Alternately hit the gym. Ever since I put on 30 pounds of visible muscle people have been much more deferential to me, and you don't have to have good genes to look burly.
While I mainly agree with you, 4 cents/song at 1m downloads per day is $40k per day, or $14.5 million per year. That's around 10% of profits - nothing to sneeze at. (My math may be wrong though.) Also, if Apple originally thought iTMS was going to be a loss leader, turning any profit at all is unexpected and nice.
Also it's to their benefit to make potential competitors think iTMS loses money, to prevent competition, so they very well might keep profitability a secret. It's not like Apple shareholders need encouragement these days.
You have to detect the presence of a few general classes of thoughts: up/down. left-right.
Unfortunately this is not correct. Although the literature is not complete in this area, it is believed that the brain encodes movement in two forms: spatial coordinates and joint velocity vectors. That is, the brain knows where you want to go in an (x,y,z) sense, and it knows the change in joint angles that will get you there (which is learned from past experience). Predicting where the arm will go is a matter of decoding the (x,y,z), but what you really need for a neuroprosthesis is the joint velocity vector, which occurs later in the system and is harder to determine because it's adaptive. The technique used by these researchers is essentially a sophisticated form of correlation: neuron A fired and the arm went to (1,2,3), so A represents position (1,2,3) etc. What we need for a prosthesis is neuron B fired and set the 7 joint angles to (x,y,z, etc). Even this may not be sufficient because it doesn't account for things like reaching around an obstacle, where your arm moves to the same point but with a different set of joint rotations.
Amen. Laws are only effective on rational actors, which addicts aren't. Most criminals aren't rational actors either, since some 50% of crimes are commited while intoxicated.
As an aside, penalties for pot are still relatively low - a fine or a few days in jail. If they started throwing people in jail for 20 years for a single joint, a lot of people would stop smoking, because early-stage pot smokers are still rational.
Way to cherry-pick an era. The US has had three major protection stages and you managed to miss all of them. The first, in the 20s, precipitated the Great Depression. The second, in the 70s, caused stagflation, which had just begun in 1975. The third, in the early 80s, shows how protection can be properly used - to protect struggling industries (e.g. Harley), where the protection is removed after a few years.
If you're not xenophobic, then why are you opposed to immigration both legal and illegal? The only reason you don't like what they're doing is because they don't live here, which is xenophobia (not racism, which I'm not accusing you of).
This is almost not worth responding to, but since it's gotten modded up I'll take the bait. For anyone who's taken Econ 101 this should be old hat.
Manufacturing in America has been dead for a long time. Your (uncited) statistic that America grew faster when it had high manufacturing omits a HUGE number of confounding variables, including the state of the world economy and the lack of education and opportunity for minorities. America's growth in the modern era has been powered by technology and know-how.
If America were to ban foreign labor, our high wages (determined partly by the minimum wage) would quickly drive prices of everything through the roof, so that anyone with a manufacturing job could not afford them. This would cause an economic disaster - in fact, many economists view the protection of industry in the US and elsewhere as the single largest factor in starting the Great Depression. Save 1 manufacturing job today, lose 10 better-paying jobs in high tech next year.
The solution to our loss of manufacturing isn't to ban imports, it's to educate the workers so that they can add more value to the world. It's all about value, people, you can't get paid more money than the value you create.
Also I like the citation of the liberal NYT and conservative Fox News both as official news sources, and the antipathy (or is it xenophobia?) towards both the poor (illegal immigrants, guest workers) and the rich. Looks like we have a consistancy problem here. Man did I get trolled.
From a marketing standpoint, they are making a horrible mistake. If they had done nothing, a few security professionals would have seen the exploit and not recommended their software. But now that they've sued over it, they have gotten a ton of free publicity advertising the following facts:
1. Their software has holes in it. 2. They don't want to fix it. 3. They don't want you to even know that the holes exist.
Now as a consumer, even if I don't understand the technical merits or implications, the message is that this company makes crappy software and is trying to cover it up.
it takes a $90K prep-school and a $10K SAT-prep course plus a "legacy" contribution to gain entrance to a top-school
Or you could be like me, a public school student with a $20 Princeton CD-ROM, who went to an Ivy League school, or my fiance, a public school student from a rural area with no SAT prep, who went to the same school, or many of our classmates. The best schools try very hard to recruit the poor and other underrepresented groups. Go to any Ivy League or comparable campus and you'll find that while there are still rich kids, there are many poor and middle-class students as well.
As a side note, many of those students, especially the poorest, later struggle or fail out because their high schools were horrific and did not prepare them at all, but that's another issue altogether...
