If the party posts large numbers of members, Donkeys and Elephants may consider addressing some IP issues, just as a way to grab those potential votes.
But they won't actually address the issues, they'll just make bullshit campaign claims about how they'll address them. Just like they did with the whole "balanced budget" thing when Perot ran.
Talk's cheap. The major parties know this, because that's really the only thing they do that appeals to voters, and their experience shows that it's more than sufficient.
For most things, organizations don't need much if any of your information. The want it to mine... there is no down side for them.
And, in general, you need their services more than they need your business. And it's not like you can count on competition to solve the problem: they're all like this, and it's likely there's a "gentleman's agreement" in place to keep things as they are. After all, nobody (except the customer) really benefits if someone steps up to the plate with a smaller information requirement.
Which means you'll have to just suck it up and deal, because your only other option is to not make use of the type of service in question at all.
If legislation also made them accountable for data theft then you would see a lot less information collected. That would be a good thing.
Which is why it won't happen.
Welcome to the 21st century, where corporations, not you, control what happens to your information.
you just outlined the perfect line reasoning by some business exec to define why the customer needs flash adverts and interstials: they are oding right by the customer. the business exec knows what they need
That may be their superficial justification for it, but it's transparently shallow. Such people aren't really doing right by the customer. The reason is that to do right by the customer, you have to know the customer's actual needs. You can't know any given customer's actual needs without actually talking to that specific customer. So the execs you mention above can't be doing right by the customer, because their method of advertising by its nature precludes the necessary conversation.
business people who do that usually wind up telling customers who do know exactly what they want and need why they want and need something they really don't, for some other agenda
in short, you can't trust a business exec to impartially represent the customer's agenda, so don't try to at all
But the reason this is so is precisely because, as you so succinctly pointed out, such execs aren't interested in doing right by their customers, they're only interested in doing right by themselves (that would be the "some other agenda").
Doing right by the customer requires understanding, patience, and a long term view. The execs you refer to have none of those qualities.
Or, just maybe, they're happy with reasonable year over year growth, rather than uncontrollably exploding, not unlike a supernova.
I don't understand this obsession with growth.
Growth is unsustainable. You can't grow forever, because eventually you'll run out of something, if only customers.
It used to be (or so my father-in-law tells me) that most stocks were dividend-paying stocks. People would invest in companies not to sell the stock later on but to benefit from the dividends the stock paid.
That was sustainable. All a company would have to do was to make a constant profit year after year. Doing so doesn't require growth, and as a result is something that can be maintained indefinitely.
Then something changed. What, exactly, I can't say (an SEC rule, perhaps?). But suddenly, the preferred method for making money from stocks was to buy and sell the stocks, not to get paid a dividend from it.
And suddenly, in order to make any money from stocks, the company issuing the stocks had to grow in some way, in terms of profits, size, or something along those lines. A company which doesn't do so, but which simply maintains the same amount of profit year after year will generate no change in their stock price (actually, it's likely their stock price will drop through the floor, as one cannot make money from the turnover of a stock whose price is stable, which makes the stock itself essentially worthless unless it pays dividends).
Needless to say, that isn't sustainable, and because it's unsustainable it's ultimately self-destructive. One need only observe Microsoft flailing about at this very moment despite the fact that their revenues are still growing: it's just that the growth rate is decreasing. It's ludicruous that Microsoft should have to care so much about how fast they grow, rather than how profitable they are.
Anyway, I think it should be abundantly clear to anyone with a real brain that the current stock model is fundamentally broken, and needs to return to the old, sustainable ways.
"the customer is always right" ever hear that one? some people just don't get it: they are very shortsighted. they are willing to destroy craigslist's user base for a fast buck, thereby making less money over the long haul. that's a nice sound business sense
Exactly. Though I'm not all that fond of the phrase "the customer's always right", because it implies that the customer always knows what he needs (sometimes what someone needs and what they want are two different things).
Instead, I believe in the motto "always do right by the customer". Which means you give them what they need, even if it's not the same as what they want. The customer will soon discover that you were right and will be happier for it. It's best to explain why you're doing what they're doing. If they insist that you give them what they want instead of what they need, then you should probably make a best effort to make it possible for the customer to easily back out of it, so you can give them what they need later on.
Of course, most businesses these days don't bother with all this real customer-oriented (instead of the fake "customer-oriented" bullshit they spout) stuff, and it shows.
Of course they are. Well, that is, any artist who's stupid enough or unlucky enough to still be using an RIAA member as a label.
What, did you actually think the labels would be taking less money after the transition to online sales? Hah! No, they'll just increase their percentage of the cut and pass the "savings" (in the form of less money) on to the artists that they obviously care soooo much about.
That's still flat. Well, it has flat surfaces, anyway.
I was thinking more along the lines of a spherical crystal ball. You know, the kind they gaze in to figure out who's file trading. How else do you think they figured out that gramma's been file trading "Dogz in da Hood"?
Your plan will motivate the provider to provide the appearance of fixing the problem; the existing system aligns the provider's own self-interest with fixing the problem.
That's true of the existing system only under the following conditions:
The cost of paying damages is, in aggregate, higher than the cost of fixing the problem. See the Ford Pinto for a case where this wasn't so.
The cost of paying damages is significant to the provider. In the case of Microsoft or some other truly gargantuan provider, that cost would have to be tremendous.
There might be other conditions that I missed as well.
And courts are far less competent to judge when a provider's services are safe than the provider itself is. Especially when the case is highly technical -- and even commonplace objects have far more highly technical theory behind them than i think most people imagine -- the case would devolve into a battle of the experts, which would increase the litigation costs for all parties (and certainly not decrease them as you claim!) and significantly diminish the odds of effecting any sort of positive change.
