Charities accept credit cards for the same reason that I (small merchant selling software on the Internet) accept credit cards: offering people the ability to satisfy their urge RIGHT NOW makes them orders of magnitude more likely to do business with you. If they are accepting them without asking for the CVV code, yes, somebody in their web development group needs to be hit upside the head with a copy of Security Best Practices for Online Merchants, but the sensible default is to accept the vast majority of all donations without human inquiry.
Similarly, in my business margins are high enough that it makes sense for me to ship product in the event of a failed CC authorization, on the assumption that most of my customers when contacted will reenter their number and fix the problem and that all of my customers deserve top-notch service.
Can you show me the Billboard Top 10 for any month in history that is just chock-full of talent, as opposed to being filled with well-marketed acts which happened to catch a passing fancy of the public? (Nothing categorically wrong with passing fancies, incidentally. I actually *like* Avril Lavigne in moderation. Not everything needs to be fine art, and fine art doesn't need to sell 10 million copies to be validated.)
For 15% of 200 million dollars, you can do a heck of a lot on the ground. That will fund
* years worth of sustainable agriculture research * educate thousands of kids in high school (1 teacher = $60k counting benefits, $30M buys 500 teacher-years) * buy a dozen voyages to the deep sea (not much use in that but, hey, its closer, teaming with interesting life, and less hostile to us than space) * launch a dozen technology startups * produce several prototypes of cutting edge devices (my technology incubator did a new robot camera system and image processing algorithms for about $2 million -- 15 projects like that would measurably advance the state of the art)
What does 15% of 200 million dollars get us in space? * New pictures of a rock that... *... look subtly different than the pictures we got last time.
I suppose most of the world is observing the Biblical demand to love who you hate, then, because pervasive anti-American sentiment doesn't seem to have so much as caused a blip in the number of folks scrambling to immigrate to the US. ("US Immigration Boom Hits Record Levels", http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10440110/, Dec 12 2005 -- 12% of population now foreign born) I had this conversation with a Chinese researcher at my university once:
*snip long rant about the Bush administration* Me: Wow, sounds like you are less than happy with the US. Him: I hate everything the government stands for. Me: Maybe you could go home to protest it? Send a letter to the Congressman and tell him thats why you're taking your PhD home with you. Him: Are you "#$"% nuts?
And yes, thats what most immigrants feel like. There are occasional frustrations with living in America -- complaining about incompetent bureacrats is a well-established tradition for everybody, regardless of place of birth. (And the INS and its successor agencies are probably among the worst in the federal government.) But would large numbers of folks give up the tremendous opportunities living in America has over those frustrations? As my Chinese-accented colleague put it, are you "#$"# nuts?
The number of citizenship applications, one easy barometer of "So, how many of you folks want to hitch the rest of your lives to the United States of America?", is up 60% in four years. That is more than double the number when Clinton left office and a Dark Shadow Fell Across The Land. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/05/news/citize n.php
Also, I don't know if subtleties of domestic politics make it abroad that often, but while Dubya's Republican Party is often depicted as being anti-immigrant, and that might well be true for a large part of the party base (also true for a large portion of the Democratic base), Dubya is personally *extraordinarily* pro-immigration. He wanted comprehensive immigration reform, which would have included a mass legalization of illegal immigrants living in the US, to be his domestic legacy. It failed for a couple of reasons, including opposition from broad portions of the bases of both parties and absolutely incompetent political maneuvering. (I think that is distressingly common in the Bush administration, and I say this having voted for him twice.)
(Disclaimer: I'm actually an expat in Japan, but I feel like waving the flag a little bit this close to the Fourth of July. America should be justifiably proud of how it treats immigrants, in the main. The system has its fair share of issues, but its nothing intractable, and its so much better than Japan its not even funny.)
(P.P.S. On the general topic of the thread, to all Slashdotters who worry that the immigrants are forcing you into poverty: learn to compete. I got a degree in Japanese along with my IT skills, and now on either side of the Pacific for jobs which require a bilingual English/Japanese engineer I can compete quite favorably with folks making a tenth of my salary, because if they can't speak both languages than hiring ten of them still won't replace me. Languages are just one way you can make yourself something other than an interchangeable cog. Domain expertise, business skills, communication skills, a finance background, proficiency in obscure legacy technologies, jumping early onto new ships like the Ruby on Rails boomlet, etc, etc.)
