Interesting considering that board members are elected BY stockholders, and are supposed to represent their interests. Let them vote for the craziest folks they dare, as long as they vote for them. It seems silly that you would subject board members to arbitrary tests when they've won the acclamation of their shareholders.
Of course this highlights a big problem with corporate governance, namely that boards are elected by stockholders, but a combination of stockholder disinterest and large institutional and mutual fund investment in firms has led to the composition of the board ballot being decided by the CEO and management.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't want "doofuses" on your board of directors, don't vote for them. Setting up some sort of independent review system is simply going to present stockholders with another stream of information to ignore. If you believe in democratic corporate governance you have to let people vote for who they want, and accept the responsibility for what happens to the business. The fact that Carol Bartz did a pretty lame job running AOL, and that the company has been on a death spiral ever since the Time Warner merger -- and for practical reasons will probably never figure out how to make their combined business a going concern -- has a lot more to do with the poor performance of the firm, notwithstanding the board.
Nota bene, my point is that Apollo was good pork in 1969. If there were private contractors designing heavy-lift vehicles in the late 60s, or Mars rovers today, I guess you'd have point. The problem with the private contractors is they only want to make what others will buy, and nobody would have paid $100 billion for a ticket to the moon.
And if all SpaceX is doing is taking NASA-funded inventions and reselling them to our defense establishment at a 20% markup, meanwhile packing along tourists at $1 million a kilo... I see no achievement, or likely any profit, in that. At least if America does it you can be proud and say "we" did it. When it's a tourist it's just some embarrassingly rich prick who comes back with a Blu-ray of his vacation, gives inept interviews about the magic of how "small" the Earth looked, and spends the rest of his life "finding himself" while running a succession of failed charities, all the while trying to ignore the fact that he liquidated the GDP of a small country in order to walk on a sandy rock, and added nothing in the process.
Admittedly, pork that puts you on the moon is still pretty good pork. Apollo was pork for Boeing, Douglas, North American, Grumman -- oh look at that, the top four military jet manufacturers got one stage each! Pork that everyone wants to see spent and achieves awesome goals takes on a different character.
The challenge has been in trying to keep the program moving forward scientifically. When there was a challenge and people were getting these vast sums of money in order to invent new technologies and put them into production, you could justify the expense because we were inventing new things. When we transitioned to the shuttle, there really wasn't any new innovation because the goals of the program were quite circumscribed compared to a lunar or planetary mission, and the contractors just get paid for maintenance work, instead of inventing the next microchip, materials process, energy source, or medical technology.
That was a close one, for a while there it was looking like you might have a moral obligation to one side or the other, but you managed to talk yourself out of it.
This is a competition, you have to be the best or improving, there's no such thing as "enough." Mobile manufacturers aren't going to settle for crumbs at Google's table, slitting each others throats while Google rides their back, extracting all the value from the platform. Particularly considering that Google is now going to be making their own phones and competing with them directly.
I suppose it isn't a good thing that Apple's vacuuming-up more of their customer's money than the alternative, but this does indicate that their business is much more sustainable. Just because Android is free doesn't mean it's always going to be available and have a healthy ecosystem-- this is mostly dependent on decisions made by Samsung, HTC, and the mobile carriers of the Earth. And if those people aren't making money, Android is dead.
Do you think car makers should only make high margin luxury cars?
If people were paying $400 for iPhones this might make sense, but iPhones are not sold at luxury car prices...
You confirm the certificate out-of-band by calling the named entity on the phone or meeting them, and comparing the key fingerprint. Only way to do it, really. That's why it doesn't scale.
But the market corrects over time, that is what it does and it is as relentless as water on stone. Government on the other hand is also made up of the same human actors, but because it has a monopoly on the use of force is much slower to realize its mistakes and thus to correct them.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." The question of the stability of laissez-faire is bound up in the question of how many people are forced to encounter this rule, and to what extreme.
Government on the other hand is also made up of the same human actors, but because it has a monopoly on the use of force is much slower to realize its mistakes and thus to correct them.