Since the remedy is being issued by the court, it's up to the court to hire an appropriate expert to assess the remedy and its implementation.
Oftentimes, even with something highly technical in nature, it's relatively simple to determine whether or not the problem itself has been fixed. Consider the case of a bug in software. Unless the bug isn't reasonably easy to reproduce, the plaintiff would find it difficult to make the case that the software in question was truly at fault. If the bug is sufficiently easy to reproduce that it's actionable in court, then it's likely to be sufficiently easy to verify that the bug has been fixed.
The same is more or less true for physical objects. The difference is that with a physical object, the amount of effort necessary to demonstrate that the flaw has been fixed may be relatively high, but that's a cost that the provider has to pay.
Incidentally, when you say that McDonald's should be liable for "any medical expenses that I had to pay for if said expenses are a significant fraction of my income or net worth," you seem to accept the philosophy behind compensatory damages while adopting an inconsistent implementation. How is it just or fair to refuse to pay for someone's medical expenses simply because they're not a significant fraction of their income or net worth?
Because in the real world, shit happens. To insist that others pay for any mistakes they may make, which is essentially what the system we have now does, is equivalent to asserting that people can be perfect, an assertion that is obviously false.
People must take responsibility not just for the mistakes they make, but also for the things that happen to them. If you use a piece of software without properly testing it beforehand, how can you reasonably claim damages in the face of bugs in said software when you decide to use it in production? If you don't do due diligence and research the software and products you decide to use, how is it reasonable for you to sue the providers of such products when they fail?
I fly a personal airplane for pleasure. When I do so, I assume the risks that go with it. The airplane can fail. It might have defects that can kill me. By flying it, I implicitly assume responsibility for those risks. To insist that the airplane must be defect-free is to insist on perfection, which is an inherently unreasonable demand. To insist that the air traffic controllers be perfect is also unreasonable.
Similarly, like most people, I drive an automobile. By going out into traffic, I'm automatically assuming the risks that go with that. Someone might wind up hitting me. If they do so as a result of their own stupidity, then they should have thei
If McDonald's negligently feeds you a poisoned hamburger, should their damages be limited to the $4.15 you payed for your Big Mac Meal?
Nope. Their "damages" should be limited to fixing the problem that caused them to feed me a poisoned hamburger to begin with, plus any medical expenses that I had to pay for if said expenses are a significant fraction of my income or net worth.
The problem with today's society is that people aren't interested in fixing things, they're only interested in "compensation".
It's yet another case that illustrates that going for anything other than directly what you're after will cause problems. What we're really after, and what the whole tort thing is ostensibly for, is to force providers to fix things. But it goes about it indirectly -- it assumes that if the provider is forced to pay enough "compensation" that he will eventually fix things as a result. But it's indirect.
If the end result of tort were instead to directly force, by mandate of the court, the provider to fix the problem and provide evidence to the court that he's done so in such a way that the problem will stay fixed, then the entire process would likely be a lot less expensive and would probably provide much better results to boot.
The reason? It has trained at least one, and probably two, generations of computer users to expect the computer to be fragile. It has made those people afraid to simply experiment with the computer because they might do something to "break" it.
This is a big reason there are so many people who don't want to learn how the computer works. By training at least one generation of people that computers are fragile, Microsoft has in a single stroke managed to limit people's willingness to learn about the computer they use every day, and thus limited their effectiveness with it.
That Microsoft also tends to (or has tended to) write their software in such a way as to hide the details of errors that occur only exacerbates the problem. And the constant stream of critical security flaws only serves to hammer in the final nail in the coffin.
Hence, I have to nominate Windows as the worst tech product of all time.
...is how the system should have been set up to begin with.
There are some who might argue that applications need to remain secret in order to prevent competitors from snatching the idea and using it in their products, because it's possible that the application will be denied, and then the patent submitter will lose his competitive advantage.
To those people, I say: applying for a 20-year monopoly on a method should carry significant risks. The decision to apply for a patent should not be one that is made lightly. Those who want such a monopoly should have to be exposed to the risk that what could have remained a trade secret is instead exposed to the world without any compensation being made to the originator.
If the patent is approved then suddenly the patent holder can arrange licensing with those who have already implemented products using the method. If a patent looks like it stands a really good chance of being approved, chances are others will stay away from it anyway. But woe to those who attempt to slide an obvious or previously-known method as a patent through such a system.
Advantages: robotics can be extremely precise. If programmed properly, it can compensate for any twitchiness on the part of the operator.
But the disadvantages are significant: the feel isn't the same as performing the surgery for real. Now, for certain types of surgery that problem isn't a problem, but the human hand is actually quite sensitive to pressures and other types of feedback that I'm sure are quite invaluable to a surgeon (IANAS, however). A machine can provide some of that feedback through the link but the amount of feedback will be limited by the sensory capability of the machine.
So, like many things, I can see this being useful for a relatively limited set of surgical operations, while for others "being there" will remain necessary.
That said, if I have to choose between having this and having nothing at all (a battlefield comes to mind for such a situation), I'd rather have this and I'll take my chances with the limitations...
Well, the things I can think of off the top of my head are:
Climb performance
Controllability in the normal flight configuration and at the limits (stall, speed at redline)
Stability (does the airplane tend to return to straight-and-level flight after a control upset?)
Crashworthiness
Reliability of the engine (take the engine, stick it on a stand, and run it at its full rated power for the TBO specified by the engine manufacturer, and see if it makes it).
Stall characteristics: too sharp? Does it tend to drop a wing in the stall?
Airframe loading: does the structure remain airworthy after being subject to relatively high loading?
Etc.
Now, you'd be right if you asked if the FAA requires the manufacturers to pass these tests. I don't have a problem with that.
