The line between "Products" and "Services" is a blurry one, for us simple folk. If you buy an aluminum billet and I machine it for you, it's a service. If I buy it and machine it for you, it's a product. But, of course, we are not talking about services or products, we are talking about information, since you said that "it's just the next logical step,[...]we are moving to an information-oriented society." Unfortunately, this is just an exercise in word-wankery.
you listed your three distinct stages:
1) manufacturing
2) service
3) information
First of all, manufacturing is a service. Second, what are you going to do with information that is not a service? In other words. Everything is a service! In fact, that is the way GDP is defined: basically the sum of all work performed by each person times their effectiveness.
Information is just another product created by performing operations on stuff, AKA work, AKA services. Information, by definition does not have a physical instantiation, but is always paired with one, due to reality constraints, so manufacturing (a service you mentioned) is involved. To create or provide information is a service, so, yeah, services...
Getting back to information, most information is worthless, in that it takes more work to use it than the incremental gain of using it. A lot of what is not useless is either freely available, easier to recreate than to attempt to acquire, or easy to obtain without paying. The more tightly useful information is locked up, the more chance that it will be recreated or unlocked. When it touches the internet hard drive, it is there forever. And of course, like anything else, information only has value when combined with services.
To sum up, I find your distinctions between manufacturing, service, and information-oriented societies to be artificial, superficial, and indicative of a complete lack of understanding or experience in industry. Everything you said was just a rehash of web 1.0 hype which has already been proven wrong to anyone with eyes. Making money at selling information is not working very well for most in the business, so I do not think you can quit your dayjob of spending your parents money while you update your myspace page and pump up your world of warcraft character to sell on ebay.
You mean information like how you are hungry because you cannot eat your information?
Productizing information is not working. For example; MPAA, RIAA vs P2P.
The patent office makes more than its operating costs from patent fees. Instead of lowering fees or hiring new examiners, the excess goes into the general fund.
This announcement amplifies their existing position of taking no responsibility for the results of their examination. It is also an artifice to justify raising fees for accelerated processing, where "accelerated" is a euphemism for "more hasty and slipshod".
TI calculators being the equal or superior of HP is a very recent thing. HP was first with personal calculators and was the best for decades. HP35 HP65 HP41. These were the "personal computers" engineers used daily before Apple, etc. were around. Incidentally, TI could only be better than HP once PCs took over the professional engineering computing market and off-the-shelf embedded microcontrollers got so good that they beat the performance of the last of HP's custom calculator ASICs.
HP may be only a computer company now, but HP started out as a test equipment company back in the 30s. Computers (custom designed computers, not Intel reference designs with a HP logo) came later and were just one of many products HP produced. Besides electronic test gear, they made scientific gear like mass Spectrometers, EKGs, and much more. HP gear was never cheap, but it had ultimate performance, was built like a tank, and lasted forever. Actually it is lasting so long, you can find old test gear inside pretty much every electronics lab in America, including mine.
Test/med/science part was spun off as Agilent, the HP name was kept for the PC-clone boxes that break, and the printers that run out of ink faster and faster. Even recent Agilent test gear is apparently not at the same level of engineering as the old stuff. There are stories of lab-grade spectrum analysers breaking after a few years and inadequate replacement part stock. Something to do with thoughtlessly coded software wearing out relays after only a year or five. These instruments can easily cost $50,000 or more, so companies expect more than they do from their Dell.
Your post indicates that HP's heyday occured before your time. Those of us who remember parts of that time are not "glorifying the past", we are simply remembering something that happened before you were around to tell us how wrong we are. Try to be understanding of some of us older (over 30) folks who have not yet had the common decency to die off yet.
Maybe even more fundamentally, maybe we can do away with the patent system altogether?
The rhetoric is that in exchange for divulging a novel invention to the world, one is granted a temporary monopoly on that invention. Others can see the published patents, build off them and thereby speed the rate of industrial progress.
Leaving aside the many patents that are prior art, there is another issue. Patent submitters routinely attempt to game the patent system by having the claims be as broad as possible while having the invention disclosure be so vague as to be useless for the purposes of rebuilding the system.
When possible submitters go beyond vagueness and try to headfake the patent by leaving out key aspects of the invention or subsituting a different method/apparatus that is still covered by the claims for the purposes of litigation. This ensures that your cool invention remains known only to you, but you can still take your competitor to court if they decide to take on your patent. This trick is possible because words do not equal reality, except to lawyers.