The GP notwithstanding, we feel compelled to remember that Marxism is characteristically anti-statist and anti-authoritarian, and that socialist and labor movements in most of the world until World War I were dedicated to reducing the size and scope of the state -- labor unions and syndicates were developed as non-state methods of social provision and welfare, and were defended from state encroachment, because actual state welfare was seen by communists as the state "buying off" support from the proletariat, which in the case at least of Germany under Bismarck, was explicitly the goal.
What's fascinating is that through that whole period the political cultures of Europe, and to a large extent the US, accepted the terms of Marxist debate on the issue and accepted that there was such a thing as a capitalist, and a proletariat (called a "working class"), a meaningful relation between labor and value, the whole mess.
The socialist and labor parties of Europe in the first decade of the 20th century split over the question of wether or not you could be a socialist and be a parliamentarian, or government official, without contradiction. It was a really big issue and the source of bitter debate! And many labor and socialist leaders refused to become a part of the government on principle.
Contrast with the arguments over wether or not someone can truly stand for the values of the "TEA Party" and a member of congress.
What is possible is to design a system which can operate in an imperfect world populated by imperfect humans. That system is a Republican form of government given the absolute minimum power required to perform those few things that the Free People associating freely can't do for themselves.
The challenge is, how imperfect can the country get before people are unwilling to fight and die for it, are unwilling to ally with it, support it, vote in its elections, or do business in it. If someone's grandparents are living destitute and their job is miserable and their kid owes $100k in student loans and can't find a job, it's not going to matter a flying fuck how much "free people associating freely" is going on. Freedom is not an alibi for misery.
Democracy is a way (not the only way, but a way) of giving people a stake and responsibility in the system. The system in the US is specifically antidemocratic, and does a terrible job of registering preferences through elections, and the result is that when the US is "imperfect," its people increasingly don't see it as their problem or responsibility.
Karl Marx was a philosopher in the tradition of the Hegelians, a Romantic and a materialist. If you evaluate his work in those terms it's very compelling, offers many interesting critiques of Adam Smith, Ricardo and the post-enlightenment economists, but it makes no testable hypotheses. He is very historicist, he makes claims about what WILL happen, but they're couched in such a way that there's always room for interpretation and he never says exactly WHEN something will happen.
It's all really brilliant but you can't base an entire state or political economy on it, it's very impractical. Of course you can say the same thing about Smith or Robert Nozick: philosophy is not a good foundation for government.
But baldness is said to be caused by excess testosterone, and I have a physique so un-manly that if I said it was Zach Braff-like I'd be lying to make myself look better, so I don't think I have anything to worry about.
Androgenic alopecia is connected to an elevation in dihydrotestosterone, not testosterone as such; dihydrotestosterone is involved a few different endocrine processes, and is created when 5-alpha-reductase interacts with testosterone. It's not clear that there's any correlation between elevations in testosterone and male pattern baldness, the production of 5-alpha-reductase and DHT is believed to play the greater role. DHT is a more active form of testosterone that cannot be converted into estrogens, like normal testosterone can and is.
Which is why people take finasteride or avodart, 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors.
That's not favouring. That's the opposite of favouring; it's a goal to stop favouring non-open source projects just because they're open source.
Just because something is open source, it is not res ipsa loquitur better. Unless we're buying software on the basis of its openness instead of evaluating wether or not it actually solves the problem at hand.
I'm not saying that people would actually verify fingerprints, but it's s solution of a sort, and really the only kind that is resilient to CA malfeasance. You're never going to be able to create a system where a user needs to know NOTHING about his chain of trust AND is immune to authority corruption. If people learned to remember people's phone numbers, something that must have seemed daunting and ridiculous to a telephone engineer in 1890, verifying a PGP fingerprint is on the same level of complexity.
PGP at least has a mechanism for webs of trust, so if two or three of your trusted friends trusted bankofamerica.com you would be able to trust it yourself, and if you wanted to verify it yourself you could go to a branch and witness the fingerprint, hopefully posted somewhere in plain sight but where it can't be easily tampered with, like behind the teller glass.
For most people the trust of three friends, or the trust gained by obtaining a fingerprint at the brick-and-mortar branch would be more than sufficient for most kinds of commerce. But it's not boneheaded simple, and it requires you to undertake your own trust process, so there's a stumbling block and most people wouldn't bother.
