None of that profit the mega-corp makes is economically useful activity (ask any economist) - they're simply leeches in the system, able to legally game it to their advantage (and, to everyone else' disadvantage, since trading is a zero-sum game).
I broadly agree with you, but it's not true that there is no useful work being done. The arbitrage that this high speed link enables has the direct effect of bringing HK prices in line with London prices and Wall Street prices, with lower latency. It is a benefit to each regional market that you can get the best price in the world at the click of a button and not just the best price on a particular exchange. It is of special benefit to smaller exchanges as HFT arbitrageurs transfer liquidity from the large exchange to the small exchange.
Currently it costs around $0.01 to make a btc payment, and about 30 mins to process. BTC devs estimate (don't have the link handy) that in its current form it could maybe scale to handle the number of transactions now processed by VISA/Mastercard, but of course it would need to scale way beyond that to handle single cent page view payments. It really is not a good technology for micropayments, much better for medium to large transactions IMO.
I once did a PhD in theoretical physics and I'd like to keep up with important new developments. I always found that it was better to read the actual papers rather than some leaky abstraction in a blog, but now I have another job I don't have time to look through *all* the different articles and trawl through the citations.
So, my question is this...is there some kind of pagerank or suggestion service for reading articles on arxiv? I'm thinking something a bit like reddit, where it maintains a global score of each article as well as tracking what you read so it can suggest what to read next based on what you liked. Citations don't quite do this as they only point backwards.
At any cost? Someone at disney will have worked out the expected future revenues on Steamboat Willie and the old mickey drawings. If they think it will cost more than this to lobby, they won't bother. You will be proved wrong in a decade or two:-)
In all of this, you have to remember that it is the artists that decide to license their works to the label. They trade the license to their creative work in exchange for advertising, production and cash. Decreeing that large companies aren't allowed to hold copyright is effectively saying that bands aren't allowed to sell their main asset. I can't see how government disqualifying the highest bidder is going to help them.
When the government starts dictating who can sell to who, it usually ends up worse for everyone concerned. In this particular case, if a label can't get access to a significant future revenue stream, then they are not going to stump up the cash for production, advertising and so on. Every limit you place on what the corporation can do with the rights gets instantly and automatically translated into a limitation on how much the artist can get paid. In your example, if a company is willing to pay £100,000 for the rights to all productions, then it might only be willing to pay £20,000 for the rights to the first production. Is this a better deal for the musician? Well, it might be, or it might not be. I'll let him figure that one out - he doesn't need me, or government, to decide for him.
To answer your question about why, it is simply about distribution of labour. Labels are good at marketing etc, artists are good at creating music. Artists pay for the labels to promote them by giving them the copyrights. At the moment it is claimed that artists get a bad deal - if it is true, then it is time for the artists to start wising up, not for the government to introduce new populist laws.
The point is that stocks go up and down on all time-scales, not just minute-to-minute and day-to-day. If they were 'known' to be going up, or even if it was known that there was going to be an increase in mean, then people would buy them immediately to profit on the change. But that would cause them to go up instantly, rather than at some future time. What this means is that the current stock price is always the statistical conditional expectation of future prices, conditioned on the current information available to the market. (Actually, the future price discounted w.r.t. interest rates, and you may also have to take into account the market price of risk.) The only way you can reasonably expect your stocks to do better than the market is by knowing more than the market - in this case their conditional expectations of the future will disagree with, and be less accurate than, yours.
So the rhetorical question is: do you know more about the demand for Nintendo products than the rest of the market?
But the third point -- Expand and protect current fair use related provisions involving copying intellectual property -- is the most important for Google.
If that were the case, google could just donate money to youtube to pay for their legal defence, and not get involved with actually owning the company. It would cost an insignificant amount relative to the $1.6B purchase fee, and they wouldn't have to pay damages in the event of defeat.
No, we are living in the modern ages were scientists never get tortured, but some still like to claim they are for the advancement of their own political agenda.
Most of my friends who download music/video do so because it is free. They don't do it because they hate record companies, or for some utopian ideals, they do it to save money. The main things that cause my other friends to not download is that it is inconvenient and they fear being sued. If the recording industry just rolled over, they would no longer fear being sued, and convenience sites like allofmp3 would be far more prevalent. Basically, far more people would download their music for free rather than paying.
Is this true? As I understand it (but correct me if I'm wrong), if the hardware cannot guarantee security, Vista will downgrade to DVD quality. The converse of this is that if you only want DVD quality, there are no restrictions. Since the codecs and formats for better-than-dvd quality are all proprietry, it seems unlikely that linux will have access to them in the medium-term future anyway. So it seems like the choice is between "HD with DRM" or "no HD".
We need to keep a certain amount of agriculture production in our country. If we were to become entirely dependent on outside food sources, you'd see the same problems with food that we see with oil today. You want Mexico or Brazil to have that kind of control over us?