Patents do not accomplish what they promise. They increase the cost of goods and services, they slow the adoption of new technology, they do not discourage trade secrets, they are treated like another tax revenue stream by the government. Society should demand that the patent system be abandoned.
You objected to the grandparent believing "our tax dollars" fund the USPTO. I agree that the common usage of "our tax dollars" usually refers to the income tax, which does not fund the USPTO. On the other hand, the patent process ultimately represents a tax, a "competitive monopoly tax". The tax is payed by corporations, who will then pass on the cost to the general public. So in the end, the public ends up funding the USPTO. The fact that income from the USPTO is diverted to other government programs more firmly underscores the fact that patent fees are considered no different from other kinds of taxes as far as the government is concerned.
Your comments indicate that the government, with its insatiable hunger for cash, is motivated to increase the amount of fees charged while at the same time diverting a larger percentage of that money away from the operations of the patent office, where it is needed. Along with other comments, one can conclude that the proposed "improvements" will ensure that more weak patents will be processed and granted, not fewer.
If they really wanted to make the most money possible, they would have sold these logs (non-anonymized) to the scores of direct marketers that I'm sure would love to have this data.
No.
1. Why would they want to sell the whole cow instead of just selling milk? The less info sold, the more likely that telemarketers will keep coming back for more. Actual names are super valuable, so you don't sell those right away, you exhaust your first level of sales and then resell with more info.
2. Protection. If they attach names, customers might get angrier, and/or could find out who leaked the info. This whole business is untested in the courts so no corporation is going to want to be the test case.
Your theory on AOL's intentions seems pretty far-fetched and naive to me. But whatever their intent was, what they really did was advertise their goods to a lot of telemarketers who may soon become customers of AOL or of other engines.
If your SPAM mail starts to eerily echo your search queries, do not be surprised.
Telecom companies can do a lot of this stuff just as well, if not better than google and they are getting paid quite well. That does not stop them from selling your name to spamlists, or selling phone records to government spies.
There is a moral bankruptcy in this society that ensures that anything goes as long as you get what you want and can get away with it. Individuals have no strength or bargaining power to defend themselves against corporate predation, except by not using the service.
Until people start balking at bad TOSes en masse, there can be no change. Unfortunately, most individuals feel that as long as they get what they want, there is no need to make a fuss.
I have been waiting for a couple years now for someone to put an optical mouse pickup on the back of a pda or a celphone as part of the user interface. I am surprised it has not been done yet, but maybe this slashdot topic got a few more engineers thinking.
A common objection is that the screen moving around as you drag the device would make it unusable, but most people do not move the mouse that far when navigating, so the eye should have no trouble tracking on the screen.
In addition to anonymizing your IP, deleting cookies, etc., you can..
Run a program/plugin that queries google at specified intervals using a word/phrase generating function.
Ideally, the program needs to look as much like you as possible, so it should have the same browser type as you usually use, it should try to run queries at the usual times you do, and at the rate you do (we are not interested overloading search engines, just obfuscating our query history). The word generating function should generate phrases that are as person-realistic as feasable, so having it use the current news, search engine zeitgiest pages, message boards, etc. as a source would be a good starting point.
The idea is to crap up your search history, so your profile becomes worthless for profiling the real you. Someone poring over your history by hand might be able to tell some of the fake queries, but probably not all of them, and it would end up making search history much less valuable.
If the engines respond by trying to force you not to obfuscate your query history somehow, then they will be demonstrating more openly how they view your privacy concerns. Anyway, this technical approach is not really a permanent solution, but rather something to be done in addition to political and legislative approaches.
If politics mattered so much to you, you'd take the time to vote
Voting is not a panacaea, and is actually the last stage of political activism. If you only talk about voting, then you are eating someone else's "dogfood". If you look closely, you may start to feel that voting leaves something to be desired, like real choice.
What you can vote on is limited. You are limited to voting at certain times, for certain people, for certain parties, for certain ballot measures, etc. These limited items to vote on are chosen for you by other people, people in politics. They have organized themselves into parties that choose who will get money to run, money collected from their "friends".
If you live in a state with referendums, there are many hoops to jump through to get your proposition on the ballot, but they have been an effective way for the people to gain some power over the process. Lately though, the referendums seems to be another avenue for private interests to push their usual agendas.
