Er... are you saying that Kraft Dinner isn't a cold, dark evil?
You ever read the ingredients list? I'd sooner smoke than eat KD!
There's only one solution.
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Write your representatives and demand the institution of a Corporate Death Penalty.
Corporations have made huge strides in gaining "personhood" rights, with none of the responsibilities.
They have evolved to become wholly irresponsible citizens of the nations. This must stop. Either send the corporate structure back two hundred years, withdrawing all the privileges they've gained in that time; or make them take on the responsibilities that all other citizens must accept.
Write your representative. Make a difference.
Re:There is plenty of cost justification.
on
The Eyes Have It
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh - and a further note:
There were 63 airline accidents resulting in fatalities in the years 1982 through 2000.
Compare that against the five bombings/suicides, and one thing is immediately obvious: reducing accidents by a mere 10% will have greater effect than eliminating terrorism.
Achieving the former is both possible and relatively cheap. Achieving the latter is impossible, and to even partially achieve the latter is terribly expensive.
Even more so, reducing automobile accidents by 1% would save more people than any amount of anti-terrorist measures.
Let's deal with reality: terrorism isn't much of a threat against American life and property when compared to things that we accept every damn day -- driving, smoking, eating Cheetos, and walking downstairs.
Re:There is plenty of cost justification.
on
The Eyes Have It
·
· Score: 2
I'd buy all that except that there hasn't been an increase in security anyways!
A lunatic with a C4 shoe-heel got on a plane just last week.
I drop my wife off for a business flight (same day as the jet in NY went down in the harbour, ugh) and as she's standing in a mile-long line-up... "Attention: all passengers for Flight 123, please proceed through the entrance gate immediately." The damn flight was getting held up, so they just waved (waived?) everyone through! Apparently, terrorists just have to wait for the final, ultra-final boarding call. WTF?!!
We have people being detained for reading Alex Haley's "Airport," FBI agents being detained for having dark skin, and no real security against Cessna's loaded with ammonia and diesel.
It's all a crock of shit.
The next terrorist attack against the USA isn't going to be done with a big ol' jet airplane. Too risky.
I'm sure that, were it not outright dangerous to speculate on terrorist tactics vis-a-vis getting one's ass nailed to the wall by the FBI under the new, draconian laws passed by a panicked Congress, you and I could come up with a dozen surprisingly effective attacks, none of which involve airliners, nor could they be prevented by any amount of security.
In summary, accidents -- fatal and non-fatal -- are on the decline in the airline industry. There were six accidents for every 100,000 hours of flight time... and that includes all those piddling little one- and two-seater private craft.
Take a look at real aircraft, those that operate on schedule and carry more than a handful of people, and the rates are very impressive: 0.4 accidents for every 100,000 departures. (It is a little unnerving that the rates are on the increase, though!)
Finally, at the bottom of the last table, we see that there were only five suicide/bomb crashes during the eighteen years between 1982 and 2000. There were 147,577,440 departures. That's an attack rate of sweet fuck-all (0.00000339% for those that really need the number).
In short, there appears to be no real good excuse for spending a pile of money on increased security measures. The risk-cost factor just doesn't justify it. Yes, there should be better security measures; but, no, they shouldn't be costly.
If it's theft, then why am I paying a surtax on every CD I purchase? I'm up in Canada, where some artists' representation organization gets something like a quarter for every data CDR/RW and a couple bucks for every audio CDR that is sold.
Seems to me, then, that I'm paying for the right to share music.
You're right. I'm going to recant: Hexachrome is evolutionary. Stochastics is cool technology. I haven't been aware of seeing any colour samples in real life (ie. real printed samples, not on-screen). I've seen b&w, though, and am impressed.
In the print industry, Hexachrome is indeed new and revolutionary.
This is, after all, an industry that was invented in the 15th century, and didn't substantially change until the 19th century, when roll paper and continuous-run presses were finally invented. That's 400 years without earth-shaking technological revolution.
It was almost a hundred more years until moveable type was invented, and nearly fifty more before colour offset printing became common.