Unless you have something to hide from (as in you're doing something illegal over the internet), this is not a problem.
Like criticizing the government? Sure, it's not a crime now, but freedoms have a tendency to erode (see: United States and Muslim organizations, Russia and Yukos) at unbelievable speeds.
I'm assuming they were willing to pay not just up-front material costs but the cost of all of the cable company's personnel that would be tied up. Even then, up-front costs are not the only costs. You also have to consider maintanence costs and operating costs, which means that the company would have to charge the rural residents a higher rate, which means fewer people will sign up, which means the rate goes up even more, and eventually nobody has cable and the company gets a bad rap because they're overpriced, and still nobody has cable.
Alternatively, the cable companies were both poorly managed, which is often true of monopolies. BUt if that's the case, then someone else should start a company to provide the cable service by wiring the valley, connecting to the other companies, etc. If people are willing to pay the costs, someone will do it.
By the way, DirectTV didn't benefit from the cable companies' apathy (at least not primarily), they benefitted from a different cost model. It costs DirectTV a constant amount of money (close to 0) to send programming to any home, anywhere, while it costs cable companies money proportional to the distance both in installation and in operation.
If people don't want it, it'll fail overwhelmingly and no one will be "forced" into anything.
Except when 51% of the people want it. Then the 49% that don't want it are forced to pay for something they don't want and won't use. If the people who want wireless, be they 10%, 51%, or 99%, can pay for the costs of it, a company will be sure to provide it. If they can't, then it shouldn't be there in the first place - it's not valuable enough to people to be worth putting in.
it's the CORPORATION'S problem to figure out how to break into a government's market area
Except the government has the use of force - it can tax the corporation, regulate it to death or ban it outright, and it can make people who don't use the service pay for it.
However, fragment your viewing audience, say by spinning off part of them (who would likely be demographically different than those who don't download) and you've got a problem with your revenue stream.
This is a feature, not a problem. More strongly split demographics mean ads can be better targeted, which increases the price per ad. Also, requiring registration for downloads allows exact demographic information - ads could even be priced based on the actual viewership.
Until the government says that Bill's money is illegally obtained, it's his to do with as he pleases. That he chooses to give much of it away is indeed noble. If you think he got money illegally, complain about the government's weak penalties and monopoly enforcement.
IANAL, but under typical accessory laws everyone associated with the crime is also guilty of it. That means not only the spyware makers, but also the companies whose software bundles the program, and any company that advertises through the associated adware. Since both of these have to have a public face, they are easy targets with nowhere to run. While they might go offshore, better there than here. Also, it might stop sites like download.com from posting programs with spyware, as they would also be accomplices. Not sure if any of this is true, but it seems likely to be.
Another advantage of this that nobody's noted yet is that you don't have to worry about reception. My apartment gets such poor cell coverage that I drop calls just walking around. With one of these I could put my cell in the spot where it got the best reception and leave it there. Or I could just stop pacing maniacally, but then I'd have to cut down on the coffee...
Since you care so much about the details of my random story,
1. Connections were 10 half, not full duplex. 2. They don't care about your downstream, since lots of people use the full downstream legitimately. 3. If I were talking about myself, I'd say so.
How can any competent network admin possibly think Firefox and Winamp are causing a computer to not boot?
One of my friends in college was running an FTP server out of his dorm room. He had pretty much maxed out his 10Base connection and was trying to find some way to tap into the college's backbone since all of the dorms only had 10 megabits.
But before he could do that the head of IT called him in for using too much bandwidth. My friend was a little worried because our college had pretty strict bandwidth policies and he stood to lose his account permanently. But when he went in, the first thing this guy (who makes >$150k) says is "Son, do you know you're using 13 megabits of bandwidth?" On a 10 megabit connection. Right. My friend stopped worrying after that.
If something SHOULD be a Right, but its not in the Constitution, its not a Right.
Wrong. The Constitution and its amendments do not create our rights, they recognize them. The 9th amendment states, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." We retain all of our rights, regardless of whether they are outlined in the Constitution. Rights are something everyone has, equally, in every country of the world, simply by being human. Whether a government respects them is, of course, another matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Being tall helps, too.
Alternately hit the gym. Ever since I put on 30 pounds of visible muscle people have been much more deferential to me, and you don't have to have good genes to look burly.
I wonder why the link in the /. submission was already grey
Hmm, mine isn't...
While I mainly agree with you, 4 cents/song at 1m downloads per day is $40k per day, or $14.5 million per year. That's around 10% of profits - nothing to sneeze at. (My math may be wrong though.) Also, if Apple originally thought iTMS was going to be a loss leader, turning any profit at all is unexpected and nice.