People should vote, but only as part of a more extended political exercise. Voting by itself means you are being controlled by someone else, but if a lot of people got active in politics all at once, they could make an actual difference in the process.
It sounds like the thought police want to try to shut down one of the main avenues of semi-anonymous web access still available. Controlling and monitoring what people do on the web makes us "safer".
A possible argument against the law is that forcing people to ask permission to use online commerce sites smacks of interfering with interstate commerce. Invoking the commerce clause is one of the favorite ploys by the government to gain nexus, since it works in so many situations. On the other hand, the government judges and lawyers may feel that the invocation of the commerce clause by joe citizen is "frivolous".
By the way, I wonder who will maintain the "no-view list" of sites? I ask because in other cases of government maintainted lists, things have not gone so great.
It's a fact that following tighter gun controls in the UK, gun related deaths fell by 20%
So after banning guns, 80% of gun deaths still kept happening? Wow. Sounds like an effective strategy...
Institutional holders certainly care about the value of their holdings, and do employ analysts, but that analysis may not be as objective and scientific as some may think. The ideal of analysts applying Graham & Dodd type Fundamental analysis to wisely choose their investments is kind of a romantic view, especially given the limited visibility and flexibility of accounting practices (Pro-Forma, beat-by-a-penny).
If analysts only focus on fundamentals, why are so many still in Fanny Mae (FNM) which has not produced a financial statement since 2003? Why does GOOG, a company with 5000 employees which sells (easily blocked) ads on a free search engine given a market cap of 120B against earnings of 1.5B, when a company like Ford, which employs 300,000 people and makes actual useful stuff gets a measly 12B market cap against earnings of 2B?
The reason is because GOOG stock has MoMo, and Ford is old and boring. But Looking at the major holders of both companies and you will find the same cast of staid-sounding financial institutions. That's because those institutions are just as willing, maybe even more willing to chase MoMo plays as those pesky but mostly mythical day-traders.
If Analysts do not chase yield, they are fired. Since it is not their money, they are often willing to take big risks since they are encouraged to be aggressive. This leads to the short-term focus that they are not supposed to have. Also, many analysts are wrong, since companies are not always eager to share bad news, the market is ruled by much more than just fundamentals, and is far less information efficient than many believe.
When Analysts are not chasing the market, they are helping to manipulate it. Many major, staid-sounding institutions employ lots of traders. These traders are aided in setting up positions for their companies by analysts who are sent out to say the right thing at the right time, thereby "enhancing their position in the capital markets". Most analysts you see on CNBC, Marketwatch, etc. are there to tout stocks and push the markets around.
For example, you may see an analyst downgrade a stock, causing suckers large and small to sell. They could be unknowingly selling to traders employed by the downgrading firm. After the firms traders have a position, there is coincidentally news about how the stock beat earnings by more than the usual one penny, or got a big contract, etc. the stock goes up on volume generated by the suckers that sold in the first place who now want back in. They are unknowingly buying back from the same traders they sold to, who walk away with their non-staid, but very green, instant profit. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If this sounds illegal, it is. But there is not a lot resources for active enforcement in the chronically underfunded SEC. Coincidentally, the US financial markets are a huge source of income for the US government, as well as being the mechanism for monetization of the national debt (It's cheaper and more efficient than using a printing press). Many also consider the financial markets as a strategic tool of the USA, a tool which extends US power farther and faster than any army can travel. Actually, maybe near-zero enforcement is not a coincidence after all.
Anyway... Long story short, big institutions chase MoMo too.
Peoples' complaints are focused into support for legislation that promises to help the situation, but the real motivation is for the government to get access to a new source of tax and/or power. They argue that they need powers and money to solve the problems, but once they get the power and money, somehow the process stops. If the people complain, they say they need more money and more laws to do more. They are not lying, its just that their definition of "more" is not the same as the peoples'.
If more people became chary of letting the government "help", things would be better in the long run.
You are applying free-market logic when the reality is a little more complicated. Telecom is a highly regulated business, with high capital costs, and special situations like cable right-of-ways and spectrum auctions. Costs like these cut into profit margins, and limit the flexibility of the operators in certain markets to offer variety of services and prices while still making a profit. Furthermore, there is very little competition in many telecom arenas, and in some cases, a given telecom company enjoys a monopoly and therefore has no need to be competitive. Finally, the government is quite involved in the telecom space, selling broadcast rights and spectrum at auction, licensing operators, taxing telecom activity, mandating various aspects of services and operations, etc.
