Not belittling Rosa Parks, Desmond Tutu, or any of the other civil disobedients who did make great sacrifice to make their point - but how many thousands have sacrificed more for no visible result beyond their own punishment? If you've got little to lose (like a certain Jet Blue flight attendant) then it's easier to let it go and roll the dice on making a bold statement. My take on life in the USA is that you're rolling about a half dozen 20 sided dice and expecting them to all come up 7 if you expect a civil disobedience protest to do anything positive for your own life, or the life of anyone you know.
Ultimately, money is meaningless, but if you have the patience, follow this idea:
I have invented a time machine, it allows me to obtain limited information from one highly probable future. I spent billions on R&D making it, employing hundreds of brilliant people, and now I want to recoup my investment. I recoup my investment by trading profitably on the stock market, taking $1 Trillion per year for the next 10 years.
I spend my first Trillion lobbying to protect my IP such that no-one is allowed to practice it until after I am dead.
I spend my next Trillion on R&D for immortality, there are minor spinoffs which benefit the masses, but for the most part the treatments discovered only benefit Trillionaires.
Having secured the important things in my life, I start to pursue altruistic goals, starting with acquiring the Texas-Mexico border and building a 50' wall along the length of it, because I think it's a good idea, even though all evidence from the the USSR and Korea is to the contrary, I'm sure it will work this time.
Meanwhile, my drain on the stock market has been an effective tax of over $3000 per-year per-capita in the US, it's spread around a little due to foreign investment, but people are starting to notice that nobody wins this game but me. Luckily, there's a fool born every minute and I'm still raking in my profits, regardless of the fact that a mass exodus from the market has dropped the Nasdaq below 500 and the Dow Jones to 1960s levels - not corrected for inflation.
The real waste here isn't the money, it's the fact that I'm wasting resources on goals with no benefit to the population at large. When everybody is poor, there will be deflation and adjustment, well, except for me.
We have enough wealth to support a certain amount of this, but if it is taken to absurdity it is obviously a huge fail. I risked billions, don't I deserve my rich reward?
Interestingly enough, my.com didn't crater, it sputtered along at breakeven and still does in some form today. The yacht meisters and other private investors collectively put in about $3M before a VC round came in. The VCs grabbed control and proceeded to pour buckets of money on the endeavor until, finally, they had amassed enough debt (to themselves, amusingly enough) to declare a net value of 0. As majority shareholders, they declared a re-organization in which they cashed out all minority investors, we (yacht meisters and all) got checks for $0.01 each. No, investors shouldn't back high risk endeavors for free, but the playing field is seriously skewed in favor of the big fish, who continue to skew things more in their favor all the time.
Yes, T-Bills are used to fund government spending - but most good Republicans don't equate government spending with anything positive. Hoarding gold, mass quantities of real estate and other resources does a great deal of harm and very little good, at least in economic terms. Drive up the Florida coast, preferably in a boat, look at all the empty (and very expensive) real-estate and tell me that that is not "money which has been sucked out of the system."
Sure it is, if you're willing to uproot your life and move across the world for another opportunity.
If you're living in a moderately sized town with a specialized skill set, you're likely getting salary squeezed in exchange for the luxury of not being a nomad.
What I have seen of fund investors in that good luck is required to do well... however, bad luck is not required to do poorly, there are managers who consistently fail. If we all had 1000 years to play this out in, we could separate the good from the bad on statistics, unfortunately, in the span of a 30 year career it is almost impossible to tell.
Most people who earn millions per year tend to have sizeable conservative investments, so they are "circulating" this money into things like T-bills, piles of gold, oceanfront estates, and other things that don't directly benefit the population at large.
I think a big part of the tech bubble around 2000 was the ultra-rich getting inspired (largely by the chance to become ultra-richer) and putting a fraction of their conservatively invested wealth into tech startups. I know our.com was talking to investors on yachts in the South Pacific...
I think Maryland is also one of the few states that forbids radar detectors... in their view it's O.K. for the Police to use new technology, but not for the policed.
Good philosophy, but it has to be obvious to someone at your company that the auto-patch and central server features are: 1. security concerns and 2. non-essential to game play. Yeah, the high score feature is nice, but I imagine many portals provide specific APIs for doing such things on "their portal", yeah, non-portable and all kinds of offensive, but if you want to play in their sandbox, learn to play by their rules.
