The only way for any public sector project to compete with a private business (even a not-for-profit) is to charge fees for services and spend zero tax dollars. Otherwise, the customers are forced at ballpoint to pay for the public service, regardless of whether they prefer the private competitor. Since taxes are usually levied without regard to the amount of services actually consumed by any particular individual, those people who patronize the private competitors are effectively paying extra, and those who use the public service can divide that unused share amongst themselves at no additional charge.
So the only people who tend to use private competitors are those customers that are picky enough to want better service than that provided by the government, and rich enough to afford paying for both. This shrinks the market for those private businesses and shrinks the profit margin. Such "competition" is about as fair as nailing the other runners' shoes to the starting line in a footrace.
You should never dream about both shields and lasguns at the same time. You're lucky that your bed wasn't destroyed by a Holtzmann effect pseudo-atomic explosion!
Gaming consoles are not priced based upon their manufacturing costs. Hardly anyone buys them just to have one--they buy them to get access to the games.
Thus, they are like buying a membership ticket to a gamers' club store. They are priced to capture a portion of the consumer surplus area, as determined by the supply and demand for the games. If the price of the console exceeds that area, no-one buys tickets, and no one buys games. The real money is in the games, and the attached licensing fees, so it would be foolish to price your console such that you would have to lower the prices on games.
So MS is not really "dumping", as an offensive tactic against Sony and Nintendo. They are simply taking a small loss on the admission ticket in order to protect huge gains on the games. It would certainly be smarter to manufacture the Xbox in such a way that this would not be necessary, but when your biggest cashflow worry is about all the paper cuts...
You don't need to download the entire brain. A lot of it is, after all, being used to control the body and process its sensory inputs, and those parts will work very similarly across all humans. All you really need to copy faithfully is the areas responsible for consciousness and memory. It is likely that a generic sensory unit hooked up to a reality-rendering engine would be sufficient for all brain backups, whereas it really wouldn't be a copy of you if it had someone else's memories and thought processes.
Even so, it would still be a difficult undertaking. I think I'd almost rather install increasing numbers of manufactured coprocessors into my brain long enough for it to start thinking with them, and do my best to keep the grey matter alive even as my other meat parts fail.
One of the major reasons for a secret ballot is to prevent vote-buying. If you can prove to someone that you voted for candidate X, it's easy for them to justify paying you for your vote. OTOH, if, as now, you have no way of proving your vote to the potential vote-buyer, then they have to trust that you voted the way you say you did. Under the current system, vote-buying is a much less certain business.
Hey, if you can't buy the votes, just buy the candidates, right? I think I would much prefer a system where it was possible to legally buy and sell votes, as it would be much more open and honest than the one currently in place.
It seems to me that the best way for a government entity to return value to the people is by amassing its initial capital from bonds, making its operating costs equal to its operating revenue, and divorcing itself from tax support completely.
If you can sell something for more than it costs you to produce it, the rest of world is essentially saying, "You are better at this than we are. More, please." But if you sell for less, and cover the difference with taxes, you are saying, "I have a wasteful hobby, and you are going to pay me enough for me to keep doing it. Or else."
So by all means, yes, a good patent for a good invention deserves public support, especially if those license fees are going straight back into research, and if everyone can buy the same license on the same terms. It doesn't matter if you believe in patents or not. Anyone that creates a new technology, and offers it on fair and equal terms for any potential buyer, can be expected to keep doing more of the same, as long as their expenses are paid.
And as an added bonus, diamonds are near-perfect conductors of heat.
But since no one has ever fried an egg on one of the larger facets of a cut and polished diamond crystal, how do we know that it isn't already non-stick, without adding Teflon?
What's so hard about putting all the newly enrolled students in an alphabetical list, numbering them in order, and appending that number to the year they started? Even the "difficult problem" of mid-year enrollees can be solved by simply tacking them on after Zelda Zyzzgy.
The federal tax base consists primarily of funds collected via the federal income tax, with small amounts coming from import tariffs and the like.
This is misleading. The US government finances a very large part of its operations by what amounts to a shell game. Uncle Sam goes to the Fed, and asks for some dollars, offering to trade no-risk bonds for them. Just like any other private bank, the Fed looks at Uncle Sam's tax revenues, sees that he can make the payments, and approves the loan. Then it takes his giant bond into its secret, ultra-secure vault, drops it onto the stack, draws a line through the Very Large Number, writes in a larger sum as the new Very Large Number, then adds the difference to Uncle Sam's checking account.