In other words, this is far from a free market in many ways, and the customer ends up having little real choice when selecting a service. Either because the operator is barely profitable after mortgaging the business 30 years into the future before it makes its first dollar, or because the operator has no competion and will squeeze to the point just below where too many people start writing their representatives. Up until that point, both the operators and the government are happily collecting your money.
The counter-generalization: The speedy ones are usually exceptionally smart, but their code is completely unmaintainable, no matter how much time they are given to write it, because the other 9/10ths don't understand the code enough to maintain it. Of course this is the fault of the 1 smart programmer. Why? because they are outnumbered 9 to 1. The exception? when the smart programmer becomes VP of engineering.
I know plenty of smart, fast programmers that write clear code and follow the rules. Sometimes the best ones will write something that most others have a hard time following, not because it is "sloppy", but because they are more talented. They also find and fix plenty of bugs that the other 9/10s made in their "maintainable" code. I have seen times where a super programmer correctly debugs a regular programmer's code in a design review sight unseen, just from the description. I have also seen regular programmers say "I checked it", or argue with a super programmer, until he gives up in and takes 10 minutes to find the bug and fix it himself.
What's my point? I don't have one, except maybe don't be a hater just because you can't hit the ball like Tiger Woods.
What happened to the utopia of Honorable Filesharing?
While your offer to manage this project is laudable, you need to design a system that can generate trust among untrustable peers.
How can you trust people when you do not know them and never will, and when you cannot tell the difference between a "legitimate" peer, and a honeypot setup by law enforcement?
If you stick only to people you know and trust, you will not have enough critical mass to get the files you want when you want.
Sharing the wrong kinds of files is a no-no, so anyone participating can be put into the prisoners' dilemma. Isn't defecting the proper "strategery" when playing that fun game?
What real value does gold have?
The time and fuel and equipment it took to blast and dig it out of the earth, smelt it, melt it, and cast it into something exchangeable. The fact that it can't be created each morning in an FOMC meeting, or each time a national bank approves someone for a credit card or home loan.
To nitpick your nitpick, only US citizens were barred from exchanging their Fed reserve notes for gold in the 30's. Foreign citizens/governments could still exchange their Fed notes for gold up until the early 70's when Nixon closed the "gold window".
Slashdot Mirror
The line between "Products" and "Services" is a blurry one, for us simple folk. If you buy an aluminum billet and I machine it for you, it's a service. If I buy it and machine it for you, it's a product. But, of course, we are not talking about services or products, we are talking about information, since you said that "it's just the next logical step,[...]we are moving to an information-oriented society." Unfortunately, this is just an exercise in word-wankery.
you listed your three distinct stages:
1) manufacturing
2) service
3) information
First of all, manufacturing is a service. Second, what are you going to do with information that is not a service? In other words. Everything is a service! In fact, that is the way GDP is defined: basically the sum of all work performed by each person times their effectiveness.
Information is just another product created by performing operations on stuff, AKA work, AKA services. Information, by definition does not have a physical instantiation, but is always paired with one, due to reality constraints, so manufacturing (a service you mentioned) is involved. To create or provide information is a service, so, yeah, services...
Getting back to information, most information is worthless, in that it takes more work to use it than the incremental gain of using it. A lot of what is not useless is either freely available, easier to recreate than to attempt to acquire, or easy to obtain without paying. The more tightly useful information is locked up, the more chance that it will be recreated or unlocked. When it touches the internet hard drive, it is there forever. And of course, like anything else, information only has value when combined with services.
To sum up, I find your distinctions between manufacturing, service, and information-oriented societies to be artificial, superficial, and indicative of a complete lack of understanding or experience in industry. Everything you said was just a rehash of web 1.0 hype which has already been proven wrong to anyone with eyes. Making money at selling information is not working very well for most in the business, so I do not think you can quit your dayjob of spending your parents money while you update your myspace page and pump up your world of warcraft character to sell on ebay.
You mean information like how you are hungry because you cannot eat your information? Productizing information is not working. For example; MPAA, RIAA vs P2P.