The problem is that the FAA doesn't simply demand that your product meet the safety requirements (something which is sensible and thus which I don't have a problem with), it insists on liking your manufacturing methods. It doesn't insist merely that your product do what it should, it insists that it do it using the technologies that the FAA likes and knows about. That means if there's some new technology that your company is familiar with but the FAA isn't, you can't use it to build an airplane. If there's some technology you want to add to the airplane to give it an advantage over those of your competitors, you can't unless the FAA likes it.
An example is liquid-cooled engines. Properly done, a liquid-cooled engine will last far longer than an air-cooled one, and be much safer as well. The reason is that a liquid-cooled engine is able to run at a much lower cylinder head temperature, which means that the metal components of the engine are running much closer to their normal strength. That improves safety, reliability, and longevity. But will the FAA sign off on such a thing? No. Not unless you can demonstrate that the engine will run at 75% (or more) power for 5 minutes without any coolant. Note that they don't have a similar requirement for the loss of oil in an aircooled engine.
Liquid cooled aircraft engines have been around since World War II. But since the FAA has no real experience with them, it won't certify one.
And the end result is that technological progress in the personal aircraft market stays at a virtual standstill in almost all ways.
Hell, the FAA was dragged kicking and screaming into the 80s with the advent of GPS. It wasn't until about a decade after handheld GPS units became commonplace that the FAA decided to allow their use for IFR operations (and then only as a supplemental navigation system).
Composites have been around since the 70s. And yet it's only now that the FAA is really allowing piston airplane manufacturers to build airplanes using them. The most prominent airplane manufacturers in question originally started as kitplane manufacturers.
At least the FAA has improved a bit when it comes to avionics, but that's probably because all the FAA guys have now had at least some experience with computers, so having a computer display in the cockpit isn't as big a deal as it used to be. And they seem to be more willing to look at things like diesel engines than they used to be. That's probably in part because their European counterparts have already certified such engines, and in part because they anticipate problems with maintaining the fleet of engines that require leaded fuel.
Small number of plane build means high price. Produce tens of thousands of the same plane and the price will drop.
That doesn't automatically follow at all.
See, the traditional reason for the price dropping as the volume goes up is that an increase in volume allows you to generate economies of scale, which happens because of greater efficiency as you scale up. That greater efficiency is almost always had through automation.
Now, if the airplane manufacturers were in a traditional unregulated market, I'd agree with you. But they're not.
Why does this make the difference? Because for a manufacturers to change how it builds an airplane, it has to get the entire manufacturing process recertified. That's so expensive that it's generally not worth doing, even to get the increased efficiencies that could be had by the use of additional automation.
In fact, it's so much of a burden that when Cessna decided to start making single-engine piston airplanes again (during the 90s), rather than take advantage of the opportunity to improve their manufacturing techniques, they pulled a pile of guys out of retirement so they could teach the new guys how to build the Cessna 172 the old-fashioned way.
Any other business in any other industry (except the medical equipment industry, of course) would have taken the opportunity to modernize the manufacturing process. That option simply wasn't available to Cessna because of the costs.
Regulation is just an encouragement by government to proceed cautiously. It isn't an evil entity intent on killing American technological advancement. It is part of the checks on industry to keep them from throwing caution to the wind in favor of the bottom dollar.
And I'm not arguing that we should have no regulation at all. Regulation is a very important part of the overall picture.
What I am arguing is that regulation needs to be done right, or it will bring the industry being regulated to a standstill. The NHTSA does it right: it regulates based on results, not on process. It doesn't dictate the technology, it dictates the effects of technology, and only where it must.
But the FDA doesn't regulate that way for medical equipment: it regulates everything, including technology, processes, and results. The reason I wrote my initial message at all is that it's the FDA we're talking about here, so it's likely they'll regulate nanotech the same way they regulate everything else that's similar. Since nanotech is in its infancy, if the FDA regulates it the same way they regulate medical equipment, nanotech in the U.S. will be dead before it gets out of its crib, because its rate of advancement will be slowed manyfold relative to a properly regulated industry. The general aviation industry should act as a warning in this regard.
Ah. So that's why we don't have computers controlling almost every function on airliners, no new structual materials since aluminum, no new engines, etc... etc...
On airliners, yes. Airliners are expensive enough to build, sans certification, that certification costs are a small fraction of the total cost.
But not on general aviation aircraft.
To put this into perspective, modern piston airplanes are still using mechanical fuel injection. We're talking technology that was first put into use in the 1950s.
Of course, that's all the fault of the evil FAA - and it has nothing to do with the virtually microscopic demand for such engines.
The demand for airliner engines is an order of magnitude (at least) lower than the demand for general aviation piston engines, and yet you don't see that holding up R&D on airliner engines, do you?
The total demand isn't what counts. What counts is the relative demand. The point is that manufacturers can't compete with each other on features such as this because the certification costs are simply too high. The certification costs to the engine manufacturer for implementing more advanced technology are bad enough, but that's not the real problem. They'd be willing to spend the money to do that if there were enough demand from the airframe manufacturers and from overhaul shops. But the airframe manufacturers can't demand such things because in order to do so they'd have to get every airframe recertified with the new engine. Why go through all that trouble and expense for a relatively minor gain? These costs are high enough that despite the fact that the Archer is Piper's most popular airplane and despite the advantages of fuel injection relative to carburetion (e.g., not having to worry about carburetor icing), Piper elected to stick with a carburetor setup. And the overhaul shops are forbidden from demanding such engines for anything other than airplanes that were originally manufactured with such engines to begin with, so they can't fit new-technology engines to customers' airplanes even if they wanted to.