Oh, and be glad that anyone buys your game directly at any price. Unless you're in a "wallet at the ready" portal, it's exceedingly rare that a "bubble pop" game of any sophistication would turn the machinery of remuneration in a player's head.
tl;dr sums up the whole article. Trying to make money at something people are willing to pay money to do is inherently problematic (witness: 737 pilots, artists, musicians, pro sports, dolphin trainers, anything to do with horses, etc...)
Around the Vail valley ski resorts there are open repeaters on many peaks... not sure about the back country. You should be able to do some internet research to turn up a list of open repeaters in the area you are interested in. My experience using handheld amateur radio (in quiet, back-country type locations) as a cell replacer is: with a repeater: good for "local" use within the range of the repeater network, without a repeater: you can often achieve the same thing by shouting loudly.
That random number is the marketing dimension, it has more influence over buying decisions than any other. You'd also be surprised how much people are paid to derive those marketing numbers and weave their influence between cost, performance, short term income, long term reputation and the CEO's favorite astrologer.
If the chip can't run all the cores at full speed due to heat/power considerations and therefore either throttles back each core's speed or disables some cores under heavy load, than core counts are really just a deceptive pissing contest, aren't they?
Depends, performance is much more multi-dimensional than it used to be.... if you have an occasional operation that can parallelize to use 24+ threads, it might be advantageous to get a dual socket motherboard with a couple of the new 6 core hyper-threading processors - even if they throttle back to 1/2 speed, you're still getting a 6x+ speedup compared to single core.
Personally, for today's software mix, I like the throttling cores, most stuff chokes a single thread so having the ability to run that single core faster is valuable. Then you can look at applications like video transcoding where you want as many cores as you can get...
Some people will buy the highest GHz they can get, some will buy the most cores they can get, a few will buy the fastest front side bus they can get, but most will buy the model 7, because they can't afford the 9 and the 5 just looked cheap.
At least in central Florida, "Cracker" refers to the settlers of the 1800's who "cracked" the whip to drive the horses, oxen, donkeys, small goats, or whatever they could afford to pull their wagons.
People have created things - beautiful, wonderful, amazing things - throughout history, many of them without any kind of promise of compensation for what they have created. They created because they *needed* to.
The independently wealthy, and the patronized can do this. In modern life (mine, at least), there is enough free time to pursue a hobby that produces tangible results. I'd say I have put about 1% of my total creative output to hobby work. The other 99% needs funding, otherwise the whole house mortgage, cars, college funds, retirement account, etc. goes down the toilet.
So, yeah, when I "need" to produce some hobby-art, I can take a little time to do it. If I take any more time out from "productive work" that does indeed care about turning a profit, I put the livelyhood that supports my hobby at serious risk.
Many other people aren't as fortunate as I am, many have to work full time just to stay alive. Others have everything provided for them and they can do as they please 100% of the time. In the "free market" western economy, I think my circumstance represents the majority of people.
Copyrights aren't for hobbyists, they are for people who need compensation from their creative output. Unfortunately, they have been twisted by the powerful in to tools to protect the powerful, as if they needed any more protection.
I do not know of any garage level medical device makers.
Funny you should say that, I've worked in medical devices for nearly 20 years, 16 of those in 3 different garage level companies (5-15 employees) and the 4th was a garage level company 10 years earlier. Whether it's a new CD or a new diagnostic algorithm, we're both just looking for a couple of hundred thousand to promote our stuff with.
I'm actually referring to investors in the technology space (electronics, software, etc.) Same principles apply, they're just as flaky and inscrutable, but at least they're dealing with a product that has some hope of quantifiable value beyond "it's got a real danceable beat."
I wasn't referring to DOS itself being pirated, DOS had a lock-in monopoly tie to the hardware. What made DOS so successful was its implicit support of piracy. How hard would it have been to build in OS support for software locking that actually worked? (start with easily accessed machine serial numbers, like SGI, Sun and all the "big boys" of the day had...)
Regardless of intent, it was extremely easy to pirate works created for DOS, evidenced by the large stacks of self-made "backup" disks beside every college kid's PC in the computer lab. Why even consider another platform when a cornucopia of software is available for free on DOS?
That's what was so great about the revolution: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." They didn't need any stinking facts, they just needed to bloody Britan's nose enough to get them to butt out. These are the same men who provided for patent and copyright in the first place, also with scant statistics or other "hard evidence."
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Not belittling Rosa Parks, Desmond Tutu, or any of the other civil disobedients who did make great sacrifice to make their point - but how many thousands have sacrificed more for no visible result beyond their own punishment? If you've got little to lose (like a certain Jet Blue flight attendant) then it's easier to let it go and roll the dice on making a bold statement. My take on life in the USA is that you're rolling about a half dozen 20 sided dice and expecting them to all come up 7 if you expect a civil disobedience protest to do anything positive for your own life, or the life of anyone you know.