Crikey, with criminals who have brains THAT rotted by junk, you would think it would be easier to lock them all up. "Whoa man, I just had this trip and got a real good idea to get one over on Johnny Law. Here it goes: Ask him, man, are you a cop? And he'll say yeah. And then I'll say 'Well then I will not sell you this here kilogram of weed, because that would be, like, illegal.'"
Look at this from Dell's perspective: the LAST thing they want is someone getting Linux installed on their computer by mistake. You can make plenty of flubups in configuring your Dell and, you know what, 99% of them are recoverable. Buy 1GB of RAM instead of 2? Probably won't notice it. Forget the carrying case? You can buy it at the store. Install Ubuntu instead of Vista Basic? Well, congratulations, thats a nice paperweight you've got there. (Yep, sorry: put 90% of America in front of Ubuntu and its a paperweight that can't run Office, IE, iTunes, or World of Warcraft.)
When Dell delivers paperweights, that will be THEIR problem, not Slashdot's problem. They're the ones that are going to field the "ZOMG WTF is this brown POS on my desktop" So they're going to bury Ubuntu where you can't find it unless you're actively looking for it.
There are at least two viable operating systems for a consumer PC which are not Windows. (Mac OS X and whatever the version before that was. Sorry, Ubuntu, I love you but far too many of your FAQs include the forbidden words "Then, open a terminal and..."). These OSes have the key software you need for business and home use: email clients, browsers, Microsoft Office*. Customers. Aren't. Buying. Them. Sure, customers might not be buying them because Microsoft gets all the software, all of the mindshare, and all of the workplace use. However, Apple has a sweet interlock thing going on themselves with the "If you use either the best music download service OR the best MP3 player, you are locked into our upgrade treadmill for life. If you don't use our music service, you can forget about legal downloads of the majority of music available to American consumers because only we have the market power to force all to sell at our store. Care to join the cult?" thing.
Disclaimer: Desktop is Windows, server is Ubuntu, music library iTunes/iPod and a quirky little Sony service which I use to get Sony Japan stuff that is not available on iTunes (yeah, sucks to be Apple when the other megacorp is rich enough to say "Piss off, we have our own ecosystem to worry about vertical integrations with".)
* Microsoft Office is not in a category by itself just because Microsoft starved out all their competitors. Its in a category by itself because its just far and away superior to the competitors, even when the competitors cost $200 less. I use OpenOffice on my home computer because I was too cheap to pony up for a copy of Office for my once-monthly non-work-related wordprocessing or budget simulation and, crikey, Word/Excel beats Writer/Calc so much it isn't funny.
That would require them to have a competitor in the corporate desktop market. In my entire career I haven't seen a Mac being used by someone not involved in creative work, to say nothing of some accountant running their reports on Ubuntu or Slackware.
Poor Scientologists, they're about to receive billions of letters from profit-seeking quackpots pushing quasi-scientific remedies with no chance of working to try to hook the gullible and stupid...
... also wondering if certain Europeans remember Munich, Pan Am 103, and the Achille Lauro. Although if you want to split hairs, I suppose you could say that the third was in the ocean, the second flying, and the first Israelis*, so they hardly count.
... by not wasting tens of millions of the tuition dollars paid by non-infringing students to dig in to fight a legal battle that they will lose, on behalf of a fraction of students who are Clearly In The Wrong.
What is the University supposed to do, tell the RIAA "Stuff your letters. We don't want to talk to you"? The RIAA will get their legal department working on a very short, to the point letter to University counsel. Counsel, if they have the sense God gave a retarded squirrel, will comply with the RIAA's quite reasonable requests. If they don't, the RIAA will sue the students as John Does 1 through X, add the University to the suit for contributory infringement, and use the discovery process to compel the University to disclose the identities of their co-defendents. The University will fight it, and they will lose, because the RIAA is in the right. (They may well prevail on their defenses against the claim of contributory infringement. Oh well, the RIAA gets the scalps that they wanted either way.) Their works are copyrighted, they are being pirated, they have evidence, and they are within their legal rights to file suits and use the legal process to compel production of material facts from parties with access to them. If you try to obstruct their suit, you'll be added to it.
Also, is it really just to give college students an out that the rest of the world doesn't have? Why does the fact that you (or your parents, or someone who you managed to convince to bankroll your eduction) are able to cough up $X0,000 for your education mean you get a pass from the law? Even supposing that I thought the RIAA's conduct was mostly in the wrong, and I am largely untroubled by it, I see no reason why we should let it steamroll the working class and legally unsavvy while protecting the (mostly) privileged folks attending a college that can afford sharp lawyers. (Despite being mildly worried about societal privilege, I am a card-carrying Republican. I think I'll vote for three tax cuts in penance for the previous paragraph.) If you want a change to the law for everyone, great -- let a few sons of politicians get hit for $5,000 fines with added public embarassment and you'll see the law changed PDQ.