OTOH, The system we have now, where system software and hardware vendors promulgate trust is acceptable -- if you don't trust your hardware or OS vendor, you're screwed no matter how you look at it, because a hardware/OS vendor can always circumvent software security. The problem is when a root authority suddenly is discovered as untrustworthy, in which case people have to go through an manually revoke certs. But in PGP, if you suddenly found one of the agents in your web of trust was a malefactor, you just end up with the same problem.
I seem to recall that in Singapore the official penalty for chewing gum on the subway is a police-administered beating. Keeping things looking nice is easy when you can flog people with truncheons for messing it up.
Klingon cruisers are definitely equipped with photon torpedoes in-canon; they use they against V'Ger in ST:TMP. Birds of Prey fire torpedoes in ST6. It is a cloaked Bird of Prey that fires while cloaked, so its possible previous variations were different; Christopher Lloyd'd (Kruge's) ship in ST3 destroyed the Grissom with an undisclosed weapon that were probably disruptors, though later, after being damaged it alternates and fires what are almost definitely torpedoes.
whereas the Disney of today is engaged primarily in stamping out new pictures as fast as they can manage, based on the same old plots, with the same old dark-skinned bad guys beating up on the lighter-skinned good guys.
Walt didn't exactly have the reputation of a slow-cooking perfectionist, either, particularly after he bought the studio lot; his was the studio that made about 6 features a year, like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, That Darn Cat!, Babes in Toyland, all perfectly serviceable but not very good films.
The bulk of Disney's output post World War 2 was, year to year, predominantly mediocre but always family-freindly -- it's approach to quality has been in "good enough for gospel" mode for decades. And the modern company is a reflection of that more than any other factor, like the absence of Walt, his brother, or the corporatization of the company in general.
Just based on the abstract, it sounds a lot like they've just tweaked the Cell cycle checkpoint mechanism. Your cells already use MicroRNA and miRNA to prevent tumor growth in a sort of sensor-effector "logic circuit" based on multiple inputs and feedback.
The abstract isn't clear enough about how this artificial process is different or constitutes a "logic circuit" that's novel relative to the natural mechanism. Not that it doesn't work better, but calling it a "logic circuit" seems sorta self-promoty, like when computer researchers in the 40s called computers "electronic brains."
Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Lion King... Remember they had that string of Menken and Ashman musicals and many of those are easily on the same level as Cinderella and Peter Pan.
Peter Pan, and Pinocchio, and Cinderella are great, but they aren't holy relics and they aren't perfect.
Netflix already has a content deal with Disney (signed in December 2010) and thus does not need Starz in order to show Disney/ABC titles.
I believe that deal last year was for television eps and catalogue films, Starz handles Disney's first-run theatrical titles. That's what we're losing.
We'll get there some day, the pricing will eventually align with the higher rungs on the value chain.
In the meantime, FYI, you can find many first-run and catalog Sony films at Crackle.com (they even have a Roku channel if you're in to that sort of thing). Crackle is Sony's Hulu-wannabe for their content. No, I don't know why it exists either.
The problem is that vendors go out of their way to cripple these devices. They expend extra effort and time to deliberately deny people the ability to do as they wish.
Mainly because it makes it easier for 3rd parties to DRM their applications, music and movies. Keeping the platform closed makes it more attractive to people that want to sell through it. Apple and Samsung don't gain very much from locked bootloaders-- even with them iTunes is still a break-even business, but Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and Rovio positively love a locked down platform. And since people buy tablets and phones in order to connect to Netflix, Hulu and Angry Birds, Apple and Samsung and Motorola are going to go pretty far to make sure they're happy.
Openness doesn't make developers happy if it costs them sales. And developers make these platforms, and they care a lot less about being able to develop in Flex or being able to give their customers the source than they do about people pirating their content willy-nilly.
Then you can, you know, compete on the quality of your products, rather than trying to stuff newspaper down each others throats in what can only be described as the bonfire of the idiots.
The point of the lawsuit is that Motorola and Samsung are claiming that patents they control are essential for implementing technical standards, and are supposed to be offered to everyone, but instead of offering to license to Apple they're just suing. They own patents that can crush any cellphone manufacturer if asserted, thus they were required as part of the standards process to permit anyone to use them and to not charge different people different prices to license them. You can't sue for them without making the standards proprietary in effect. If they sue Apple for them today, how does Huawei know they aren't going to get hit tomorrow?