The patent office makes more than its operating costs from patent fees. Instead of lowering fees or hiring new examiners, the excess goes into the general fund. This announcement amplifies their existing position of taking no responsibility for the results of their examination. It is also an artifice to justify raising fees for accelerated processing, where "accelerated" is a euphemism for "more hasty and slipshod".
TI calculators being the equal or superior of HP is a very recent thing. HP was first with personal calculators and was the best for decades. HP35 HP65 HP41. These were the "personal computers" engineers used daily before Apple, etc. were around. Incidentally, TI could only be better than HP once PCs took over the professional engineering computing market and off-the-shelf embedded microcontrollers got so good that they beat the performance of the last of HP's custom calculator ASICs.
HP may be only a computer company now, but HP started out as a test equipment company back in the 30s. Computers (custom designed computers, not Intel reference designs with a HP logo) came later and were just one of many products HP produced. Besides electronic test gear, they made scientific gear like mass Spectrometers, EKGs, and much more. HP gear was never cheap, but it had ultimate performance, was built like a tank, and lasted forever. Actually it is lasting so long, you can find old test gear inside pretty much every electronics lab in America, including mine.
Test/med/science part was spun off as Agilent, the HP name was kept for the PC-clone boxes that break, and the printers that run out of ink faster and faster. Even recent Agilent test gear is apparently not at the same level of engineering as the old stuff. There are stories of lab-grade spectrum analysers breaking after a few years and inadequate replacement part stock. Something to do with thoughtlessly coded software wearing out relays after only a year or five. These instruments can easily cost $50,000 or more, so companies expect more than they do from their Dell.
Your post indicates that HP's heyday occured before your time. Those of us who remember parts of that time are not "glorifying the past", we are simply remembering something that happened before you were around to tell us how wrong we are. Try to be understanding of some of us older (over 30) folks who have not yet had the common decency to die off yet.
Maybe even more fundamentally, maybe we can do away with the patent system altogether?
The rhetoric is that in exchange for divulging a novel invention to the world, one is granted a temporary monopoly on that invention. Others can see the published patents, build off them and thereby speed the rate of industrial progress.
Leaving aside the many patents that are prior art, there is another issue. Patent submitters routinely attempt to game the patent system by having the claims be as broad as possible while having the invention disclosure be so vague as to be useless for the purposes of rebuilding the system.
When possible submitters go beyond vagueness and try to headfake the patent by leaving out key aspects of the invention or subsituting a different method/apparatus that is still covered by the claims for the purposes of litigation. This ensures that your cool invention remains known only to you, but you can still take your competitor to court if they decide to take on your patent. This trick is possible because words do not equal reality, except to lawyers.
Patents do not accomplish what they promise. They increase the cost of goods and services, they slow the adoption of new technology, they do not discourage trade secrets, they are treated like another tax revenue stream by the government. Society should demand that the patent system be abandoned.
You objected to the grandparent believing "our tax dollars" fund the USPTO. I agree that the common usage of "our tax dollars" usually refers to the income tax, which does not fund the USPTO. On the other hand, the patent process ultimately represents a tax, a "competitive monopoly tax". The tax is payed by corporations, who will then pass on the cost to the general public. So in the end, the public ends up funding the USPTO. The fact that income from the USPTO is diverted to other government programs more firmly underscores the fact that patent fees are considered no different from other kinds of taxes as far as the government is concerned.
Your comments indicate that the government, with its insatiable hunger for cash, is motivated to increase the amount of fees charged while at the same time diverting a larger percentage of that money away from the operations of the patent office, where it is needed. Along with other comments, one can conclude that the proposed "improvements" will ensure that more weak patents will be processed and granted, not fewer.
If they really wanted to make the most money possible, they would have sold these logs (non-anonymized) to the scores of direct marketers that I'm sure would love to have this data.
No.
1. Why would they want to sell the whole cow instead of just selling milk? The less info sold, the more likely that telemarketers will keep coming back for more. Actual names are super valuable, so you don't sell those right away, you exhaust your first level of sales and then resell with more info.
2. Protection. If they attach names, customers might get angrier, and/or could find out who leaked the info. This whole business is untested in the courts so no corporation is going to want to be the test case.
Your theory on AOL's intentions seems pretty far-fetched and naive to me. But whatever their intent was, what they really did was advertise their goods to a lot of telemarketers who may soon become customers of AOL or of other engines.