Why infantilize college students -- specious arguments aside, they all know that piracy is illegal by now. Let them take responsibility for their actions.
You managed to say "Its the piracy, stupid" without getting modded down. That takes some serious skill on Slashdot. And yes, "Its the piracy, stupid".
The average customer doesn't give a toot about "do whatever they want with their music", since what they want to do with their music is "play it", and DRM typically permits that. The average customer does not care that they cannot play music imported from Japan's Sony store on their Linux box, chiefly because the average customer is buying made-in-the-USA bubblegum pop to play on their Windows machine, iPod, or CD player. If you're the average customer, you could grow old and die without DRM ever inconveniencing you enough to notice. (No, the average customer does not care that if their Windows box dies and their iPod dies then they lose access to their music library. The average customer does not *have* a music library -- they have a selection of CDs they are listening to right now. Many of them are in the wrong CD cases, liner notes have been lost, and some are bare on the dresser. Not having access to that selection in 6 months doesn't concern them, because they will be listening to new CDs in 6 months, because to the average customer music is an experience like seeing a movie in theatres and half of the fun is that it is new.)
The flexibility of buying only the tracks you like is a great feature of iTunes, but nobody is filling up those 4 GB iPods* at ~25 cents per MB. The iPod is a cultural phenomenon, selling 100 million units worldwide. The iTunes store has sold about 300 million *songs*, and it is joined at the hip. Three songs per machine -- if one buyer buys a 12 song album, on average three buyers buy nothing. Are these three songs per machine causing the decline in CD sales? They must have been darn good songs!
Think of what would happen if the government instituted a pithy 5% consumption tax on Azeroth. Across all US servers. And then opened an office to sell the resulting gold for US dollars. That would be an entirely real headache for an entirely real several-hundred-million-dollars.
(If this strikes you as unlikely, replace it with them taxing gold-for-dollars transactions, as they already theoretically do. All they need is a way to actually discover that the transactions are taking place, in the same way that your bank is required to report to the government any year they pay you more than $10 in dividends.)
... but how open are they with, hmm, Turkey? (And anti-immigrant sentiment hits Eastern Europeans all the time, too. What was that called, the Polish plumber problem?)
Yep. When you get to that level of management, it is a more efficient use of your time to have a trusted aide or secretary read 100 emails and summarize them into the 5 things you need to worry about this afternoon than it is to read the emails yourself. Its the same reason why he doesn't make his own appointments, despite the low demands of carrying a paper notebook in his pocket to record them in.
The facts always support the hypothesis because the hypothesis changes to fit the facts! Mark my words, if we had ten years of cold weather and scaremongering activists and opportunistic climatologists will be warning of a coming ice age which we can only avoid by going green. Its happened before, after all. (The scaremongering, not the ice age. Well, OK, technically we have had an ice age before, too.)
(It is so much more fun to write Rails jokes than Perl jokes. The only problem is that there is a two-year delay between when you run them and when people laugh...)
Take the American West or Alaska, for example. That whole "Hmm, you need to have a direct line of sight between point A and point B" is a bit of a bummer once you think of trees, hills, buildings, etc, which could possibly get in the way of the signal. Putting point B on top of a mountain makes it marginally easier, but of course if we tried that here environmentalists would probably object.
(Why would environmentalists object to saving 250 miles of wilderness from having cables and an access road plowed through them? I don't know, but if they can simultaneously say that global warming is going to be the end of the world as we know it unless Peak Oil gets us first but for Gaea's sake DON'T USE NUKES, they can probably manage it.)
... that way, if it breaks down on your grandmother, all she has to do is pull out her trusty toolkit, break out the blueprints, locate the part at fault in the engine, fashion a replacement for it out of chewing gum, and she will be on her way...
(I am not usually this cynical, but after 3 hours spent yesterday trying to get Beryl running on a coworker's new Ubuntu-inside-a-VM I am not in the best of humor when it comes to OSS today. He was very big on installing Beryl after he saw videos on Youtube of how cool it looked compared to Vista. Key distinction: Vista could have been installed on his machine by a trained monkey.)