Ultimately, money is meaningless, but if you have the patience, follow this idea:
I have invented a time machine, it allows me to obtain limited information from one highly probable future. I spent billions on R&D making it, employing hundreds of brilliant people, and now I want to recoup my investment. I recoup my investment by trading profitably on the stock market, taking $1 Trillion per year for the next 10 years.
I spend my first Trillion lobbying to protect my IP such that no-one is allowed to practice it until after I am dead.
I spend my next Trillion on R&D for immortality, there are minor spinoffs which benefit the masses, but for the most part the treatments discovered only benefit Trillionaires.
Having secured the important things in my life, I start to pursue altruistic goals, starting with acquiring the Texas-Mexico border and building a 50' wall along the length of it, because I think it's a good idea, even though all evidence from the the USSR and Korea is to the contrary, I'm sure it will work this time.
Meanwhile, my drain on the stock market has been an effective tax of over $3000 per-year per-capita in the US, it's spread around a little due to foreign investment, but people are starting to notice that nobody wins this game but me. Luckily, there's a fool born every minute and I'm still raking in my profits, regardless of the fact that a mass exodus from the market has dropped the Nasdaq below 500 and the Dow Jones to 1960s levels - not corrected for inflation.
The real waste here isn't the money, it's the fact that I'm wasting resources on goals with no benefit to the population at large. When everybody is poor, there will be deflation and adjustment, well, except for me.
We have enough wealth to support a certain amount of this, but if it is taken to absurdity it is obviously a huge fail. I risked billions, don't I deserve my rich reward?
Interestingly enough, my .com didn't crater, it sputtered along at breakeven and still does in some form today. The yacht meisters and other private investors collectively put in about $3M before a VC round came in. The VCs grabbed control and proceeded to pour buckets of money on the endeavor until, finally, they had amassed enough debt (to themselves, amusingly enough) to declare a net value of 0. As majority shareholders, they declared a re-organization in which they cashed out all minority investors, we (yacht meisters and all) got checks for $0.01 each. No, investors shouldn't back high risk endeavors for free, but the playing field is seriously skewed in favor of the big fish, who continue to skew things more in their favor all the time.
Yes, T-Bills are used to fund government spending - but most good Republicans don't equate government spending with anything positive. Hoarding gold, mass quantities of real estate and other resources does a great deal of harm and very little good, at least in economic terms. Drive up the Florida coast, preferably in a boat, look at all the empty (and very expensive) real-estate and tell me that that is not "money which has been sucked out of the system."
That will *force* salaries up to the real market rate
or... force them down to make sure the plebes don't have the resources to pull something so cheeky in the future.
Sure it is, if you're willing to uproot your life and move across the world for another opportunity.
If you're living in a moderately sized town with a specialized skill set, you're likely getting salary squeezed in exchange for the luxury of not being a nomad.
Don't buy that red Ferrari!
What I have seen of fund investors in that good luck is required to do well... however, bad luck is not required to do poorly, there are managers who consistently fail. If we all had 1000 years to play this out in, we could separate the good from the bad on statistics, unfortunately, in the span of a 30 year career it is almost impossible to tell.
Most people who earn millions per year tend to have sizeable conservative investments, so they are "circulating" this money into things like T-bills, piles of gold, oceanfront estates, and other things that don't directly benefit the population at large.
.com was talking to investors on yachts in the South Pacific ...
I think a big part of the tech bubble around 2000 was the ultra-rich getting inspired (largely by the chance to become ultra-richer) and putting a fraction of their conservatively invested wealth into tech startups. I know our
Thanks, the whole world around there is an alien blur as I drive through on I-95...
if anybody was being a danger to anyone else, it was the motorcyclist. Can't say I'm overly sympathetic.
Sympathy for the motorcyclist is moot, the guy making the videotape is the one who needs some protection.
I think Maryland is also one of the few states that forbids radar detectors... in their view it's O.K. for the Police to use new technology, but not for the policed.
Good philosophy, but it has to be obvious to someone at your company that the auto-patch and central server features are: 1. security concerns and 2. non-essential to game play. Yeah, the high score feature is nice, but I imagine many portals provide specific APIs for doing such things on "their portal", yeah, non-portable and all kinds of offensive, but if you want to play in their sandbox, learn to play by their rules.