Regardless of what Florian Mueller says, it's hard to dispute that the 'rules' of F/RAND are largely community dictated and ambiguous
Regardless of what a patent lawyer says, clearly we should just read the nouns in the summary and relax, knowing that if "Apple," "$ANDROID_LICENSEE" and "patent" appear in the summary we know who they "good guys" are without further need for investigation.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting considering that board members are elected BY stockholders, and are supposed to represent their interests. Let them vote for the craziest folks they dare, as long as they vote for them. It seems silly that you would subject board members to arbitrary tests when they've won the acclamation of their shareholders.
Of course this highlights a big problem with corporate governance, namely that boards are elected by stockholders, but a combination of stockholder disinterest and large institutional and mutual fund investment in firms has led to the composition of the board ballot being decided by the CEO and management.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't want "doofuses" on your board of directors, don't vote for them. Setting up some sort of independent review system is simply going to present stockholders with another stream of information to ignore. If you believe in democratic corporate governance you have to let people vote for who they want, and accept the responsibility for what happens to the business. The fact that Carol Bartz did a pretty lame job running AOL, and that the company has been on a death spiral ever since the Time Warner merger -- and for practical reasons will probably never figure out how to make their combined business a going concern -- has a lot more to do with the poor performance of the firm, notwithstanding the board.
Nota bene, my point is that Apollo was good pork in 1969. If there were private contractors designing heavy-lift vehicles in the late 60s, or Mars rovers today, I guess you'd have point. The problem with the private contractors is they only want to make what others will buy, and nobody would have paid $100 billion for a ticket to the moon.
And if all SpaceX is doing is taking NASA-funded inventions and reselling them to our defense establishment at a 20% markup, meanwhile packing along tourists at $1 million a kilo... I see no achievement, or likely any profit, in that. At least if America does it you can be proud and say "we" did it. When it's a tourist it's just some embarrassingly rich prick who comes back with a Blu-ray of his vacation, gives inept interviews about the magic of how "small" the Earth looked, and spends the rest of his life "finding himself" while running a succession of failed charities, all the while trying to ignore the fact that he liquidated the GDP of a small country in order to walk on a sandy rock, and added nothing in the process.
Foul mood this morning...
Admittedly, pork that puts you on the moon is still pretty good pork. Apollo was pork for Boeing, Douglas, North American, Grumman -- oh look at that, the top four military jet manufacturers got one stage each! Pork that everyone wants to see spent and achieves awesome goals takes on a different character.
The challenge has been in trying to keep the program moving forward scientifically. When there was a challenge and people were getting these vast sums of money in order to invent new technologies and put them into production, you could justify the expense because we were inventing new things. When we transitioned to the shuttle, there really wasn't any new innovation because the goals of the program were quite circumscribed compared to a lunar or planetary mission, and the contractors just get paid for maintenance work, instead of inventing the next microchip, materials process, energy source, or medical technology.
A pox on both of your houses.
That was a close one, for a while there it was looking like you might have a moral obligation to one side or the other, but you managed to talk yourself out of it.
This is a competition, you have to be the best or improving, there's no such thing as "enough." Mobile manufacturers aren't going to settle for crumbs at Google's table, slitting each others throats while Google rides their back, extracting all the value from the platform. Particularly considering that Google is now going to be making their own phones and competing with them directly.
I suppose it isn't a good thing that Apple's vacuuming-up more of their customer's money than the alternative, but this does indicate that their business is much more sustainable. Just because Android is free doesn't mean it's always going to be available and have a healthy ecosystem-- this is mostly dependent on decisions made by Samsung, HTC, and the mobile carriers of the Earth. And if those people aren't making money, Android is dead.
If people were paying $400 for iPhones this might make sense, but iPhones are not sold at luxury car prices...
I guess that's why you posted your comment in response to an article about, in so many words, "Flash video support."
Probably the same rule they use to block Hulu, Netflix, HBO Go, ABC, Disney, porn tube sites.... Oh wait, they don't block those.
And, uh, how do you know to trust the key?