Everyone else holding dollars fails to notice that a fraction of a cent has just been sucked out of each and every one of them. Every unborn and as-yet unconceived child remains blissfully unaware that someone else has just taken out a loan with them as security.
The states, not having this magic wand with which to steal money, have to rely on actual tax revenues and federal handouts. The reason why these federal laws with absolutely no Constitutional backing get implemented is because of bribes. The bribes are like crack. States get some money for free, and get used to having it. Then, for the next big check, they have to do a little favor for Uncle Sam. Well, no problem; they have enough extra money to do that out of the check alone. And then they become Uncle Sam's bitch. They can't give up those federal checks without severe withdrawal pains, so they have to do everything the Federal government says, even if the money doesn't cover the expense.
Don't bust out the economic arguments unless you are prepared to deal with the consequences. Economics is not favorable to any company that sells bits for a profit. They must be some form of protected monopoly.
Any industry whose primary product is reproducible by every customer at nearly zero cost cannot expect to profit. When you produce digital bit sequences, such as software, digital music, on-line newspaper articles, et al., you can guarantee that at least one person you sell your byte-sequences to for $50 can turn around and sell 1000 exact copies for $0.10 each, or even give away 10000 for free.
In the past, this sort of thing was stopped by copyright, and slightly higher hardware and technical requirements for reproducing various forms of information. Profit in these industries is now protected solely by the consumers' belief that they are paying a fair price for a good product. These companies do not realize that the only reason they make any money at all is because the consumers are doing them a favor, in the expectation that those companies will continue offering more products of similar construction and quality.
It is not surprising that when these companies set prices too high and abuse their customers that infringement increases. The existing businesses cannot maintain an illusion of fairness, and new businesses cannot enter on the existing business model while the old ones are trashing it. So the only way to compete is to employ a new business model.
The only one that makes sense is prepaid development and free distribution. Rather than trying to sell thousands of copies for $50 each, just to get enough profit to justify prior production costs, you have to sell the very first copy for $1 million and then forget about ever earning another cent off the same work. For new authors and artists, that money has to come from bounties and contest prizes, whereas established producers may get patronage deals.
If, in the future, every scientific report will be on the web, then the rating system for those articles can be highly distributed and computerized.
I can easily imagine the whole thing controlled by just three variables:
I am x% familiar with the subject matter of this report.
I rate this report at y%.
I give z% credibility to this author.
The first two would be edges between an article node and an author node, and the third would be edges between author nodes.
If you are a well-respected, oft-published geologist, you still might have a somewhat valuable perspective on a pharmaceutical trial report (and you probably wouldn't even bother to read the article if it had no meaning to you in the first place). But in regard to an article on x-ray crystallography, your opinion will carry much more weight. And if the article is very good, you might decide to up your own assessment of the writers' credibility scores.
If you assume that you give yourself 100% credibility, you can trace along the giant graph to not only find the best articles, but also the ones most relevant to your interests. Even Joe Schmoe could decide that he trusts the rock stars of science to pick out the good from the bad, and get highly-rated articles that way. But it would not do him much good to rate those articles until some of the authors decided they wanted to trust his opinion, and to get that trust, he would have to either publish his own articles or impress a few authors in person.
Obviously, the weak point in the system is the judge's self-assessment of topical familiarity, so the check on that would have to be the rated author's credibility rating for the judge. If you rate an article at 20%, claim 90% familiarity with the topic, and cannot back up your low marks with some coherent criticism, then the author will lower your credibility.
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide
everything. --Josef Stalin
Who counts the votes in the USA? Diebold. ES&S. Sequoia. These three companies count 80% of the votes cast nationally.
Given that two of those three publicly favor the Republican Party, and the third is owned by a British parent company, and that there is practically zero accountability in regard to fairness and accuracy of their products, is there any wonder that people are getting just a little bit cynical?
But don't forget... Extortion is just another word for terrorism, and therefore a legitimate excuse to invade and occupy all of Costa Rica. Never mind that the extortionist isn't there. Costa Rica has better beaches.
As yet another Eagle Scout, I think perhaps the Boy Scouts are just a little too vulnerable to manipulation by politically-motivated organizations. The purpose of the organization is to mold boys into men of good character, by the standards of the local and national community.
In my opinion, droids cannot be of good character, because they have no character at all. Therefore, I think the following modification is in order:
replace obedient with dutiful. Blind obedience to authority is definitely not a virtue, and I always bristled at the implication that it was my solemn duty to carry out the commands of complete idiots.