Oh, and be glad that anyone buys your game directly at any price. Unless you're in a "wallet at the ready" portal, it's exceedingly rare that a "bubble pop" game of any sophistication would turn the machinery of remuneration in a player's head.
tl;dr sums up the whole article. Trying to make money at something people are willing to pay money to do is inherently problematic (witness: 737 pilots, artists, musicians, pro sports, dolphin trainers, anything to do with horses, etc...)
Around the Vail valley ski resorts there are open repeaters on many peaks... not sure about the back country. You should be able to do some internet research to turn up a list of open repeaters in the area you are interested in. My experience using handheld amateur radio (in quiet, back-country type locations) as a cell replacer is: with a repeater: good for "local" use within the range of the repeater network, without a repeater: you can often achieve the same thing by shouting loudly.
That random number is the marketing dimension, it has more influence over buying decisions than any other. You'd also be surprised how much people are paid to derive those marketing numbers and weave their influence between cost, performance, short term income, long term reputation and the CEO's favorite astrologer.
If the chip can't run all the cores at full speed due to heat/power considerations and therefore either throttles back each core's speed or disables some cores under heavy load, than core counts are really just a deceptive pissing contest, aren't they?
Depends, performance is much more multi-dimensional than it used to be.... if you have an occasional operation that can parallelize to use 24+ threads, it might be advantageous to get a dual socket motherboard with a couple of the new 6 core hyper-threading processors - even if they throttle back to 1/2 speed, you're still getting a 6x+ speedup compared to single core.
Personally, for today's software mix, I like the throttling cores, most stuff chokes a single thread so having the ability to run that single core faster is valuable. Then you can look at applications like video transcoding where you want as many cores as you can get...
Some people will buy the highest GHz they can get, some will buy the most cores they can get, a few will buy the fastest front side bus they can get, but most will buy the model 7, because they can't afford the 9 and the 5 just looked cheap.
So, if we get that far, we'll be lunar cave men.
At least in central Florida, "Cracker" refers to the settlers of the 1800's who "cracked" the whip to drive the horses, oxen, donkeys, small goats, or whatever they could afford to pull their wagons.
Bullshit.
People have created things - beautiful, wonderful, amazing things - throughout history, many of them without any kind of promise of compensation for what they have created. They created because they *needed* to.
The independently wealthy, and the patronized can do this. In modern life (mine, at least), there is enough free time to pursue a hobby that produces tangible results. I'd say I have put about 1% of my total creative output to hobby work. The other 99% needs funding, otherwise the whole house mortgage, cars, college funds, retirement account, etc. goes down the toilet.
So, yeah, when I "need" to produce some hobby-art, I can take a little time to do it. If I take any more time out from "productive work" that does indeed care about turning a profit, I put the livelyhood that supports my hobby at serious risk.
Many other people aren't as fortunate as I am, many have to work full time just to stay alive. Others have everything provided for them and they can do as they please 100% of the time. In the "free market" western economy, I think my circumstance represents the majority of people.
Copyrights aren't for hobbyists, they are for people who need compensation from their creative output. Unfortunately, they have been twisted by the powerful in to tools to protect the powerful, as if they needed any more protection.
I do not know of any garage level medical device makers.
Funny you should say that, I've worked in medical devices for nearly 20 years, 16 of those in 3 different garage level companies (5-15 employees) and the 4th was a garage level company 10 years earlier. Whether it's a new CD or a new diagnostic algorithm, we're both just looking for a couple of hundred thousand to promote our stuff with.
I'm actually referring to investors in the technology space (electronics, software, etc.) Same principles apply, they're just as flaky and inscrutable, but at least they're dealing with a product that has some hope of quantifiable value beyond "it's got a real danceable beat."
I wasn't referring to DOS itself being pirated, DOS had a lock-in monopoly tie to the hardware. What made DOS so successful was its implicit support of piracy. How hard would it have been to build in OS support for software locking that actually worked? (start with easily accessed machine serial numbers, like SGI, Sun and all the "big boys" of the day had...)
Regardless of intent, it was extremely easy to pirate works created for DOS, evidenced by the large stacks of self-made "backup" disks beside every college kid's PC in the computer lab. Why even consider another platform when a cornucopia of software is available for free on DOS?
The law needs to be built on facts:
That's what was so great about the revolution: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." They didn't need any stinking facts, they just needed to bloody Britan's nose enough to get them to butt out. These are the same men who provided for patent and copyright in the first place, also with scant statistics or other "hard evidence."
You want proof? Don't look to off the cuff forum posts. We're not in the business of proof here.