The bottom line is that the FAA dictates the technology that goes into general aviation airplanes. They shouldn't be dictating any such thing, they should be doing results-based testing, just like the NHTSA does.
Yet - somehow numerous manufacturers are using composites. (Including some pretty small airfram manufacturers.)
Yes, and all of them are new manufacturers. Like I said, the certification costs are high enough that you basically have to pay enough money to start a brand new company in order to manufacture airplanes using new materials like that. The point is that you cannot improve the product without going through so much expense that it's just not worth it. The expense is so high that it's only slightly more expensive to do a clean-sheet design from scratch! And that's what happens, and what has happened.
Don't you get it? Without incremental improvement, technology comes to a standstill for years, if not decades, at a time. When people are told what kind of technology goes into general aviation airplanes these days, they laugh their asses off, and rightly so. It's got nothing to do with the market itself: there are lots of specialty markets that, because they're internally competitive and unhindered by regulation, remain close to the technological cutting edge.
Only an overregulated industry will willingly remain in the technological dark ages like general aviation has.
First off, the medical and aviation industries are doing quite well, thank you. So process-level regulation is not the impending doom you make it out to be.
Oh, yeah? Then why is it that there are only a few thousand general aviation airplanes manufactured each year? There should be tens of thousands at least, just based on their utility alone. Taking the airlines is like taking the bus. Flying your own airplane is roughly like driving your own car, at least in terms of the additional flexibility it provides you.
As for the medical industry, I'm not claiming that it's in any danger, only that thanks to the way the FDA regulates it, medical equipment is far, far more expensive than it should be. It's in large part because of the way the FDA regulates medical equipment that what should be a cheap, highly available, routine scan costs several thousand dollars. And if you think that cost isn't a big problem, think on this: imagine how many cases of cancer would be avoided if people could afford to get a full-body CT scan every 6 months. How much does it cost our society to not do those scans due to their expense?
My bicycle is still pedal powered...
For one thing, that's by definition. They make an engine powered version. It's called a "motorcycle". Maybe you've heard of them.
For another, if you really want your bicycle to not be pedal powered, they make battery driven power packs for bicycles. And guess what? That wouldn't be the case if bicycles were regulated the way general aviation is.
Mechanical injection is reliable, cheap to build, and cheap to repair (compared to electrical systems). Just because something isn't cutting edge doesn't mean that it's worthless.
Well, shit, then why mess with mechanical injection when you can just use a carburetor? Oh, guess what, some brand-new airplanes still have them!
The Piper Archer probably would have gotten a fuel injected engine when they started building them again in the late 90s, if it weren't for the recertification costs.
It's only just now, 20 years after electronic engine controls became widely available in the automobile world, that aircraft engine manufacturers are starting to mess with it. There are tons of benefits to be had with it: easier engine management, greater engine longevity, greater power, the ability to use unleaded fuels, etc., etc.
Third, to catch the inevitable retort from those who take libertarian precepts a bit too far, the market will not adequately resolve this.
Really? Then why is this exactly the approach that's used to regulate automobiles, where the consequences for getting it wrong can be just as disasterous as it can be for airplanes (see, for instance, the Pinto experience), if not much worse (since there are far more automobiles being produced than airplanes, and thus far more people to be affected by a nasty defect)?
I don't buy the argument that process regulation is required for increased levels of safety. If you want increased levels of safety, test the products directly for the appropriate levels of safety. In short, test for what you want to achieve. Anything else is fluff.
If you insist on regulating the process and thus making thinngs much more expensive while bringing product improvement to a virtual standstill, then a regulatory signoff by the regulating body should automatically grant the manufacturer complete immunity to product defect tort suits against the product that was signed off.
Yeah, that's good point, the medical and airline industries are really hurting these days.
The medical industry isn't hurting because it's essentially an infinite-demand industry. When you need treatment, you need it, period, and you usually can't go elsewhere for it. "Elsewhere" here means out of country, because that's what it would take to escape the regulatory effects of the FDA.
The airline industry just passes its costs onto the consumer. Since the entire industry is regulated by the same agency in the same way, and there are no less-regulated alternatives that can provide the same type of service to the same people, the industry can't be hurting too badly except in the face of a confidence-shaking event like 9/11.
No, if you really want to see what the FAA has done to aviation, look at the general aviation industry. Even the most basic 4-place airplane will set you back over $200K, and it's still using technology and designs that are literally over half a century old. Personal airplanes compete with both the airlines for medium size hops and automobiles for short hops. Airliners are large enough and by their nature (i.e., before accounting for certification expenses) expensive enough that the certification costs can get lost in the noise, but the same isn't true for personal airplanes.
Technological progress should be reducing the real costs of goods over time, as it reduces the amount of labor required to produce a good. Thanks to the FAA, general aviation aircraft haven't seen any real benefits there.
I suppose I should mention an example of how to regulate an industry properly: the NHTSA.
Automobile manufacturers don't have to get their manufacturing methods certified by the NHTSA. The NHTSA doesn't care how you manufacture something. It only cares about the end results: does the resulting product pass a battery of safety tests. If it passes, all is good.
The end result is that auto manufacturers can continuously improve their product, as long as they continue to meet the result-oriented safety requirements of the NHTSA.
That's the right way to regulate an industry: test for results, not processes.
Needless to say, the FAA and the FDA don't do that, and you can see the difference in the costs and the quality.
If you want to kill off an industry, the best way to do so is to regulate it the way the medical industry and the aviation industry are regulated.
In both cases, the industry in question is regulated not at the results level but at the process level. To change the way an airplane is manufactured, you have to get your manufacturing process recertified by the FAA. It's a great way to prevent technological progress. To put this into perspective, modern piston airplanes are still using mechanical fuel injection. We're talking technology that was first put into use in the 1950s.