A printing technology like Hexachrome is, indeed, very new, and still struggling to gain acceptance -- it's a radical idea!
The best you can hope for is that you'll be able to get HDTV movie releases on DVD. And even there, you're limited: bandwidth requirements don't permit truly high-definition (1080x1920x120i) viewing. Not on our current DVD technology, at any rate.
To promote the video, it was shown in Overwaitea and Save-On stores, running off uncompressed digital tape and displayed on a true HDTV. No artifacting: 20MHz bandwidth sent to a 1080x1920x60Hz (120Hz interlaced) professional-grade display.
Mindblowing quality. It's like watching film, but without the flicker. Amazing detail. Rock-solid imaging. Fan-fucking-tastic.
Naturally, the HDTV that we're actually ending up with can't compare. It's been compressed, so there's all sorts of obnoxious aliasing. And the screen quality isn't quite up to the pro-quality $50,000 rig they had at the store. And it's impossible to pump 20MHz of information to consumers; current standards limit HDTV to about 6MHz bandwidth, with a subsequent loss of detail and quality.
But, still, even the consumer-grade stuff looks a helluva lot better than the age-old NTSC format.
Precisely. This is what I was driving at: have people pay for their downloads, at a rate so cheap that they've no particular disincentive to pay.
For instance, I'm currently using the Mahogany email client (SourceForge). It's very much a beta application. I download the latest patch every week or so. And I wouldn't object at all were that download to cost me fifty cents, and that forty-nine cents of that made it over to the developers.
The key is that the middleman needs to be very philanthropic. I anticipate that it'll be a businessman who's a multi-billionaire, and who is a dot-com geek: this will be a legacy akin to that of the Rockefeller Libraries scattered across the USA.
I think you're very likely right. Between.NET and Passport, plus having more money than they know what to do with, Microsoft is in the position to pull this off.
It scares the bejeezus out of me. And if IIRC, we just had a discussion about the commercialization of the net.
You can be damn sure Microsoft's commercialization is going to involve them getting a cut from every goddamn byte that flows through the pipe. That just sickens me.
I didn't mention VISA at all. I'm not sure why you do.
I also neglected to mention a further money-making part of this venture: the payee's money pool.
In my part of the world, banks generally waive the transaction/account fees if you have $1000 (sometimes $5000) in the account at all times during the month. Dip below, and they nail you. Keep it above, and they pay you a pittance in interest.
For the micro/small payment system to work, the middleman will need to set a deposit boundry. I think it should be $50. If you dip below $50, a surcharge is going to be applied to your transactions... perhaps an extra dollar charge, in addition to the payment you've made. It'll provide hefty incentive to keep a good bit of money in the account.
I think most people will be comfortable with having about $100 floating in their account.
Thus, with a million subscribers, the middle-man will have an additional $100M to play with. That'll be another $3 million of investment profit.
Plus you can bet that at any given time, a few percent of the users will let their accounts go below $50, giving the middle-man yet more revenue.
There are also some value-added services that could be provided to the recipients of these payments. Many of the recipients are going to be a group of people: hardly ever is an artist or programmer working entirely alone. These groups are going to need to distribute their money to the members. Our middle-man can do that for a nominal fee. Shazam, more bucks come rolling in.
Again, I repeat: this is going to require a selfless super-rich "donor" who has grown past the need to make more money, and now wishes to do something that will revolutionize the way we transact business with creative individuals. It's got a lousy rate of return, in a strictly dollars-and-cents mindset... but it's got a fantastic return, in terms of revolutionizing how we reward the creative people in our society.
Damn, I just posted about this sort of thing. I guess I'll follow-up here, then:
The only reason micropayments aren't working is greed. Yahoo's 2.5% is pretty reasonable; it's the extra thirty cents that kills the whole micropayment mechanism.
We need someone with deep pockets to come along and make his money not through direct charges, but through savvy money management.
Charge a 2% transaction charge, sure. That's a penny on every fifty-cent transaction. That's cool.