And in regard to having them changed in an orderly manner, the scouting office seems to be suffering from a lack of familiarity with reality. The only feasible ways to change an unjust law are with large-scale protests and with large-scale bribes. It is your duty to disobey an unjust law, especially when obeying it can cause harm to another. Not that this principle has any specific application to copyright, of course...
The 2/113 statistic does not account for missions that were scrubbed or could not even be scheduled due to technical problems with the launch vehicle. The shuttle has a supposed design lifetime of 100 missions over 10 years.
There are six shuttles: Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. (Enterprise was the non-spacefaring glide test type, but could be refitted, as Challenger was refitted from the structural test type, to become fully functional.) As Endeavor was a replacement, and Enterprise was only a test type, one might have expected 400 missions by 2001.
Additionally, each flight costs 25 times as much as projected. So, running these new numbers, I get...
27% of promised functionality, at 700% of promised operating cost. There was a total loss of 50% of the original fleet--2 failures in 113 missions, a catastrophic failure rate of 1.8% . At that rate, the likelihood of blowing up your ride before completing 100 missions in it is a whopping 83.7%.
On top of that, no failure was attributable to crew error, or was recoverable by any crew action. Space must be some trip if NASA can get people with multiple PhDs to go up multiple times in their orbiting pork barrels, knowing that they are just one order of magnitude from playing Russian Roulette.
There is a saying in economics: "Sunk costs are sunk."
The initial expenses incurred in creating a new product cannot be recovered through sales of that product. That money is gone, forever. The reason why people pay those expenses at all is because they are essentially purchasing a future revenue stream from a new, and hopefully profitable, product.
But you cannot hope to earn profits from a product that can be reproduced at essentially zero cost. The first copy you sell can become billions more, given away for free. This is why copyright exists. So long as it actually cost someone paper, or ink, or blank discs, or some other consumable good to copy the product, copyright law was sufficient to increase the real cost of counterfeit goods such that counterfeit cannot compete with the originals.
But copying bits is now so cheap that you have to count up billions of them before it is even worth writing down the price. Instead of needing a printing press to stamp out knockoff copies of a book, all you need is some disk space, a network, and some computing cycles. In this circumstance, copyright is powerless. The business model for firms producing digital works must change. Rather than buying a future revenue stream which may or may not actually exist, they ought to instead sell the first produced copy into the public domain for a one-time, immediate payment that exceeds their startup costs.
This means a shift to prizes and bounties for new works, rather than perpetual, unenforceable copyrights. All you copyright-based companies out there: you have been warned--adapt or die.
Slashdot Mirror
You could have the exoskeleton partially resist every muscle movement. Then it becomes an exercise suit.
The only way for any public sector project to compete with a private business (even a not-for-profit) is to charge fees for services and spend zero tax dollars. Otherwise, the customers are forced at ballpoint to pay for the public service, regardless of whether they prefer the private competitor. Since taxes are usually levied without regard to the amount of services actually consumed by any particular individual, those people who patronize the private competitors are effectively paying extra, and those who use the public service can divide that unused share amongst themselves at no additional charge.
So the only people who tend to use private competitors are those customers that are picky enough to want better service than that provided by the government, and rich enough to afford paying for both. This shrinks the market for those private businesses and shrinks the profit margin. Such "competition" is about as fair as nailing the other runners' shoes to the starting line in a footrace.
Gaming consoles are not priced based upon their manufacturing costs. Hardly anyone buys them just to have one--they buy them to get access to the games.
Thus, they are like buying a membership ticket to a gamers' club store. They are priced to capture a portion of the consumer surplus area, as determined by the supply and demand for the games. If the price of the console exceeds that area, no-one buys tickets, and no one buys games. The real money is in the games, and the attached licensing fees, so it would be foolish to price your console such that you would have to lower the prices on games.
So MS is not really "dumping", as an offensive tactic against Sony and Nintendo. They are simply taking a small loss on the admission ticket in order to protect huge gains on the games. It would certainly be smarter to manufacture the Xbox in such a way that this would not be necessary, but when your biggest cashflow worry is about all the paper cuts...
You don't need to download the entire brain. A lot of it is, after all, being used to control the body and process its sensory inputs, and those parts will work very similarly across all humans. All you really need to copy faithfully is the areas responsible for consciousness and memory. It is likely that a generic sensory unit hooked up to a reality-rendering engine would be sufficient for all brain backups, whereas it really wouldn't be a copy of you if it had someone else's memories and thought processes.
Even so, it would still be a difficult undertaking. I think I'd almost rather install increasing numbers of manufactured coprocessors into my brain long enough for it to start thinking with them, and do my best to keep the grey matter alive even as my other meat parts fail.