As a result, it takes the financial commitment of basically building an entirely new company in order to manufacture composite airplanes (as opposed to using aluminum sheetmetal and rivets). Manufacturers aren't allowed to truly compete with each other by continuously improving their products in meaningful ways because the cost of improving the product is too high. Everything has to be recertified when a real improvement is made.
And the same is true for medical equipment, which is one of the big reasons your out of pocket expense for a simple MRI session is several thousand dollars.
So if we want to make sure that the U.S. is dead last in nanotech, the best way to do it is to regulate it the way we regulate medical equipment and aviation.
I agree with most of your post, but let me state once and for all: the fire did not have to melt steel. It only had to weaken it. Steel gradually loses its tensile strength with temperature. It is a known fact and a pretty well researched one, since it is very important in warehouses containing flammable materials--they can easily collapse during a fire.
Agreed. And if the WTC towers had collapsed at a rate consistent with that idea, we'd basically be done.
But they didn't. They collapsed at, essentially, freefall speed.
There's NO WAY that could possibly happen unless almost all of the internal support (being provided by the large internal steel structural members) was completely removed immediately prior to the collapse. Simply weakening them isn't enough. The lower floors that were still being supported would have slowed the collapse considerably.
Because of that, the fact that the kerosene fires were relatively cool (fuel rich) as evidenced by the plethora of black smoke from them, the visual evidence of squibs (or something that looks like it) being set off in the lower parts of the building immediately prior to collapse, the still molten and/or yellow-hot steel in the basement rubble weeks after the collapse, the reports of multiple explosions within the buildings immediately prior to collapse, and on and on, I'm completely convinced that the trade center towers were demolished using some combination of thermite/thermate and high explosives.
I'm not a conspiracy nut by most measures. I believe whatever the evidence most strongly suggests. And in this case, it most strongly suggests a controlled demolition of the WTC towers.
And go where? There's no place to go. The entire planet is on a downward spiral into darkness and despair, and very soon totalitarian governments, or those remote-controlled by totalitarian governments, will be the only kinds of government to be found.
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But they won't actually address the issues, they'll just make bullshit campaign claims about how they'll address them. Just like they did with the whole "balanced budget" thing when Perot ran.
Talk's cheap. The major parties know this, because that's really the only thing they do that appeals to voters, and their experience shows that it's more than sufficient.
I'm betting you won't regret the move. PostgreSQL kicks some very serious ass these days.
And, in general, you need their services more than they need your business. And it's not like you can count on competition to solve the problem: they're all like this, and it's likely there's a "gentleman's agreement" in place to keep things as they are. After all, nobody (except the customer) really benefits if someone steps up to the plate with a smaller information requirement.
Which means you'll have to just suck it up and deal, because your only other option is to not make use of the type of service in question at all.
Which is why it won't happen.
Welcome to the 21st century, where corporations, not you, control what happens to your information.
That may be their superficial justification for it, but it's transparently shallow. Such people aren't really doing right by the customer. The reason is that to do right by the customer, you have to know the customer's actual needs. You can't know any given customer's actual needs without actually talking to that specific customer. So the execs you mention above can't be doing right by the customer, because their method of advertising by its nature precludes the necessary conversation.
But the reason this is so is precisely because, as you so succinctly pointed out, such execs aren't interested in doing right by their customers, they're only interested in doing right by themselves (that would be the "some other agenda").
Doing right by the customer requires understanding, patience, and a long term view. The execs you refer to have none of those qualities.
I don't understand this obsession with growth.
Growth is unsustainable. You can't grow forever, because eventually you'll run out of something, if only customers.
It used to be (or so my father-in-law tells me) that most stocks were dividend-paying stocks. People would invest in companies not to sell the stock later on but to benefit from the dividends the stock paid.
That was sustainable. All a company would have to do was to make a constant profit year after year. Doing so doesn't require growth, and as a result is something that can be maintained indefinitely.
Then something changed. What, exactly, I can't say (an SEC rule, perhaps?). But suddenly, the preferred method for making money from stocks was to buy and sell the stocks, not to get paid a dividend from it.
And suddenly, in order to make any money from stocks, the company issuing the stocks had to grow in some way, in terms of profits, size, or something along those lines. A company which doesn't do so, but which simply maintains the same amount of profit year after year will generate no change in their stock price (actually, it's likely their stock price will drop through the floor, as one cannot make money from the turnover of a stock whose price is stable, which makes the stock itself essentially worthless unless it pays dividends).
Needless to say, that isn't sustainable, and because it's unsustainable it's ultimately self-destructive. One need only observe Microsoft flailing about at this very moment despite the fact that their revenues are still growing: it's just that the growth rate is decreasing. It's ludicruous that Microsoft should have to care so much about how fast they grow, rather than how profitable they are.
Anyway, I think it should be abundantly clear to anyone with a real brain that the current stock model is fundamentally broken, and needs to return to the old, sustainable ways.
Exactly. Though I'm not all that fond of the phrase "the customer's always right", because it implies that the customer always knows what he needs (sometimes what someone needs and what they want are two different things).
Instead, I believe in the motto "always do right by the customer". Which means you give them what they need, even if it's not the same as what they want. The customer will soon discover that you were right and will be happier for it. It's best to explain why you're doing what they're doing. If they insist that you give them what they want instead of what they need, then you should probably make a best effort to make it possible for the customer to easily back out of it, so you can give them what they need later on.
Of course, most businesses these days don't bother with all this real customer-oriented (instead of the fake "customer-oriented" bullshit they spout) stuff, and it shows.
What? No. Software should be as simple as it can be, but no simpler. It should be as complex as it needs to be, but not more complex.
In short, software should err on the side of simplicity, not on the side of complexity.