Next, don't transfer the money to the recipient for each and every charge. Only transfer the money when it's worth transferring... say, every one thousand dollars, or every month, whichever is reached last.
In other words, until your work collects a thousand bucks worth of payment, you don't get a dime. At the other end of the scale, if you're churning ten thousand a day, you don't get a penny until the end of the month.
The middleman is going to make his money by investing that money. A nice, safe fixed-income bond pays 2.5 to 3% these days. If you can get billion dollars of transactions sequestered away at those rates, you're going to make $20M in transaction charges + $30M in interest = a fifty million dollar business.
Now, granted, that's not a very good return on investment. But the point here isn't to get rich: it's to enable a revolutionary economy. The person who does this is going to have to be the kind of super-wealthy fellow who doesn't have a need to make piles of money. He's going to have to be the kind of guy who wants to make a big mark in history.
Micropayments will work, if we can find someone who will allow them to work for the benefit of the artists/programmers/creators. It'll never work if the middle-man is greedy.
I've harped on this in the past, but as regards music artists (ie. RIAA-bashing). I see no technical reason that the same solution as rids of us RIAA can't also be used to support open software.
To wit, we need a system that does two things:
a) provides a database backend that supports end-users in "discovering" things that they like. In the music application, it would help users explore genres and discover artists. In the OS application, it would help users locate a solution to their problem and ensure they get all the little bits required for that solution.
b) provides a micropayment system that is so inexpensive and so easy to use that there's no particular benefit to be gained by pirating. In the music application, I imagine it would price songs at substantially less than a buck a track, but would forward payment to the artist only when the cumulative sales make doing so worth-while. In the OS application, it would be much the same.
There is no technical reason for a micropayment (or very small payment, if they're not exactly micro) system to work. The only hurdle at this point is the ludicrous surcharges involved in handling small transactions. This hurdle is the fault of profiteering credit card companies, banks, and yahoos who figure that they deserve to get a six-figure income simply because they make it possible to pay artists/programmers directly.
The database solution is the bigger problem. User-referral works to some extent, but it's not great; see Amazon for examples. Genre-labelling is very useful, but classifying music into genres is difficult. And so on.
With OS it's probably easier; it shouldn't be too difficult to create the database content that will help people find what they need, and that ensures they download all the components they need.
Anyway, bottom line of what I'm saying here is that the solution isn't stymied for technical reasons, but for greedy reasons. If someone can solve the greed problem -- ie. ensure that most of the money goes to the people who did the music/programming -- then I think we'll finally see a day when independent artists/programmers can make a living without having to go commercial.
I really don't think there is any limit to this insanity.
And no, not according to me should TI threaten the news media for using their trademarks. It's according to trademark law. Got nothing to do with me.
There are times when TI must communicate with the news media regarding the use of their trademarks. If the media is not using them in an allowable fashion -- ie. "The accountant whipped out his TI and calculated the annual return" -- they get cease and desist letters and an explanation of how to properly use the trademark ("The accountant whipped out his TI brand business calculator and calculated the annual return" or somesuch.) Poor example, but contains the essential gist of it.
Companies that do not protect their trademark from common-language usage lose their trademark. That's absolutely mortifying to those companies... literally the death of some of them.
It's pretty fucking easy to write off the Bhopal disaster as "one of those things" when you're an American. Ten times more people died in Bhopal than in New York's 9/11 disaster.
And pray tell, how is one to avoid buying a vehicle which explodes at low-speed rear impact because of deliberate poor design? It's not like the manufacturers advertise the fact. Ford didn't put a sticker on the cars stating "We saved $11 in the manufacture of this vehicle by increasing the chances of you dying by several hundred percent."
"The government, and corporations, are made up of you and I. They are not unthinking, uncaring robots that kidnap old people, puree them in a big blender, and sell them back to you as baby food."
The megacorporations can be callously uncaring robots that would have no problem pureeing you into baby food. There's no doubt of that.
"The government, and corporations, are made up of you and I. They are not unthinking, uncaring robots that kidnap old people, puree them in a big blender, and sell them back to you as baby food."