Also it's to their benefit to make potential competitors think iTMS loses money, to prevent competition, so they very well might keep profitability a secret. It's not like Apple shareholders need encouragement these days.
You have to detect the presence of a few general classes of thoughts: up/down. left-right.
Unfortunately this is not correct. Although the literature is not complete in this area, it is believed that the brain encodes movement in two forms: spatial coordinates and joint velocity vectors. That is, the brain knows where you want to go in an (x,y,z) sense, and it knows the change in joint angles that will get you there (which is learned from past experience). Predicting where the arm will go is a matter of decoding the (x,y,z), but what you really need for a neuroprosthesis is the joint velocity vector, which occurs later in the system and is harder to determine because it's adaptive. The technique used by these researchers is essentially a sophisticated form of correlation: neuron A fired and the arm went to (1,2,3), so A represents position (1,2,3) etc. What we need for a prosthesis is neuron B fired and set the 7 joint angles to (x,y,z, etc). Even this may not be sufficient because it doesn't account for things like reaching around an obstacle, where your arm moves to the same point but with a different set of joint rotations.
And yes, IAACS (cognitive scientist).
Apple's DRM is so danged innocuous that I haven't run into it, ever
Then clearly you don't:
Amen. Laws are only effective on rational actors, which addicts aren't. Most criminals aren't rational actors either, since some 50% of crimes are commited while intoxicated.
As an aside, penalties for pot are still relatively low - a fine or a few days in jail. If they started throwing people in jail for 20 years for a single joint, a lot of people would stop smoking, because early-stage pot smokers are still rational.
look up the inflation rate between 1935 and 1975.
Way to cherry-pick an era. The US has had three major protection stages and you managed to miss all of them. The first, in the 20s, precipitated the Great Depression. The second, in the 70s, caused stagflation, which had just begun in 1975. The third, in the early 80s, shows how protection can be properly used - to protect struggling industries (e.g. Harley), where the protection is removed after a few years.
If you're not xenophobic, then why are you opposed to immigration both legal and illegal? The only reason you don't like what they're doing is because they don't live here, which is xenophobia (not racism, which I'm not accusing you of).
This is almost not worth responding to, but since it's gotten modded up I'll take the bait. For anyone who's taken Econ 101 this should be old hat.
Manufacturing in America has been dead for a long time. Your (uncited) statistic that America grew faster when it had high manufacturing omits a HUGE number of confounding variables, including the state of the world economy and the lack of education and opportunity for minorities. America's growth in the modern era has been powered by technology and know-how.
If America were to ban foreign labor, our high wages (determined partly by the minimum wage) would quickly drive prices of everything through the roof, so that anyone with a manufacturing job could not afford them. This would cause an economic disaster - in fact, many economists view the protection of industry in the US and elsewhere as the single largest factor in starting the Great Depression. Save 1 manufacturing job today, lose 10 better-paying jobs in high tech next year.
The solution to our loss of manufacturing isn't to ban imports, it's to educate the workers so that they can add more value to the world. It's all about value, people, you can't get paid more money than the value you create.
Also I like the citation of the liberal NYT and conservative Fox News both as official news sources, and the antipathy (or is it xenophobia?) towards both the poor (illegal immigrants, guest workers) and the rich. Looks like we have a consistancy problem here. Man did I get trolled.
From a marketing standpoint, they are making a horrible mistake. If they had done nothing, a few security professionals would have seen the exploit and not recommended their software. But now that they've sued over it, they have gotten a ton of free publicity advertising the following facts:
1. Their software has holes in it.
2. They don't want to fix it.
3. They don't want you to even know that the holes exist.
Now as a consumer, even if I don't understand the technical merits or implications, the message is that this company makes crappy software and is trying to cover it up.
it takes a $90K prep-school and a $10K SAT-prep course plus a "legacy" contribution to gain entrance to a top-school
Or you could be like me, a public school student with a $20 Princeton CD-ROM, who went to an Ivy League school, or my fiance, a public school student from a rural area with no SAT prep, who went to the same school, or many of our classmates. The best schools try very hard to recruit the poor and other underrepresented groups. Go to any Ivy League or comparable campus and you'll find that while there are still rich kids, there are many poor and middle-class students as well.
As a side note, many of those students, especially the poorest, later struggle or fail out because their high schools were horrific and did not prepare them at all, but that's another issue altogether...
Unless you have something to hide from (as in you're doing something illegal over the internet), this is not a problem.