Of course they are. Well, that is, any artist who's stupid enough or unlucky enough to still be using an RIAA member as a label.
What, did you actually think the labels would be taking less money after the transition to online sales? Hah! No, they'll just increase their percentage of the cut and pass the "savings" (in the form of less money) on to the artists that they obviously care soooo much about.
I was thinking more along the lines of a spherical crystal ball. You know, the kind they gaze in to figure out who's file trading. How else do you think they figured out that gramma's been file trading "Dogz in da Hood"?
That's true of the existing system only under the following conditions:
There might be other conditions that I missed as well.
Since the remedy is being issued by the court, it's up to the court to hire an appropriate expert to assess the remedy and its implementation.
Oftentimes, even with something highly technical in nature, it's relatively simple to determine whether or not the problem itself has been fixed. Consider the case of a bug in software. Unless the bug isn't reasonably easy to reproduce, the plaintiff would find it difficult to make the case that the software in question was truly at fault. If the bug is sufficiently easy to reproduce that it's actionable in court, then it's likely to be sufficiently easy to verify that the bug has been fixed.
The same is more or less true for physical objects. The difference is that with a physical object, the amount of effort necessary to demonstrate that the flaw has been fixed may be relatively high, but that's a cost that the provider has to pay.
Because in the real world, shit happens. To insist that others pay for any mistakes they may make, which is essentially what the system we have now does, is equivalent to asserting that people can be perfect, an assertion that is obviously false.
People must take responsibility not just for the mistakes they make, but also for the things that happen to them. If you use a piece of software without properly testing it beforehand, how can you reasonably claim damages in the face of bugs in said software when you decide to use it in production? If you don't do due diligence and research the software and products you decide to use, how is it reasonable for you to sue the providers of such products when they fail?
I fly a personal airplane for pleasure. When I do so, I assume the risks that go with it. The airplane can fail. It might have defects that can kill me. By flying it, I implicitly assume responsibility for those risks. To insist that the airplane must be defect-free is to insist on perfection, which is an inherently unreasonable demand. To insist that the air traffic controllers be perfect is also unreasonable.
Similarly, like most people, I drive an automobile. By going out into traffic, I'm automatically assuming the risks that go with that. Someone might wind up hitting me. If they do so as a result of their own stupidity, then they should have thei
Nope. Their "damages" should be limited to fixing the problem that caused them to feed me a poisoned hamburger to begin with, plus any medical expenses that I had to pay for if said expenses are a significant fraction of my income or net worth.
The problem with today's society is that people aren't interested in fixing things, they're only interested in "compensation".
It's yet another case that illustrates that going for anything other than directly what you're after will cause problems. What we're really after, and what the whole tort thing is ostensibly for, is to force providers to fix things. But it goes about it indirectly -- it assumes that if the provider is forced to pay enough "compensation" that he will eventually fix things as a result. But it's indirect.
If the end result of tort were instead to directly force, by mandate of the court, the provider to fix the problem and provide evidence to the court that he's done so in such a way that the problem will stay fixed, then the entire process would likely be a lot less expensive and would probably provide much better results to boot.
The reason? It has trained at least one, and probably two, generations of computer users to expect the computer to be fragile. It has made those people afraid to simply experiment with the computer because they might do something to "break" it.
This is a big reason there are so many people who don't want to learn how the computer works. By training at least one generation of people that computers are fragile, Microsoft has in a single stroke managed to limit people's willingness to learn about the computer they use every day, and thus limited their effectiveness with it.
That Microsoft also tends to (or has tended to) write their software in such a way as to hide the details of errors that occur only exacerbates the problem. And the constant stream of critical security flaws only serves to hammer in the final nail in the coffin.
Hence, I have to nominate Windows as the worst tech product of all time.
There are some who might argue that applications need to remain secret in order to prevent competitors from snatching the idea and using it in their products, because it's possible that the application will be denied, and then the patent submitter will lose his competitive advantage.
To those people, I say: applying for a 20-year monopoly on a method should carry significant risks. The decision to apply for a patent should not be one that is made lightly. Those who want such a monopoly should have to be exposed to the risk that what could have remained a trade secret is instead exposed to the world without any compensation being made to the originator.
If the patent is approved then suddenly the patent holder can arrange licensing with those who have already implemented products using the method. If a patent looks like it stands a really good chance of being approved, chances are others will stay away from it anyway. But woe to those who attempt to slide an obvious or previously-known method as a patent through such a system.
That's how it should be.
But the disadvantages are significant: the feel isn't the same as performing the surgery for real. Now, for certain types of surgery that problem isn't a problem, but the human hand is actually quite sensitive to pressures and other types of feedback that I'm sure are quite invaluable to a surgeon (IANAS, however). A machine can provide some of that feedback through the link but the amount of feedback will be limited by the sensory capability of the machine.
So, like many things, I can see this being useful for a relatively limited set of surgical operations, while for others "being there" will remain necessary.
That said, if I have to choose between having this and having nothing at all (a battlefield comes to mind for such a situation), I'd rather have this and I'll take my chances with the limitations...
Well, the things I can think of off the top of my head are:
Now, you'd be right if you asked if the FAA requires the manufacturers to pass these tests. I don't have a problem with that.
The problem is that the FAA doesn't simply demand that your product meet the safety requirements (something which is sensible and thus which I don't have a problem with), it insists on liking your manufacturing methods. It doesn't insist merely that your product do what it should, it insists that it do it using the technologies that the FAA likes and knows about. That means if there's some new technology that your company is familiar with but the FAA isn't, you can't use it to build an airplane. If there's some technology you want to add to the airplane to give it an advantage over those of your competitors, you can't unless the FAA likes it.