Hah! What colour is the sky in your world?
Here are just two examples: Union Carbide, Bhopal disaster. Ford Motor Company, Pinto.
In the UC case, shoddy plant maintenance and a shocking reduction in staff training -- a cut from six months of training, to a quick two weeks! -- led to a tragic chemical leak that resulted in 20000 deaths, another 120000 people requiring medical treatment, and a generation of grossly deformed children.
Ford Motor company built Pintos from 1969 to 1977, fully aware that it would explode on rear impact, because it calculated that the predicted 180 deaths per year directly attributable to this known design defect would be cheaper than spending an additional $11 per car to eliminate the defect.
Oh, hey, and let's look at one last case: Kerr-McGee corporation, which was a plutonium fuels processing plant. Yah, that'd be plutonium: one of the most deadly elements, lethal in astonishingly small quantities. The plant had some safety control problems. Karen Silkwood started kicking up a fuss.
It's pretty much acknowledged that the head honchos at Kerr-McGee had Karen Silkwood killed for her efforts to protect the workers and community.
"The government, and corporations, are made up of you and I. They are not unthinking, uncaring robots that kidnap old people, puree them in a big blender, and sell them back to you as baby food."
Hell, no. They're unthinking, uncaring robots that spew forty tons of massively toxic, mutagenic chemicals into third-world cities, build cars that explode in a low-speed rear-end collision because it's cheaper that way, and murder employees who might fink them out.
Competition based on low prices is a deadman's game. It's extremely short-sighted and ultimately doomed to failure. There can be only one winner in that game, and it's not likely to be the consumer nor the employees.
The consumer loses because competition based on cost requires the elimination of additional value in the supply chain. Quality, customer service, guarantees, product returns, post-sales service, what-have-you: it all is eliminated when the lowest price guarantee becomes the requirement for survival.
The employees lose because the intolerably low overhead demands poor wages and working conditions.
Oh, and the consumer also loses because competition is eliminated: only one supplier can provide the lowest possible price. All other suppliers must fold.
Low prices are the antithesis of democratic, meritocratic competition. In fact, low prices are anticommercial, anticapitalist, antiequality, and antiegalitarean, too.
Please understand that I'm not saying that outrageously high prices are better. What I am saying is that a focus on price alone is a fool's game and a foolish attitude.
Corporations are already treated as full individuals in almost all regards, save voting rights (and even that could be called into question.)
The corporation exists as an individual, because it protects the people who run the corporation. A corporation can kill thousands of people through shoddy plant maintenance and untrained personnel (US Carbide: Bhopal), and no human individual goes to jail. Even were the case to go to court and the corporation found guilty, the most that can happen are financial penalties: with no corporeal body, there's no way to throw the corporate entity into jail.
There are two ways to take things:
A) Really start punishing corporations as individuals. Bring back the death penalty: if a corporation is found guilty of murder, then kill the corporation. Naturally, the unemployment of tens of thousands of employees may be an issue in this case!
B) Abolish the corporation-as-individual rights. Regress things back a few hundred years, to the point where owners and directors were held personally accountable for the consequences of their decisions and the actions of their employees.
Anyway, point is that you're on the right track, but going the wrong direction for the goal you want to score. Treating corporations even more as "full" individuals would result in the directors/owners/etc being more protected, but would place the corporate entity at greater risk; treating them less as individuals would likely reduce the risk to the corporation, and increase the risk for the directors/owners.
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Then use a frigging Lear Jet. The point is that no one's likely to be using a commercial jetliner for that job ever again.
The new security doors, for starters, are going to see to that.
Er... are you saying that Kraft Dinner isn't a cold, dark evil?
You ever read the ingredients list? I'd sooner smoke than eat KD!
Write your representatives and demand the institution of a Corporate Death Penalty.
Corporations have made huge strides in gaining "personhood" rights, with none of the responsibilities.
They have evolved to become wholly irresponsible citizens of the nations. This must stop. Either send the corporate structure back two hundred years, withdrawing all the privileges they've gained in that time; or make them take on the responsibilities that all other citizens must accept.