Oil producing countries have power because they own a scarce resource, countries without oil under the ground cannot simply decide to start producing oil. The OPEC cartel is rickity as it is with 12 members - imagine trying to manipulate the market when you are just one of the 192 or so food producing countries.
As you say, if farm subsidies are cut, production will decrease in america, starting with the least efficient farms, leading to increased imports from other imports from other countries. But, as soon as the global price of food increases to a level where it is cost effective for the marginal land in america to be reused, it will indeed be reused. There can be no power games, because there are many suppliers and everyone knows that america can just up capacity if they get into trouble.
What makes you think jars are secure? I had a friend who worked in a jar factory. He said if you knew half of what went on, you'd keep your money buried under the mattress.
You consider the all-important aspect of language-usage to be communication, so I would have thought you would be glad for someone to point out to you that, to many people, using the word "virii" communicates a lack of education and a surplus of pomposity.
It would cost a merchant too much in lost sales for them to refuse a payment type, so they just have to mark up the price of the goods by the maximum cost of all the payment types they offer. Since the merchant has already increased the price, there is no incentive for the customer to pay with a cheaper method, so he pays with the most convenient one, which may well end up costing the merchant the most.
From the perspective of the CCC, there is no incentive to undercut their competition, because the person who chooses the payment method (the customer) doesn't see the price difference, so the reduction in price will not lead to more demand. In fact, as long as a certain method is cheaper than the most expensive method, the merchant still benefits by adding it to their list.
Wow, that's amazing. No wonder prices are so high, there's no incentive for CC companies to reduce them. Pretty tasty legislation for them, I would say.
Remember, the $0.20 + 2% is paid by the seller and is taken out of the actual price.
It only obfuscates the issue. A seller could provide a form and a google-checkout. The customer can then choose whether to save $0.15 and 1.5% on the transaction, or not.
For tech jobs an extremely important factor is the quantity and calibre of university graduates. India has for many years had an education system far better than their GDP would indicate. According to the Economist, India produces 2.5 million graduates a year, of whom 250,000 are engineers. Whether many african countries can match this, I don't know.
iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day, make $50/month, and have to pay half of that right back to the company for housing and food....whereas if they had to pay half of that straight to some other landlord instead, it would be ok. wtf? Or maybe that's not the point. Perhaps the shock revelation is: "chinese ipod workers spend half their salary on food and accomodation". Tragic.
I've often wondered what people actually mean when they say there is no god.
When individuals say they believe in God, they generally have a good idea of what they mean by that. But people tend to differ wildly in what their God actually is and what he does, so saying "there is no God" without qualification can be a very bold statement.
For example, I believe in an all-present, all-knowing and all-powerful entity. This entity works in mysterious ways but reveals itself to certain individuals who document their discovery for the benefit of others. There is only one true entity, but can be viewed from many different angles, each one revealing some aspect of the whole. It is more beautiful than anything mankind has ever created.
So, does this entity fit the definition of being a God? Would only a fanatic claim the existence of such a thing?
We are witnessing the worlds most populous country lift itself out of poverty, mainly due to greater economic flexibility and outside investment, and you consider this one of the top 5 things to stop?
I realise you want your outsourced programming job back, but trying to restrict the rest of the world to be farmers is perhaps a little self-centred.
Slashdot Mirror
None of that profit the mega-corp makes is economically useful activity (ask any economist) - they're simply leeches in the system, able to legally game it to their advantage (and, to everyone else' disadvantage, since trading is a zero-sum game).
I broadly agree with you, but it's not true that there is no useful work being done. The arbitrage that this high speed link enables has the direct effect of bringing HK prices in line with London prices and Wall Street prices, with lower latency. It is a benefit to each regional market that you can get the best price in the world at the click of a button and not just the best price on a particular exchange. It is of special benefit to smaller exchanges as HFT arbitrageurs transfer liquidity from the large exchange to the small exchange.
Currently it costs around $0.01 to make a btc payment, and about 30 mins to process. BTC devs estimate (don't have the link handy) that in its current form it could maybe scale to handle the number of transactions now processed by VISA/Mastercard, but of course it would need to scale way beyond that to handle single cent page view payments. It really is not a good technology for micropayments, much better for medium to large transactions IMO.
I once did a PhD in theoretical physics and I'd like to keep up with important new developments. I always found that it was better to read the actual papers rather than some leaky abstraction in a blog, but now I have another job I don't have time to look through *all* the different articles and trawl through the citations.
So, my question is this...is there some kind of pagerank or suggestion service for reading articles on arxiv?
I'm thinking something a bit like reddit, where it maintains a global score of each article as well as tracking what you read so it can suggest what to read next based on what you liked. Citations don't quite do this as they only point backwards.
At any cost? Someone at disney will have worked out the expected future revenues on Steamboat Willie and the old mickey drawings. If they think it will cost more than this to lobby, they won't bother. You will be proved wrong in a decade or two :-)
No, they're claiming patent infringement my friend, not copyright infringement.