An example is liquid-cooled engines. Properly done, a liquid-cooled engine will last far longer than an air-cooled one, and be much safer as well. The reason is that a liquid-cooled engine is able to run at a much lower cylinder head temperature, which means that the metal components of the engine are running much closer to their normal strength. That improves safety, reliability, and longevity. But will the FAA sign off on such a thing? No. Not unless you can demonstrate that the engine will run at 75% (or more) power for 5 minutes without any coolant. Note that they don't have a similar requirement for the loss of oil in an aircooled engine.
Liquid cooled aircraft engines have been around since World War II. But since the FAA has no real experience with them, it won't certify one.
And the end result is that technological progress in the personal aircraft market stays at a virtual standstill in almost all ways.
Hell, the FAA was dragged kicking and screaming into the 80s with the advent of GPS. It wasn't until about a decade after handheld GPS units became commonplace that the FAA decided to allow their use for IFR operations (and then only as a supplemental navigation system).
Composites have been around since the 70s. And yet it's only now that the FAA is really allowing piston airplane manufacturers to build airplanes using them. The most prominent airplane manufacturers in question originally started as kitplane manufacturers.
At least the FAA has improved a bit when it comes to avionics, but that's probably because all the FAA guys have now had at least some experience with computers, so having a computer display in the cockpit isn't as big a deal as it used to be. And they seem to be more willing to look at things like diesel engines than they used to be. That's probably in part because their European counterparts have already certified such engines, and in part because they anticipate problems with maintaining the fleet of engines that require leaded fuel.
That doesn't automatically follow at all.
See, the traditional reason for the price dropping as the volume goes up is that an increase in volume allows you to generate economies of scale, which happens because of greater efficiency as you scale up. That greater efficiency is almost always had through automation.
Now, if the airplane manufacturers were in a traditional unregulated market, I'd agree with you. But they're not.
Why does this make the difference? Because for a manufacturers to change how it builds an airplane, it has to get the entire manufacturing process recertified. That's so expensive that it's generally not worth doing, even to get the increased efficiencies that could be had by the use of additional automation.
In fact, it's so much of a burden that when Cessna decided to start making single-engine piston airplanes again (during the 90s), rather than take advantage of the opportunity to improve their manufacturing techniques, they pulled a pile of guys out of retirement so they could teach the new guys how to build the Cessna 172 the old-fashioned way.
Any other business in any other industry (except the medical equipment industry, of course) would have taken the opportunity to modernize the manufacturing process. That option simply wasn't available to Cessna because of the costs.
And I'm not arguing that we should have no regulation at all. Regulation is a very important part of the overall picture.
What I am arguing is that regulation needs to be done right, or it will bring the industry being regulated to a standstill. The NHTSA does it right: it regulates based on results, not on process. It doesn't dictate the technology, it dictates the effects of technology, and only where it must.
But the FDA doesn't regulate that way for medical equipment: it regulates everything, including technology, processes, and results. The reason I wrote my initial message at all is that it's the FDA we're talking about here, so it's likely they'll regulate nanotech the same way they regulate everything else that's similar. Since nanotech is in its infancy, if the FDA regulates it the same way they regulate medical equipment, nanotech in the U.S. will be dead before it gets out of its crib, because its rate of advancement will be slowed manyfold relative to a properly regulated industry. The general aviation industry should act as a warning in this regard.
On airliners, yes. Airliners are expensive enough to build, sans certification, that certification costs are a small fraction of the total cost.
But not on general aviation aircraft.
The demand for airliner engines is an order of magnitude (at least) lower than the demand for general aviation piston engines, and yet you don't see that holding up R&D on airliner engines, do you?
The total demand isn't what counts. What counts is the relative demand. The point is that manufacturers can't compete with each other on features such as this because the certification costs are simply too high. The certification costs to the engine manufacturer for implementing more advanced technology are bad enough, but that's not the real problem. They'd be willing to spend the money to do that if there were enough demand from the airframe manufacturers and from overhaul shops. But the airframe manufacturers can't demand such things because in order to do so they'd have to get every airframe recertified with the new engine. Why go through all that trouble and expense for a relatively minor gain? These costs are high enough that despite the fact that the Archer is Piper's most popular airplane and despite the advantages of fuel injection relative to carburetion (e.g., not having to worry about carburetor icing), Piper elected to stick with a carburetor setup. And the overhaul shops are forbidden from demanding such engines for anything other than airplanes that were originally manufactured with such engines to begin with, so they can't fit new-technology engines to customers' airplanes even if they wanted to.
The bottom line is that the FAA dictates the technology that goes into general aviation airplanes. They shouldn't be dictating any such thing, they should be doing results-based testing, just like the NHTSA does.
Yes, and all of them are new manufacturers. Like I said, the certification costs are high enough that you basically have to pay enough money to start a brand new company in order to manufacture airplanes using new materials like that. The point is that you cannot improve the product without going through so much expense that it's just not worth it. The expense is so high that it's only slightly more expensive to do a clean-sheet design from scratch! And that's what happens, and what has happened.
Don't you get it? Without incremental improvement, technology comes to a standstill for years, if not decades, at a time. When people are told what kind of technology goes into general aviation airplanes these days, they laugh their asses off, and rightly so. It's got nothing to do with the market itself: there are lots of specialty markets that, because they're internally competitive and unhindered by regulation, remain close to the technological cutting edge.
Only an overregulated industry will willingly remain in the technological dark ages like general aviation has.
Oh, yeah? Then why is it that there are only a few thousand general aviation airplanes manufactured each year? There should be tens of thousands at least, just based on their utility alone. Taking the airlines is like taking the bus. Flying your own airplane is roughly like driving your own car, at least in terms of the additional flexibility it provides you.