Write your representative. Make a difference.
Oh - and a further note:
There were 63 airline accidents resulting in fatalities in the years 1982 through 2000.
Compare that against the five bombings/suicides, and one thing is immediately obvious: reducing accidents by a mere 10% will have greater effect than eliminating terrorism.
Achieving the former is both possible and relatively cheap. Achieving the latter is impossible, and to even partially achieve the latter is terribly expensive.
Even more so, reducing automobile accidents by 1% would save more people than any amount of anti-terrorist measures.
Let's deal with reality: terrorism isn't much of a threat against American life and property when compared to things that we accept every damn day -- driving, smoking, eating Cheetos, and walking downstairs.
I'd buy all that except that there hasn't been an increase in security anyways!
A lunatic with a C4 shoe-heel got on a plane just last week.
I drop my wife off for a business flight (same day as the jet in NY went down in the harbour, ugh) and as she's standing in a mile-long line-up... "Attention: all passengers for Flight 123, please proceed through the entrance gate immediately." The damn flight was getting held up, so they just waved (waived?) everyone through! Apparently, terrorists just have to wait for the final, ultra-final boarding call. WTF?!!
We have people being detained for reading Alex Haley's "Airport," FBI agents being detained for having dark skin, and no real security against Cessna's loaded with ammonia and diesel.
It's all a crock of shit.
The next terrorist attack against the USA isn't going to be done with a big ol' jet airplane. Too risky.
I'm sure that, were it not outright dangerous to speculate on terrorist tactics vis-a-vis getting one's ass nailed to the wall by the FBI under the new, draconian laws passed by a panicked Congress, you and I could come up with a dozen surprisingly effective attacks, none of which involve airliners, nor could they be prevented by any amount of security.
Here are real stats.
In summary, accidents -- fatal and non-fatal -- are on the decline in the airline industry. There were six accidents for every 100,000 hours of flight time... and that includes all those piddling little one- and two-seater private craft.
Take a look at real aircraft, those that operate on schedule and carry more than a handful of people, and the rates are very impressive: 0.4 accidents for every 100,000 departures. (It is a little unnerving that the rates are on the increase, though!)
Finally, at the bottom of the last table, we see that there were only five suicide/bomb crashes during the eighteen years between 1982 and 2000. There were 147,577,440 departures. That's an attack rate of sweet fuck-all (0.00000339% for those that really need the number).
In short, there appears to be no real good excuse for spending a pile of money on increased security measures. The risk-cost factor just doesn't justify it. Yes, there should be better security measures; but, no, they shouldn't be costly.
IMO, YMMV, IDFM (I don't fly much).
But it's converting from lossy format to lossy format... doesn't that introduce artifacts?
General rule of thumb is to never re-encode lossy-compressed music.
Is PowerAmp just transmogrifying the data, or is it decoding/re-encoding?
Thieving music?
If it's theft, then why am I paying a surtax on every CD I purchase? I'm up in Canada, where some artists' representation organization gets something like a quarter for every data CDR/RW and a couple bucks for every audio CDR that is sold.
Seems to me, then, that I'm paying for the right to share music.
...they couldn't possibly discriminate based on attitude, ego, or even plain incompetence.
:-)
Not at age 19! At age 19, one has a team-spirited attitude, is humble, and is Lord and Liege Master of the Universe!
You're right. I'm going to recant: Hexachrome is evolutionary. Stochastics is cool technology. I haven't been aware of seeing any colour samples in real life (ie. real printed samples, not on-screen). I've seen b&w, though, and am impressed.
In the print industry, Hexachrome is indeed new and revolutionary.
This is, after all, an industry that was invented in the 15th century, and didn't substantially change until the 19th century, when roll paper and continuous-run presses were finally invented. That's 400 years without earth-shaking technological revolution.
It was almost a hundred more years until moveable type was invented, and nearly fifty more before colour offset printing became common.
A printing technology like Hexachrome is, indeed, very new, and still struggling to gain acceptance -- it's a radical idea!