Like criticizing the government? Sure, it's not a crime now, but freedoms have a tendency to erode (see: United States and Muslim organizations, Russia and Yukos) at unbelievable speeds.
I'd love to be able to use a filesystem that can be seen in a dual-boot environment
Well now you can as long as you're dual booting Longhorn and WinXP.
I'm assuming they were willing to pay not just up-front material costs but the cost of all of the cable company's personnel that would be tied up. Even then, up-front costs are not the only costs. You also have to consider maintanence costs and operating costs, which means that the company would have to charge the rural residents a higher rate, which means fewer people will sign up, which means the rate goes up even more, and eventually nobody has cable and the company gets a bad rap because they're overpriced, and still nobody has cable.
Alternatively, the cable companies were both poorly managed, which is often true of monopolies. BUt if that's the case, then someone else should start a company to provide the cable service by wiring the valley, connecting to the other companies, etc. If people are willing to pay the costs, someone will do it.
By the way, DirectTV didn't benefit from the cable companies' apathy (at least not primarily), they benefitted from a different cost model. It costs DirectTV a constant amount of money (close to 0) to send programming to any home, anywhere, while it costs cable companies money proportional to the distance both in installation and in operation.
If people don't want it, it'll fail overwhelmingly and no one will be "forced" into anything.
Except when 51% of the people want it. Then the 49% that don't want it are forced to pay for something they don't want and won't use. If the people who want wireless, be they 10%, 51%, or 99%, can pay for the costs of it, a company will be sure to provide it. If they can't, then it shouldn't be there in the first place - it's not valuable enough to people to be worth putting in.
it's the CORPORATION'S problem to figure out how to break into a government's market area
Except the government has the use of force - it can tax the corporation, regulate it to death or ban it outright, and it can make people who don't use the service pay for it.
However, fragment your viewing audience, say by spinning off part of them (who would likely be demographically different than those who don't download) and you've got a problem with your revenue stream.
This is a feature, not a problem. More strongly split demographics mean ads can be better targeted, which increases the price per ad. Also, requiring registration for downloads allows exact demographic information - ads could even be priced based on the actual viewership.
Until the government says that Bill's money is illegally obtained, it's his to do with as he pleases. That he chooses to give much of it away is indeed noble. If you think he got money illegally, complain about the government's weak penalties and monopoly enforcement.
IANAL, but under typical accessory laws everyone associated with the crime is also guilty of it. That means not only the spyware makers, but also the companies whose software bundles the program, and any company that advertises through the associated adware. Since both of these have to have a public face, they are easy targets with nowhere to run. While they might go offshore, better there than here. Also, it might stop sites like download.com from posting programs with spyware, as they would also be accomplices. Not sure if any of this is true, but it seems likely to be.
Another advantage of this that nobody's noted yet is that you don't have to worry about reception. My apartment gets such poor cell coverage that I drop calls just walking around. With one of these I could put my cell in the spot where it got the best reception and leave it there. Or I could just stop pacing maniacally, but then I'd have to cut down on the coffee...
Who sleeps better at night? Bill or Linus?
Bill: with a $100 million house, he must have a REALLY nice bed
Don't call her 9 out of 10 either.
Since you care so much about the details of my random story,
1. Connections were 10 half, not full duplex.
2. They don't care about your downstream, since lots of people use the full downstream legitimately.
3. If I were talking about myself, I'd say so.
How can any competent network admin possibly think Firefox and Winamp are causing a computer to not boot?
One of my friends in college was running an FTP server out of his dorm room. He had pretty much maxed out his 10Base connection and was trying to find some way to tap into the college's backbone since all of the dorms only had 10 megabits.
But before he could do that the head of IT called him in for using too much bandwidth. My friend was a little worried because our college had pretty strict bandwidth policies and he stood to lose his account permanently. But when he went in, the first thing this guy (who makes >$150k) says is "Son, do you know you're using 13 megabits of bandwidth?" On a 10 megabit connection. Right. My friend stopped worrying after that.
US Military Plans Space Combat
Does anyone see a connection? In space containment is much less of a problem (though cost is still an issue).
The Windows Centrino drivers don't work half the time anyway. Windows may have more drivers than Linux, but working drivers is another story...
If something SHOULD be a Right, but its not in the Constitution, its not a Right.
Wrong. The Constitution and its amendments do not create our rights, they recognize them. The 9th amendment states, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." We retain all of our rights, regardless of whether they are outlined in the Constitution. Rights are something everyone has, equally, in every country of the world, simply by being human. Whether a government respects them is, of course, another matter.