As for the medical industry, I'm not claiming that it's in any danger, only that thanks to the way the FDA regulates it, medical equipment is far, far more expensive than it should be. It's in large part because of the way the FDA regulates medical equipment that what should be a cheap, highly available, routine scan costs several thousand dollars. And if you think that cost isn't a big problem, think on this: imagine how many cases of cancer would be avoided if people could afford to get a full-body CT scan every 6 months. How much does it cost our society to not do those scans due to their expense?
For one thing, that's by definition. They make an engine powered version. It's called a "motorcycle". Maybe you've heard of them.
For another, if you really want your bicycle to not be pedal powered, they make battery driven power packs for bicycles. And guess what? That wouldn't be the case if bicycles were regulated the way general aviation is.
Well, shit, then why mess with mechanical injection when you can just use a carburetor? Oh, guess what, some brand-new airplanes still have them!
The Piper Archer probably would have gotten a fuel injected engine when they started building them again in the late 90s, if it weren't for the recertification costs.
It's only just now, 20 years after electronic engine controls became widely available in the automobile world, that aircraft engine manufacturers are starting to mess with it. There are tons of benefits to be had with it: easier engine management, greater engine longevity, greater power, the ability to use unleaded fuels, etc., etc.
Really? Then why is this exactly the approach that's used to regulate automobiles, where the consequences for getting it wrong can be just as disasterous as it can be for airplanes (see, for instance, the Pinto experience), if not much worse (since there are far more automobiles being produced than airplanes, and thus far more people to be affected by a nasty defect)?
I don't buy the argument that process regulation is required for increased levels of safety. If you want increased levels of safety, test the products directly for the appropriate levels of safety. In short, test for what you want to achieve. Anything else is fluff.
If you insist on regulating the process and thus making thinngs much more expensive while bringing product improvement to a virtual standstill, then a regulatory signoff by the regulating body should automatically grant the manufacturer complete immunity to product defect tort suits against the product that was signed off.
The medical industry isn't hurting because it's essentially an infinite-demand industry. When you need treatment, you need it, period, and you usually can't go elsewhere for it. "Elsewhere" here means out of country, because that's what it would take to escape the regulatory effects of the FDA.
The airline industry just passes its costs onto the consumer. Since the entire industry is regulated by the same agency in the same way, and there are no less-regulated alternatives that can provide the same type of service to the same people, the industry can't be hurting too badly except in the face of a confidence-shaking event like 9/11.
No, if you really want to see what the FAA has done to aviation, look at the general aviation industry. Even the most basic 4-place airplane will set you back over $200K, and it's still using technology and designs that are literally over half a century old. Personal airplanes compete with both the airlines for medium size hops and automobiles for short hops. Airliners are large enough and by their nature (i.e., before accounting for certification expenses) expensive enough that the certification costs can get lost in the noise, but the same isn't true for personal airplanes.
Technological progress should be reducing the real costs of goods over time, as it reduces the amount of labor required to produce a good. Thanks to the FAA, general aviation aircraft haven't seen any real benefits there.
*sounds of crickets*
Ah, well, I'll be here all week anyway...
Automobile manufacturers don't have to get their manufacturing methods certified by the NHTSA. The NHTSA doesn't care how you manufacture something. It only cares about the end results: does the resulting product pass a battery of safety tests. If it passes, all is good.
The end result is that auto manufacturers can continuously improve their product, as long as they continue to meet the result-oriented safety requirements of the NHTSA.
That's the right way to regulate an industry: test for results, not processes.
Needless to say, the FAA and the FDA don't do that, and you can see the difference in the costs and the quality.
In both cases, the industry in question is regulated not at the results level but at the process level. To change the way an airplane is manufactured, you have to get your manufacturing process recertified by the FAA. It's a great way to prevent technological progress. To put this into perspective, modern piston airplanes are still using mechanical fuel injection. We're talking technology that was first put into use in the 1950s.
As a result, it takes the financial commitment of basically building an entirely new company in order to manufacture composite airplanes (as opposed to using aluminum sheetmetal and rivets). Manufacturers aren't allowed to truly compete with each other by continuously improving their products in meaningful ways because the cost of improving the product is too high. Everything has to be recertified when a real improvement is made.
And the same is true for medical equipment, which is one of the big reasons your out of pocket expense for a simple MRI session is several thousand dollars.
So if we want to make sure that the U.S. is dead last in nanotech, the best way to do it is to regulate it the way we regulate medical equipment and aviation.
Agreed. And if the WTC towers had collapsed at a rate consistent with that idea, we'd basically be done.
But they didn't. They collapsed at, essentially, freefall speed.
There's NO WAY that could possibly happen unless almost all of the internal support (being provided by the large internal steel structural members) was completely removed immediately prior to the collapse. Simply weakening them isn't enough. The lower floors that were still being supported would have slowed the collapse considerably.
Because of that, the fact that the kerosene fires were relatively cool (fuel rich) as evidenced by the plethora of black smoke from them, the visual evidence of squibs (or something that looks like it) being set off in the lower parts of the building immediately prior to collapse, the still molten and/or yellow-hot steel in the basement rubble weeks after the collapse, the reports of multiple explosions within the buildings immediately prior to collapse, and on and on, I'm completely convinced that the trade center towers were demolished using some combination of thermite/thermate and high explosives.
I'm not a conspiracy nut by most measures. I believe whatever the evidence most strongly suggests. And in this case, it most strongly suggests a controlled demolition of the WTC towers.
See the paper and other supporing material here.
And go where? There's no place to go. The entire planet is on a downward spiral into darkness and despair, and very soon totalitarian governments, or those remote-controlled by totalitarian governments, will be the only kinds of government to be found.