It seems to me that the best way for a government entity to return value to the people is by amassing its initial capital from bonds, making its operating costs equal to its operating revenue, and divorcing itself from tax support completely.
If you can sell something for more than it costs you to produce it, the rest of world is essentially saying, "You are better at this than we are. More, please." But if you sell for less, and cover the difference with taxes, you are saying, "I have a wasteful hobby, and you are going to pay me enough for me to keep doing it. Or else."
So by all means, yes, a good patent for a good invention deserves public support, especially if those license fees are going straight back into research, and if everyone can buy the same license on the same terms. It doesn't matter if you believe in patents or not. Anyone that creates a new technology, and offers it on fair and equal terms for any potential buyer, can be expected to keep doing more of the same, as long as their expenses are paid.
And as an added bonus, diamonds are near-perfect conductors of heat.
But since no one has ever fried an egg on one of the larger facets of a cut and polished diamond crystal, how do we know that it isn't already non-stick, without adding Teflon?
What's so hard about putting all the newly enrolled students in an alphabetical list, numbering them in order, and appending that number to the year they started? Even the "difficult problem" of mid-year enrollees can be solved by simply tacking them on after Zelda Zyzzgy.
Everyone else holding dollars fails to notice that a fraction of a cent has just been sucked out of each and every one of them. Every unborn and as-yet unconceived child remains blissfully unaware that someone else has just taken out a loan with them as security.
The states, not having this magic wand with which to steal money, have to rely on actual tax revenues and federal handouts. The reason why these federal laws with absolutely no Constitutional backing get implemented is because of bribes. The bribes are like crack. States get some money for free, and get used to having it. Then, for the next big check, they have to do a little favor for Uncle Sam. Well, no problem; they have enough extra money to do that out of the check alone. And then they become Uncle Sam's bitch. They can't give up those federal checks without severe withdrawal pains, so they have to do everything the Federal government says, even if the money doesn't cover the expense.
Welcome to the plutocracy.
Don't bust out the economic arguments unless you are prepared to deal with the consequences. Economics is not favorable to any company that sells bits for a profit. They must be some form of protected monopoly.
Any industry whose primary product is reproducible by every customer at nearly zero cost cannot expect to profit. When you produce digital bit sequences, such as software, digital music, on-line newspaper articles, et al., you can guarantee that at least one person you sell your byte-sequences to for $50 can turn around and sell 1000 exact copies for $0.10 each, or even give away 10000 for free.
In the past, this sort of thing was stopped by copyright, and slightly higher hardware and technical requirements for reproducing various forms of information. Profit in these industries is now protected solely by the consumers' belief that they are paying a fair price for a good product. These companies do not realize that the only reason they make any money at all is because the consumers are doing them a favor, in the expectation that those companies will continue offering more products of similar construction and quality.
It is not surprising that when these companies set prices too high and abuse their customers that infringement increases. The existing businesses cannot maintain an illusion of fairness, and new businesses cannot enter on the existing business model while the old ones are trashing it. So the only way to compete is to employ a new business model.
The only one that makes sense is prepaid development and free distribution. Rather than trying to sell thousands of copies for $50 each, just to get enough profit to justify prior production costs, you have to sell the very first copy for $1 million and then forget about ever earning another cent off the same work. For new authors and artists, that money has to come from bounties and contest prizes, whereas established producers may get patronage deals.
If, in the future, every scientific report will be on the web, then the rating system for those articles can be highly distributed and computerized.
I can easily imagine the whole thing controlled by just three variables:
- I am x% familiar with the subject matter of this report.
- I rate this report at y%
. - I give z% credibility to this author.
The first two would be edges between an article node and an author node, and the third would be edges between author nodes.If you are a well-respected, oft-published geologist, you still might have a somewhat valuable perspective on a pharmaceutical trial report (and you probably wouldn't even bother to read the article if it had no meaning to you in the first place). But in regard to an article on x-ray crystallography, your opinion will carry much more weight. And if the article is very good, you might decide to up your own assessment of the writers' credibility scores.
If you assume that you give yourself 100% credibility, you can trace along the giant graph to not only find the best articles, but also the ones most relevant to your interests. Even Joe Schmoe could decide that he trusts the rock stars of science to pick out the good from the bad, and get highly-rated articles that way. But it would not do him much good to rate those articles until some of the authors decided they wanted to trust his opinion, and to get that trust, he would have to either publish his own articles or impress a few authors in person.
