reason Apple changed its MacWorld announcements at the last minute was because the company sued little Burst.com a few days before, trying to invalidate the Burst patents. But since Apple sued Burst, Burst shares have gone UP by 30 percent. The market is rarely wrong. Suing Burst was an enormous mistake for Apple, casting a pall on their video strategy and potentially costing the company strategic alliances with networks and movie studios. Apple realizes this now and is struggling internally to find a way to change course and put a positive spin on the course correction. Apple will lose and Burst will win, and Apple won't be able to afford to wait for the courts to decide anything, since time is critical in staking out Internet video turf. I predict that Apple will eventually take a license from Burst, that is UNLESS SOME OTHER COMPANY (Google? Real? Yahoo?) doesn't snatch up Burst first.
Here's something I've noticed lately: Big companies believe in patents as long as they are talking about THEIR patents. Because Burst is three guys in an office in Santa Rosa, companies like Microsoft and Apple tend not to take them seriously. They forget that Burst spent 21 years and $66 million developing that IP, and the company has code that is still better than anything else on the market -- code not even Microsoft has seen. Unless someone buys the company first, Burst is going to win this and eventually license the world. They are in the right, for one thing, and in practical terms they now have as much money for legal bills as any of their opponents. Apple can't win this one.
...will make SF a key example of what more metro areas need to be.
Well, maybe. But isn't anyone worried about turning cities into ISPs? Will they be faster and better at fixing net problems than potholes? What happens when the city supervisors decide some websites and newsgroups represent "hate" and must be banned? What happens when spammers bring their laptops to SF and spew out millions of spams? It seems to me there's a lot starry-eyed optimism about wireless access that's "free" (really taxpayer-financed) and not much thought given to possible downsides.
Let's not jump to doomsday conclusions about civil liberties just yet! Set aside the breathless tone of the article and recall that Pentagon planners (just like the military planners in all countries) spend a lot of time planning for a wide variety of potential situations. I'm sure they have plans for the invasion of Canada, too, but I don't think that means Canada needs to increase their defense alert level.
The real question, of course, is when and how such plans are put into practice, if ever. If they are, and it does erode civil liberties in some way, then we have something to talk about. But the fact that the Pentagon "has plans" for many scary-sounding things isn't really news or anything to get alarmed about.
Because in the last couple of years the quality of writing on The Simpsons has taken a noticable drop. Too often the jokes are merely silly and almost random, and lack the inspired cleverness and connection to the characters and plots that made me a big fan of the show in the first place.
Yes, I know people have been complaining about a drop in quality for many years, but I felt that was arguable. The 2004-2005 season, though, really was pretty weak.
Then you'll love the mysterious pickled dragon.
Yes, patents can be abused, as with submarine patents. And patents can slow technological progress, as with the wing warping patent battles. But I don't think it logically follows that patents are always bad, and that technological progress would be faster without them. After all, the patent system was created to reduce trade secrecy and and encourage invention, and it certainly does that, however imperfectly.
My dear A. Coward, in your second reference, which estimates a 79.6 meter rise if both the Greenland and the Antarctic sheets melt, I find this:
Strictly speaking, the calculations assume that the oceans and seas have vertical sides, with the area covered by water remaining constant throughout the process of sea level rise. Instead, as sea levels rise, the area covered by water would increase, which would reduce the magnitude of the rise.
Which is exactly my original point. (Oh, and I'm 6 feet, 175 lbs. Do I look fat to you?)
The USGS study Doc Ruby cites estimates a 79.87 meter rise in the same circumstance, so it seems likely they are using the same oceans-have-vertical-sides assumption. Which is, again, my point.
When the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Greenland have melted, the seas will be 35' higher, which will be the end of the world for the majority of humans
Sorry, I want to see some evidence to support this figure. It sounds way to large to me. As Isaac Asimov once pointed out, sloppy calculations are too often used regarding sea level increases. You can't just assume all the non-floating ice in the world melts to form X cubic meters of water, which ends up on top of the Y area of the oceans, and thus increasing sea level by Z and flooding everything below that level. The sides of the oceans aren't vertical, so as the sea level increases, it also increases its area. So sure, there will be some flooding, but it's important to know exactly how much. Are we talking about losing the Maldives, Manhattan, all of Florida, what? Hopefully someone in this thread has the math chops to give a carefully estimated figure for maximum possible sea level rise, but I'll bet it's a ot less than 35 feet.
Sure, but not as much fun as this thread would be if Google had teamed with AOL. Oh, to see the flames in that discussion!
I'm not vouching for the science behind the Sky Ramp, but it's similar to what you're proposing. The idea is to use a ramp and sled instead of a first stage. Beware: the website design is painful.
You beat me to it. But for the full "If Only" effect, check out the contemporary John Carter of Mars comic strip drawn by John Coleman Burroughs, which would probably have been the basis for the look of the film, and meditate on the fact that if they had been able to make it, it might become the first full-length animated U.S. feature film, instead of Snow White.
Those of you who do the "yesbutNOCACHEtag" dance have got it backwards to: it's not the responsibility of the copyrightholder to sing to the tune of whatever the latest fad is.
Ah, but it is. IANAL, but my understanding is that the copyrightholder is required to take steps to protect his work, by getting a copyright in the first place, for example. Also, trademark owners can lose trademark protection by not trying to prevent infringement. So I'd say the plaintiff's case is silly, given that a NOCACHE tag would have prevented the "infringement" in the first place.
I certainly agree that Jobs deserves much credit as a visionary, and many of the things he's pushed (USB, FireWire, UNIX-based OSes, etc.) have been fine ideas that worked out well. His visionary nature can sometimes collide with practical reality, though, such as the first time he tried to kill floppy drives: not with the iMac but with the original NeXT cube in 1988.
Yup, the NeXT cube first shipped only a 256 MB optical drive. At the time, blanks cost about $50, and back then downloading software wasn't really an option, so software distribution was problematic. When asked about the lack of a floppy drive, he dismissed it as "'70's technology." I remember thinking: "Well, keyboards are 19th century technology, but I wouldn't want a computer without one." Jobs did relent and NeXT cubes got floppy drives in 1990.