Getting rid of TV was one of the best things I ever did.
It gave me more time for Slashdot!
:*)
In a word: never.
The best you can hope for is that you'll be able to get HDTV movie releases on DVD. And even there, you're limited: bandwidth requirements don't permit truly high-definition (1080x1920x120i) viewing. Not on our current DVD technology, at any rate.
No salt needed. I'll vouch for what you've said. My full disclosure is that I do own a TV. It's a 1976 12" Electrohome. No cable. :-)
KCTS, Beautiful BC Magazine, and Overwaitea Foods grocery stores funded a project to film British Columbia. The video is named Over BC.
It is stunning.
To promote the video, it was shown in Overwaitea and Save-On stores, running off uncompressed digital tape and displayed on a true HDTV. No artifacting: 20MHz bandwidth sent to a 1080x1920x60Hz (120Hz interlaced) professional-grade display.
Mindblowing quality. It's like watching film, but without the flicker. Amazing detail. Rock-solid imaging. Fan-fucking-tastic.
Naturally, the HDTV that we're actually ending up with can't compare. It's been compressed, so there's all sorts of obnoxious aliasing. And the screen quality isn't quite up to the pro-quality $50,000 rig they had at the store. And it's impossible to pump 20MHz of information to consumers; current standards limit HDTV to about 6MHz bandwidth, with a subsequent loss of detail and quality.
But, still, even the consumer-grade stuff looks a helluva lot better than the age-old NTSC format.
Shame there's still nothing on TV worth watching.
Precisely. This is what I was driving at: have people pay for their downloads, at a rate so cheap that they've no particular disincentive to pay.
For instance, I'm currently using the Mahogany email client (SourceForge). It's very much a beta application. I download the latest patch every week or so. And I wouldn't object at all were that download to cost me fifty cents, and that forty-nine cents of that made it over to the developers.
The key is that the middleman needs to be very philanthropic. I anticipate that it'll be a businessman who's a multi-billionaire, and who is a dot-com geek: this will be a legacy akin to that of the Rockefeller Libraries scattered across the USA.
Suck it down, I imagine.
.NET and Passport, plus having more money than they know what to do with, Microsoft is in the position to pull this off.
I think you're very likely right. Between
It scares the bejeezus out of me. And if IIRC, we just had a discussion about the commercialization of the net.
You can be damn sure Microsoft's commercialization is going to involve them getting a cut from every goddamn byte that flows through the pipe. That just sickens me.
I didn't mention VISA at all. I'm not sure why you do.
I also neglected to mention a further money-making part of this venture: the payee's money pool.
In my part of the world, banks generally waive the transaction/account fees if you have $1000 (sometimes $5000) in the account at all times during the month. Dip below, and they nail you. Keep it above, and they pay you a pittance in interest.
For the micro/small payment system to work, the middleman will need to set a deposit boundry. I think it should be $50. If you dip below $50, a surcharge is going to be applied to your transactions... perhaps an extra dollar charge, in addition to the payment you've made. It'll provide hefty incentive to keep a good bit of money in the account.
I think most people will be comfortable with having about $100 floating in their account.
Thus, with a million subscribers, the middle-man will have an additional $100M to play with. That'll be another $3 million of investment profit.
Plus you can bet that at any given time, a few percent of the users will let their accounts go below $50, giving the middle-man yet more revenue.
There are also some value-added services that could be provided to the recipients of these payments. Many of the recipients are going to be a group of people: hardly ever is an artist or programmer working entirely alone. These groups are going to need to distribute their money to the members. Our middle-man can do that for a nominal fee. Shazam, more bucks come rolling in.
Again, I repeat: this is going to require a selfless super-rich "donor" who has grown past the need to make more money, and now wishes to do something that will revolutionize the way we transact business with creative individuals. It's got a lousy rate of return, in a strictly dollars-and-cents mindset... but it's got a fantastic return, in terms of revolutionizing how we reward the creative people in our society.