Obviously, the weak point in the system is the judge's self-assessment of topical familiarity, so the check on that would have to be the rated author's credibility rating for the judge. If you rate an article at 20%, claim 90% familiarity with the topic, and cannot back up your low marks with some coherent criticism, then the author will lower your credibility.
Given that two of those three publicly favor the Republican Party, and the third is owned by a British parent company, and that there is practically zero accountability in regard to fairness and accuracy of their products, is there any wonder that people are getting just a little bit cynical?
The Intelligent Design proponents had better be careful, or they might end up proving God out of existence.
But don't forget... Extortion is just another word for terrorism, and therefore a legitimate excuse to invade and occupy all of Costa Rica. Never mind that the extortionist isn't there. Costa Rica has better beaches.
Apparently the key question is rhetorical. Have you ever been to a public school? We got fed propaganda all the way from K through 12.
As yet another Eagle Scout, I think perhaps the Boy Scouts are just a little too vulnerable to manipulation by politically-motivated organizations. The purpose of the organization is to mold boys into men of good character, by the standards of the local and national community.
In my opinion, droids cannot be of good character, because they have no character at all. Therefore, I think the following modification is in order: replace obedient with dutiful. Blind obedience to authority is definitely not a virtue, and I always bristled at the implication that it was my solemn duty to carry out the commands of complete idiots.
And in regard to having them changed in an orderly manner, the scouting office seems to be suffering from a lack of familiarity with reality. The only feasible ways to change an unjust law are with large-scale protests and with large-scale bribes. It is your duty to disobey an unjust law, especially when obeying it can cause harm to another. Not that this principle has any specific application to copyright, of course...
Then pick hardware. You'll need it to build that time machine that can take you back to the 90s.
First, they will institute a massive neutrino literacy program. Then, they will post tiny signs reading "Restricted Area. No Unauthorized Leptons."
John Marshall, U.S. Supreme Court justice, had this to say about taxation:
Little did he know that it would be taxen out of context and applied everywhere. Score one for the embarrassing soundbite from a government employee!Ok, let's see...
- Arctic Winter
- Antarctic Winter
- 9th Circle of Hell
- Airtight, Radiation-Shielded Bikini Season
Yep, that's four.The 2/113 statistic does not account for missions that were scrubbed or could not even be scheduled due to technical problems with the launch vehicle. The shuttle has a supposed design lifetime of 100 missions over 10 years.
There are six shuttles: Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. (Enterprise was the non-spacefaring glide test type, but could be refitted, as Challenger was refitted from the structural test type, to become fully functional.) As Endeavor was a replacement, and Enterprise was only a test type, one might have expected 400 missions by 2001.
Additionally, each flight costs 25 times as much as projected. So, running these new numbers, I get...
27% of promised functionality, at 700% of promised operating cost. There was a total loss of 50% of the original fleet--2 failures in 113 missions, a catastrophic failure rate of 1.8% . At that rate, the likelihood of blowing up your ride before completing 100 missions in it is a whopping 83.7% .
On top of that, no failure was attributable to crew error, or was recoverable by any crew action. Space must be some trip if NASA can get people with multiple PhDs to go up multiple times in their orbiting pork barrels, knowing that they are just one order of magnitude from playing Russian Roulette.
NASA immediately re-named its launch vehicles to "Death Gliders", and found that their budget had suddenly increased by $120 billion.
There is a saying in economics: "Sunk costs are sunk."
The initial expenses incurred in creating a new product cannot be recovered through sales of that product. That money is gone, forever. The reason why people pay those expenses at all is because they are essentially purchasing a future revenue stream from a new, and hopefully profitable, product.
But you cannot hope to earn profits from a product that can be reproduced at essentially zero cost. The first copy you sell can become billions more, given away for free. This is why copyright exists. So long as it actually cost someone paper, or ink, or blank discs, or some other consumable good to copy the product, copyright law was sufficient to increase the real cost of counterfeit goods such that counterfeit cannot compete with the originals.
But copying bits is now so cheap that you have to count up billions of them before it is even worth writing down the price. Instead of needing a printing press to stamp out knockoff copies of a book, all you need is some disk space, a network, and some computing cycles. In this circumstance, copyright is powerless. The business model for firms producing digital works must change. Rather than buying a future revenue stream which may or may not actually exist, they ought to instead sell the first produced copy into the public domain for a one-time, immediate payment that exceeds their startup costs.
This means a shift to prizes and bounties for new works, rather than perpetual, unenforceable copyrights. All you copyright-based companies out there: you have been warned--adapt or die.