If your SPAM mail starts to eerily echo your search queries, do not be surprised.
Telecom companies can do a lot of this stuff just as well, if not better than google and they are getting paid quite well. That does not stop them from selling your name to spamlists, or selling phone records to government spies.
There is a moral bankruptcy in this society that ensures that anything goes as long as you get what you want and can get away with it. Individuals have no strength or bargaining power to defend themselves against corporate predation, except by not using the service.
Until people start balking at bad TOSes en masse, there can be no change. Unfortunately, most individuals feel that as long as they get what they want, there is no need to make a fuss.
I have been waiting for a couple years now for someone to put an optical mouse pickup on the back of a pda or a celphone as part of the user interface. I am surprised it has not been done yet, but maybe this slashdot topic got a few more engineers thinking.
A common objection is that the screen moving around as you drag the device would make it unusable, but most people do not move the mouse that far when navigating, so the eye should have no trouble tracking on the screen.
In addition to anonymizing your IP, deleting cookies, etc., you can..
Run a program/plugin that queries google at specified intervals using a word/phrase generating function.
Ideally, the program needs to look as much like you as possible, so it should have the same browser type as you usually use, it should try to run queries at the usual times you do, and at the rate you do (we are not interested overloading search engines, just obfuscating our query history). The word generating function should generate phrases that are as person-realistic as feasable, so having it use the current news, search engine zeitgiest pages, message boards, etc. as a source would be a good starting point.
The idea is to crap up your search history, so your profile becomes worthless for profiling the real you. Someone poring over your history by hand might be able to tell some of the fake queries, but probably not all of them, and it would end up making search history much less valuable.
If the engines respond by trying to force you not to obfuscate your query history somehow, then they will be demonstrating more openly how they view your privacy concerns. Anyway, this technical approach is not really a permanent solution, but rather something to be done in addition to political and legislative approaches.
What are you converting with a DC/DC converter? The level.
If politics mattered so much to you, you'd take the time to vote
Voting is not a panacaea, and is actually the last stage of political activism. If you only talk about voting, then you are eating someone else's "dogfood". If you look closely, you may start to feel that voting leaves something to be desired, like real choice.
What you can vote on is limited. You are limited to voting at certain times, for certain people, for certain parties, for certain ballot measures, etc. These limited items to vote on are chosen for you by other people, people in politics. They have organized themselves into parties that choose who will get money to run, money collected from their "friends".
If you live in a state with referendums, there are many hoops to jump through to get your proposition on the ballot, but they have been an effective way for the people to gain some power over the process. Lately though, the referendums seems to be another avenue for private interests to push their usual agendas.
People should vote, but only as part of a more extended political exercise. Voting by itself means you are being controlled by someone else, but if a lot of people got active in politics all at once, they could make an actual difference in the process.
It sounds like the thought police want to try to shut down one of the main avenues of semi-anonymous web access still available. Controlling and monitoring what people do on the web makes us "safer".
A possible argument against the law is that forcing people to ask permission to use online commerce sites smacks of interfering with interstate commerce. Invoking the commerce clause is one of the favorite ploys by the government to gain nexus, since it works in so many situations. On the other hand, the government judges and lawyers may feel that the invocation of the commerce clause by joe citizen is "frivolous".
By the way, I wonder who will maintain the "no-view list" of sites? I ask because in other cases of government maintainted lists, things have not gone so great.
Having "solved" the "gun problem" by disarming law abiding citizens, the UK Home Office moves on to pointy kitchen knives.
Classic.
It's a fact that following tighter gun controls in the UK, gun related deaths fell by 20% So after banning guns, 80% of gun deaths still kept happening? Wow. Sounds like an effective strategy...
Institutional holders certainly care about the value of their holdings, and do employ analysts, but that analysis may not be as objective and scientific as some may think. The ideal of analysts applying Graham & Dodd type Fundamental analysis to wisely choose their investments is kind of a romantic view, especially given the limited visibility and flexibility of accounting practices (Pro-Forma, beat-by-a-penny).
If analysts only focus on fundamentals, why are so many still in Fanny Mae (FNM) which has not produced a financial statement since 2003? Why does GOOG, a company with 5000 employees which sells (easily blocked) ads on a free search engine given a market cap of 120B against earnings of 1.5B, when a company like Ford, which employs 300,000 people and makes actual useful stuff gets a measly 12B market cap against earnings of 2B?