Damn, I just posted about this sort of thing. I guess I'll follow-up here, then:
... say, every one thousand dollars, or every month, whichever is reached last.
The only reason micropayments aren't working is greed. Yahoo's 2.5% is pretty reasonable; it's the extra thirty cents that kills the whole micropayment mechanism.
We need someone with deep pockets to come along and make his money not through direct charges, but through savvy money management.
Charge a 2% transaction charge, sure. That's a penny on every fifty-cent transaction. That's cool.
Next, don't transfer the money to the recipient for each and every charge. Only transfer the money when it's worth transferring
In other words, until your work collects a thousand bucks worth of payment, you don't get a dime. At the other end of the scale, if you're churning ten thousand a day, you don't get a penny until the end of the month.
The middleman is going to make his money by investing that money. A nice, safe fixed-income bond pays 2.5 to 3% these days. If you can get billion dollars of transactions sequestered away at those rates, you're going to make $20M in transaction charges + $30M in interest = a fifty million dollar business.
Now, granted, that's not a very good return on investment. But the point here isn't to get rich: it's to enable a revolutionary economy. The person who does this is going to have to be the kind of super-wealthy fellow who doesn't have a need to make piles of money. He's going to have to be the kind of guy who wants to make a big mark in history.
Micropayments will work, if we can find someone who will allow them to work for the benefit of the artists/programmers/creators. It'll never work if the middle-man is greedy.
I've harped on this in the past, but as regards music artists (ie. RIAA-bashing). I see no technical reason that the same solution as rids of us RIAA can't also be used to support open software.
To wit, we need a system that does two things:
a) provides a database backend that supports end-users in "discovering" things that they like. In the music application, it would help users explore genres and discover artists. In the OS application, it would help users locate a solution to their problem and ensure they get all the little bits required for that solution.
b) provides a micropayment system that is so inexpensive and so easy to use that there's no particular benefit to be gained by pirating. In the music application, I imagine it would price songs at substantially less than a buck a track, but would forward payment to the artist only when the cumulative sales make doing so worth-while. In the OS application, it would be much the same.
There is no technical reason for a micropayment (or very small payment, if they're not exactly micro) system to work. The only hurdle at this point is the ludicrous surcharges involved in handling small transactions. This hurdle is the fault of profiteering credit card companies, banks, and yahoos who figure that they deserve to get a six-figure income simply because they make it possible to pay artists/programmers directly.
The database solution is the bigger problem. User-referral works to some extent, but it's not great; see Amazon for examples. Genre-labelling is very useful, but classifying music into genres is difficult. And so on.
With OS it's probably easier; it shouldn't be too difficult to create the database content that will help people find what they need, and that ensures they download all the components they need.
Anyway, bottom line of what I'm saying here is that the solution isn't stymied for technical reasons, but for greedy reasons. If someone can solve the greed problem -- ie. ensure that most of the money goes to the people who did the music/programming -- then I think we'll finally see a day when independent artists/programmers can make a living without having to go commercial.
You are either a troll, or an exceedingly stupid person. Either way, it's not worth responding to you in length.
I really don't think there is any limit to this insanity.
And no, not according to me should TI threaten the news media for using their trademarks. It's according to trademark law. Got nothing to do with me.
There are times when TI must communicate with the news media regarding the use of their trademarks. If the media is not using them in an allowable fashion -- ie. "The accountant whipped out his TI and calculated the annual return" -- they get cease and desist letters and an explanation of how to properly use the trademark ("The accountant whipped out his TI brand business calculator and calculated the annual return" or somesuch.) Poor example, but contains the essential gist of it.
Companies that do not protect their trademark from common-language usage lose their trademark. That's absolutely mortifying to those companies... literally the death of some of them.
It's pretty fucking easy to write off the Bhopal disaster as "one of those things" when you're an American. Ten times more people died in Bhopal than in New York's 9/11 disaster.
And pray tell, how is one to avoid buying a vehicle which explodes at low-speed rear impact because of deliberate poor design? It's not like the manufacturers advertise the fact. Ford didn't put a sticker on the cars stating "We saved $11 in the manufacture of this vehicle by increasing the chances of you dying by several hundred percent."