You confirm the certificate out-of-band by calling the named entity on the phone or meeting them, and comparing the key fingerprint. Only way to do it, really. That's why it doesn't scale.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." The question of the stability of laissez-faire is bound up in the question of how many people are forced to encounter this rule, and to what extreme.
The GP notwithstanding, we feel compelled to remember that Marxism is characteristically anti-statist and anti-authoritarian, and that socialist and labor movements in most of the world until World War I were dedicated to reducing the size and scope of the state -- labor unions and syndicates were developed as non-state methods of social provision and welfare, and were defended from state encroachment, because actual state welfare was seen by communists as the state "buying off" support from the proletariat, which in the case at least of Germany under Bismarck, was explicitly the goal.
What's fascinating is that through that whole period the political cultures of Europe, and to a large extent the US, accepted the terms of Marxist debate on the issue and accepted that there was such a thing as a capitalist, and a proletariat (called a "working class"), a meaningful relation between labor and value, the whole mess.
The socialist and labor parties of Europe in the first decade of the 20th century split over the question of wether or not you could be a socialist and be a parliamentarian, or government official, without contradiction. It was a really big issue and the source of bitter debate! And many labor and socialist leaders refused to become a part of the government on principle.
Contrast with the arguments over wether or not someone can truly stand for the values of the "TEA Party" and a member of congress.
The challenge is, how imperfect can the country get before people are unwilling to fight and die for it, are unwilling to ally with it, support it, vote in its elections, or do business in it. If someone's grandparents are living destitute and their job is miserable and their kid owes $100k in student loans and can't find a job, it's not going to matter a flying fuck how much "free people associating freely" is going on. Freedom is not an alibi for misery.
Democracy is a way (not the only way, but a way) of giving people a stake and responsibility in the system. The system in the US is specifically antidemocratic, and does a terrible job of registering preferences through elections, and the result is that when the US is "imperfect," its people increasingly don't see it as their problem or responsibility.
Karl Marx was a philosopher in the tradition of the Hegelians, a Romantic and a materialist. If you evaluate his work in those terms it's very compelling, offers many interesting critiques of Adam Smith, Ricardo and the post-enlightenment economists, but it makes no testable hypotheses. He is very historicist, he makes claims about what WILL happen, but they're couched in such a way that there's always room for interpretation and he never says exactly WHEN something will happen.
It's all really brilliant but you can't base an entire state or political economy on it, it's very impractical. Of course you can say the same thing about Smith or Robert Nozick: philosophy is not a good foundation for government.
Androgenic alopecia is connected to an elevation in dihydrotestosterone, not testosterone as such; dihydrotestosterone is involved a few different endocrine processes, and is created when 5-alpha-reductase interacts with testosterone. It's not clear that there's any correlation between elevations in testosterone and male pattern baldness, the production of 5-alpha-reductase and DHT is believed to play the greater role. DHT is a more active form of testosterone that cannot be converted into estrogens, like normal testosterone can and is.
Which is why people take finasteride or avodart, 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors.
Just because something is open source, it is not res ipsa loquitur better. Unless we're buying software on the basis of its openness instead of evaluating wether or not it actually solves the problem at hand.
I'm not saying that people would actually verify fingerprints, but it's s solution of a sort, and really the only kind that is resilient to CA malfeasance. You're never going to be able to create a system where a user needs to know NOTHING about his chain of trust AND is immune to authority corruption. If people learned to remember people's phone numbers, something that must have seemed daunting and ridiculous to a telephone engineer in 1890, verifying a PGP fingerprint is on the same level of complexity.
I am so far from a FOSSie it's not even funny.
PGP at least has a mechanism for webs of trust, so if two or three of your trusted friends trusted bankofamerica.com you would be able to trust it yourself, and if you wanted to verify it yourself you could go to a branch and witness the fingerprint, hopefully posted somewhere in plain sight but where it can't be easily tampered with, like behind the teller glass.
For most people the trust of three friends, or the trust gained by obtaining a fingerprint at the brick-and-mortar branch would be more than sufficient for most kinds of commerce. But it's not boneheaded simple, and it requires you to undertake your own trust process, so there's a stumbling block and most people wouldn't bother.