The reason is because GOOG stock has MoMo, and Ford is old and boring. But Looking at the major holders of both companies and you will find the same cast of staid-sounding financial institutions. That's because those institutions are just as willing, maybe even more willing to chase MoMo plays as those pesky but mostly mythical day-traders.
If Analysts do not chase yield, they are fired. Since it is not their money, they are often willing to take big risks since they are encouraged to be aggressive. This leads to the short-term focus that they are not supposed to have. Also, many analysts are wrong, since companies are not always eager to share bad news, the market is ruled by much more than just fundamentals, and is far less information efficient than many believe.
When Analysts are not chasing the market, they are helping to manipulate it. Many major, staid-sounding institutions employ lots of traders. These traders are aided in setting up positions for their companies by analysts who are sent out to say the right thing at the right time, thereby "enhancing their position in the capital markets". Most analysts you see on CNBC, Marketwatch, etc. are there to tout stocks and push the markets around.
For example, you may see an analyst downgrade a stock, causing suckers large and small to sell. They could be unknowingly selling to traders employed by the downgrading firm. After the firms traders have a position, there is coincidentally news about how the stock beat earnings by more than the usual one penny, or got a big contract, etc. the stock goes up on volume generated by the suckers that sold in the first place who now want back in. They are unknowingly buying back from the same traders they sold to, who walk away with their non-staid, but very green, instant profit. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If this sounds illegal, it is. But there is not a lot resources for active enforcement in the chronically underfunded SEC. Coincidentally, the US financial markets are a huge source of income for the US government, as well as being the mechanism for monetization of the national debt (It's cheaper and more efficient than using a printing press). Many also consider the financial markets as a strategic tool of the USA, a tool which extends US power farther and faster than any army can travel. Actually, maybe near-zero enforcement is not a coincidence after all.
Anyway... Long story short, big institutions chase MoMo too.
Peoples' complaints are focused into support for legislation that promises to help the situation, but the real motivation is for the government to get access to a new source of tax and/or power. They argue that they need powers and money to solve the problems, but once they get the power and money, somehow the process stops. If the people complain, they say they need more money and more laws to do more. They are not lying, its just that their definition of "more" is not the same as the peoples'.
If more people became chary of letting the government "help", things would be better in the long run.
In other words, this is far from a free market in many ways, and the customer ends up having little real choice when selecting a service. Either because the operator is barely profitable after mortgaging the business 30 years into the future before it makes its first dollar, or because the operator has no competion and will squeeze to the point just below where too many people start writing their representatives. Up until that point, both the operators and the government are happily collecting your money.
I know plenty of smart, fast programmers that write clear code and follow the rules. Sometimes the best ones will write something that most others have a hard time following, not because it is "sloppy", but because they are more talented. They also find and fix plenty of bugs that the other 9/10s made in their "maintainable" code. I have seen times where a super programmer correctly debugs a regular programmer's code in a design review sight unseen, just from the description. I have also seen regular programmers say "I checked it", or argue with a super programmer, until he gives up in and takes 10 minutes to find the bug and fix it himself.
What's my point? I don't have one, except maybe don't be a hater just because you can't hit the ball like Tiger Woods.
Actually, the reason the US gives out so many ridiculous patents is because they get money for each patent.
While your offer to manage this project is laudable, you need to design a system that can generate trust among untrustable peers.
How can you trust people when you do not know them and never will, and when you cannot tell the difference between a "legitimate" peer, and a honeypot setup by law enforcement?
If you stick only to people you know and trust, you will not have enough critical mass to get the files you want when you want.
Sharing the wrong kinds of files is a no-no, so anyone participating can be put into the prisoners' dilemma. Isn't defecting the proper "strategery" when playing that fun game?
Actually, I think the most important information are the secrets you whisper into google's ear.
What real value does gold have? The time and fuel and equipment it took to blast and dig it out of the earth, smelt it, melt it, and cast it into something exchangeable. The fact that it can't be created each morning in an FOMC meeting, or each time a national bank approves someone for a credit card or home loan.
To nitpick your nitpick, only US citizens were barred from exchanging their Fed reserve notes for gold in the 30's. Foreign citizens/governments could still exchange their Fed notes for gold up until the early 70's when Nixon closed the "gold window".