"The government, and corporations, are made up of you and I. They are not unthinking, uncaring robots that kidnap old people, puree them in a big blender, and sell them back to you as baby food."
The megacorporations can be callously uncaring robots that would have no problem pureeing you into baby food. There's no doubt of that.
"The government, and corporations, are made up of you and I. They are not unthinking, uncaring robots that kidnap old people, puree them in a big blender, and sell them back to you as baby food."
Hah! What colour is the sky in your world?
Here are just two examples: Union Carbide, Bhopal disaster. Ford Motor Company, Pinto.
In the UC case, shoddy plant maintenance and a shocking reduction in staff training -- a cut from six months of training, to a quick two weeks! -- led to a tragic chemical leak that resulted in 20000 deaths, another 120000 people requiring medical treatment, and a generation of grossly deformed children.
United Carbide really gives a flying fuck, don't they?
Ford Motor company built Pintos from 1969 to 1977, fully aware that it would explode on rear impact, because it calculated that the predicted 180 deaths per year directly attributable to this known design defect would be cheaper than spending an additional $11 per car to eliminate the defect.
Ford really gave a flying fuck, didn't it?
Oh, hey, and let's look at one last case: Kerr-McGee corporation, which was a plutonium fuels processing plant. Yah, that'd be plutonium: one of the most deadly elements, lethal in astonishingly small quantities. The plant had some safety control problems. Karen Silkwood started kicking up a fuss.
It's pretty much acknowledged that the head honchos at Kerr-McGee had Karen Silkwood killed for her efforts to protect the workers and community.
"The government, and corporations, are made up of you and I. They are not unthinking, uncaring robots that kidnap old people, puree them in a big blender, and sell them back to you as baby food."
Hell, no. They're unthinking, uncaring robots that spew forty tons of massively toxic, mutagenic chemicals into third-world cities, build cars that explode in a low-speed rear-end collision because it's cheaper that way, and murder employees who might fink them out.
Competition based on low prices is a deadman's game. It's extremely short-sighted and ultimately doomed to failure. There can be only one winner in that game, and it's not likely to be the consumer nor the employees.
The consumer loses because competition based on cost requires the elimination of additional value in the supply chain. Quality, customer service, guarantees, product returns, post-sales service, what-have-you: it all is eliminated when the lowest price guarantee becomes the requirement for survival.
The employees lose because the intolerably low overhead demands poor wages and working conditions.
Oh, and the consumer also loses because competition is eliminated: only one supplier can provide the lowest possible price. All other suppliers must fold.
Low prices are the antithesis of democratic, meritocratic competition. In fact, low prices are anticommercial, anticapitalist, antiequality, and antiegalitarean, too.
Please understand that I'm not saying that outrageously high prices are better. What I am saying is that a focus on price alone is a fool's game and a foolish attitude.
Corporations are already treated as full individuals in almost all regards, save voting rights (and even that could be called into question.)
The corporation exists as an individual, because it protects the people who run the corporation. A corporation can kill thousands of people through shoddy plant maintenance and untrained personnel (US Carbide: Bhopal), and no human individual goes to jail. Even were the case to go to court and the corporation found guilty, the most that can happen are financial penalties: with no corporeal body, there's no way to throw the corporate entity into jail.
There are two ways to take things:
A) Really start punishing corporations as individuals. Bring back the death penalty: if a corporation is found guilty of murder, then kill the corporation. Naturally, the unemployment of tens of thousands of employees may be an issue in this case!
B) Abolish the corporation-as-individual rights. Regress things back a few hundred years, to the point where owners and directors were held personally accountable for the consequences of their decisions and the actions of their employees.
Anyway, point is that you're on the right track, but going the wrong direction for the goal you want to score. Treating corporations even more as "full" individuals would result in the directors/owners/etc being more protected, but would place the corporate entity at greater risk; treating them less as individuals would likely reduce the risk to the corporation, and increase the risk for the directors/owners.