OTOH, The system we have now, where system software and hardware vendors promulgate trust is acceptable -- if you don't trust your hardware or OS vendor, you're screwed no matter how you look at it, because a hardware/OS vendor can always circumvent software security. The problem is when a root authority suddenly is discovered as untrustworthy, in which case people have to go through an manually revoke certs. But in PGP, if you suddenly found one of the agents in your web of trust was a malefactor, you just end up with the same problem.
I seem to recall that in Singapore the official penalty for chewing gum on the subway is a police-administered beating. Keeping things looking nice is easy when you can flog people with truncheons for messing it up.
Klingon cruisers are definitely equipped with photon torpedoes in-canon; they use they against V'Ger in ST:TMP. Birds of Prey fire torpedoes in ST6. It is a cloaked Bird of Prey that fires while cloaked, so its possible previous variations were different; Christopher Lloyd'd (Kruge's) ship in ST3 destroyed the Grissom with an undisclosed weapon that were probably disruptors, though later, after being damaged it alternates and fires what are almost definitely torpedoes.
Walt didn't exactly have the reputation of a slow-cooking perfectionist, either, particularly after he bought the studio lot; his was the studio that made about 6 features a year, like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, That Darn Cat!, Babes in Toyland, all perfectly serviceable but not very good films.
The bulk of Disney's output post World War 2 was, year to year, predominantly mediocre but always family-freindly -- it's approach to quality has been in "good enough for gospel" mode for decades. And the modern company is a reflection of that more than any other factor, like the absence of Walt, his brother, or the corporatization of the company in general.
Just based on the abstract, it sounds a lot like they've just tweaked the Cell cycle checkpoint mechanism. Your cells already use MicroRNA and miRNA to prevent tumor growth in a sort of sensor-effector "logic circuit" based on multiple inputs and feedback.
The abstract isn't clear enough about how this artificial process is different or constitutes a "logic circuit" that's novel relative to the natural mechanism. Not that it doesn't work better, but calling it a "logic circuit" seems sorta self-promoty, like when computer researchers in the 40s called computers "electronic brains."
Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Lion King... Remember they had that string of Menken and Ashman musicals and many of those are easily on the same level as Cinderella and Peter Pan.
Peter Pan, and Pinocchio, and Cinderella are great, but they aren't holy relics and they aren't perfect.
I believe that deal last year was for television eps and catalogue films, Starz handles Disney's first-run theatrical titles. That's what we're losing.
We'll get there some day, the pricing will eventually align with the higher rungs on the value chain.
In the meantime, FYI, you can find many first-run and catalog Sony films at Crackle.com (they even have a Roku channel if you're in to that sort of thing). Crackle is Sony's Hulu-wannabe for their content. No, I don't know why it exists either.
"Arthur Dent" as in The Late Dent, Arthur Dent? A bit of a pun, you see.
Mainly because it makes it easier for 3rd parties to DRM their applications, music and movies. Keeping the platform closed makes it more attractive to people that want to sell through it. Apple and Samsung don't gain very much from locked bootloaders-- even with them iTunes is still a break-even business, but Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and Rovio positively love a locked down platform. And since people buy tablets and phones in order to connect to Netflix, Hulu and Angry Birds, Apple and Samsung and Motorola are going to go pretty far to make sure they're happy.
Openness doesn't make developers happy if it costs them sales. And developers make these platforms, and they care a lot less about being able to develop in Flex or being able to give their customers the source than they do about people pirating their content willy-nilly.
The point of the lawsuit is that Motorola and Samsung are claiming that patents they control are essential for implementing technical standards, and are supposed to be offered to everyone, but instead of offering to license to Apple they're just suing. They own patents that can crush any cellphone manufacturer if asserted, thus they were required as part of the standards process to permit anyone to use them and to not charge different people different prices to license them. You can't sue for them without making the standards proprietary in effect. If they sue Apple for them today, how does Huawei know they aren't going to get hit tomorrow?
Regardless of what a patent lawyer says, clearly we should just read the nouns in the summary and relax, knowing that if "Apple," "$ANDROID_LICENSEE" and "patent" appear in the summary we know who they "good guys" are without further need for investigation.
Another few orders of magnitude and they might approach vacuum tube-levels of reliability.