When the government starts dictating who can sell to who, it usually ends up worse for everyone concerned. In this particular case, if a label can't get access to a significant future revenue stream, then they are not going to stump up the cash for production, advertising and so on. Every limit you place on what the corporation can do with the rights gets instantly and automatically translated into a limitation on how much the artist can get paid. In your example, if a company is willing to pay £100,000 for the rights to all productions, then it might only be willing to pay £20,000 for the rights to the first production. Is this a better deal for the musician? Well, it might be, or it might not be. I'll let him figure that one out - he doesn't need me, or government, to decide for him.
To answer your question about why, it is simply about distribution of labour. Labels are good at marketing etc, artists are good at creating music. Artists pay for the labels to promote them by giving them the copyrights. At the moment it is claimed that artists get a bad deal - if it is true, then it is time for the artists to start wising up, not for the government to introduce new populist laws.
So the rhetorical question is: do you know more about the demand for Nintendo products than the rest of the market?
If that were the case, google could just donate money to youtube to pay for their legal defence, and not get involved with actually owning the company. It would cost an insignificant amount relative to the $1.6B purchase fee, and they wouldn't have to pay damages in the event of defeat.
Which is why the bill doesn't just specify XML. FTFA,
...the department in its evaluation of open, XML-based file formats shall consider all of the following features:No, we are living in the modern ages were scientists never get tortured, but some still like to claim they are for the advancement of their own political agenda.
Most of my friends who download music/video do so because it is free. They don't do it because they hate record companies, or for some utopian ideals, they do it to save money. The main things that cause my other friends to not download is that it is inconvenient and they fear being sued. If the recording industry just rolled over, they would no longer fear being sued, and convenience sites like allofmp3 would be far more prevalent. Basically, far more people would download their music for free rather than paying.
Is this true? As I understand it (but correct me if I'm wrong), if the hardware cannot guarantee security, Vista will downgrade to DVD quality. The converse of this is that if you only want DVD quality, there are no restrictions. Since the codecs and formats for better-than-dvd quality are all proprietry, it seems unlikely that linux will have access to them in the medium-term future anyway. So it seems like the choice is between "HD with DRM" or "no HD".
Oil producing countries have power because they own a scarce resource, countries without oil under the ground cannot simply decide to start producing oil. The OPEC cartel is rickity as it is with 12 members - imagine trying to manipulate the market when you are just one of the 192 or so food producing countries.
As you say, if farm subsidies are cut, production will decrease in america, starting with the least efficient farms, leading to increased imports from other imports from other countries. But, as soon as the global price of food increases to a level where it is cost effective for the marginal land in america to be reused, it will indeed be reused. There can be no power games, because there are many suppliers and everyone knows that america can just up capacity if they get into trouble.
William Shakespeare
What makes you think jars are secure? I had a friend who worked in a jar factory. He said if you knew half of what went on, you'd keep your money buried under the mattress.
You consider the all-important aspect of language-usage to be communication, so I would have thought you would be glad for someone to point out to you that, to many people, using the word "virii" communicates a lack of education and a surplus of pomposity.
From the perspective of the CCC, there is no incentive to undercut their competition, because the person who chooses the payment method (the customer) doesn't see the price difference, so the reduction in price will not lead to more demand. In fact, as long as a certain method is cheaper than the most expensive method, the merchant still benefits by adding it to their list.
Wow, that's amazing. No wonder prices are so high, there's no incentive for CC companies to reduce them. Pretty tasty legislation for them, I would say.
It only obfuscates the issue. A seller could provide a form and a google-checkout. The customer can then choose whether to save $0.15 and 1.5% on the transaction, or not.
For tech jobs an extremely important factor is the quantity and calibre of university graduates. India has for many years had an education system far better than their GDP would indicate. According to the Economist, India produces 2.5 million graduates a year, of whom 250,000 are engineers. Whether many african countries can match this, I don't know.
iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day, make $50/month, and have to pay half of that right back to the company for housing and food. ...whereas if they had to pay half of that straight to some other landlord instead, it would be ok. wtf? Or maybe that's not the point. Perhaps the shock revelation is: "chinese ipod workers spend half their salary on food and accomodation". Tragic.
I'm with BillyG, this is clearly the work of the devil.
...i'll let them have some.
When individuals say they believe in God, they generally have a good idea of what they mean by that. But people tend to differ wildly in what their God actually is and what he does, so saying "there is no God" without qualification can be a very bold statement.
For example, I believe in an all-present, all-knowing and all-powerful entity. This entity works in mysterious ways but reveals itself to certain individuals who document their discovery for the benefit of others. There is only one true entity, but can be viewed from many different angles, each one revealing some aspect of the whole. It is more beautiful than anything mankind has ever created.
So, does this entity fit the definition of being a God? Would only a fanatic claim the existence of such a thing?
I realise you want your outsourced programming job back, but trying to restrict the rest of the world to be farmers is perhaps a little self-centred.