... unless you lived in any of the countries America and the USSR ended up using as proxy battlefields. Then the war was a lot less cold and trading in the war for a blowhard senator starts looking pretty darn attractive.
(I never really get the comparisons of McCarthyism and Communist purges. Not saying that parent is engaging in them, but I heart a lot of that sort of talk in college from folks who were, in the main, fortunate that their only exposure to Communism was the Che Guevara shirt they wore in high school. McCarthy's political machinations resulted in some people getting fired and being unable to find work. Thats bad. Communism resulted in millions of people being executed and many more millions being killed by democide (intentional artificial famines and the like). Thats worse.)
... believe they are in the top 1% of the talent at their company.
For what its worth, I'm in the other 20%. I have no illusions that I am the best hacker I've ever met, or even the 47th best. I produce code which, on a great day, has bits of brilliance, on a good day, is solid and worksmanlike, and on a bad day is junk which I'll have to replace the next day... just like almost every other programmer I have ever met.
... that $3 million of the $5 million that the school district absconded with is being taken from the pockets of retired or soon-to-be-retired working Americans. (Sorry, old rhetorical trick I picked up in college to deflate the balloons of folks who liked to make every issue into The Class Struggle. Most billion dollar companies, once you trace through the intermediaries like pensions and mutual funds, as a series of thousand dollar chunks. Many of the owners or beneficiaries of these chunks would not strike you as being very wealthy, or even as being investors, if you were to bump into them in the checkout at the supermarket.)
Slashdot Mirror
Charities accept credit cards for the same reason that I (small merchant selling software on the Internet) accept credit cards: offering people the ability to satisfy their urge RIGHT NOW makes them orders of magnitude more likely to do business with you. If they are accepting them without asking for the CVV code, yes, somebody in their web development group needs to be hit upside the head with a copy of Security Best Practices for Online Merchants, but the sensible default is to accept the vast majority of all donations without human inquiry.
Similarly, in my business margins are high enough that it makes sense for me to ship product in the event of a failed CC authorization, on the assumption that most of my customers when contacted will reenter their number and fix the problem and that all of my customers deserve top-notch service.
Can you show me the Billboard Top 10 for any month in history that is just chock-full of talent, as opposed to being filled with well-marketed acts which happened to catch a passing fancy of the public? (Nothing categorically wrong with passing fancies, incidentally. I actually *like* Avril Lavigne in moderation. Not everything needs to be fine art, and fine art doesn't need to sell 10 million copies to be validated.)
For 15% of 200 million dollars, you can do a heck of a lot on the ground. That will fund
... look subtly different than the pictures we got last time.
* years worth of sustainable agriculture research
* educate thousands of kids in high school (1 teacher = $60k counting benefits, $30M buys 500 teacher-years)
* buy a dozen voyages to the deep sea (not much use in that but, hey, its closer, teaming with interesting life, and less hostile to us than space)
* launch a dozen technology startups
* produce several prototypes of cutting edge devices (my technology incubator did a new robot camera system and image processing algorithms for about $2 million -- 15 projects like that would measurably advance the state of the art)
What does 15% of 200 million dollars get us in space?
* New pictures of a rock that...
*
... punctuation uses you.
... Oh crud. Well, I have an unidentified wand. Time to find out what it does. Oh, genocide human.
&'&
I suppose most of the world is observing the Biblical demand to love who you hate, then, because pervasive anti-American sentiment doesn't seem to have so much as caused a blip in the number of folks scrambling to immigrate to the US. ("US Immigration Boom Hits Record Levels", http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10440110/, Dec 12 2005 -- 12% of population now foreign born) I had this conversation with a Chinese researcher at my university once:
e n.php
*snip long rant about the Bush administration*
Me: Wow, sounds like you are less than happy with the US.
Him: I hate everything the government stands for.
Me: Maybe you could go home to protest it? Send a letter to the Congressman and tell him thats why you're taking your PhD home with you.
Him: Are you "#$"% nuts?
And yes, thats what most immigrants feel like. There are occasional frustrations with living in America -- complaining about incompetent bureacrats is a well-established tradition for everybody, regardless of place of birth. (And the INS and its successor agencies are probably among the worst in the federal government.) But would large numbers of folks give up the tremendous opportunities living in America has over those frustrations? As my Chinese-accented colleague put it, are you "#$"# nuts?
The number of citizenship applications, one easy barometer of "So, how many of you folks want to hitch the rest of your lives to the United States of America?", is up 60% in four years. That is more than double the number when Clinton left office and a Dark Shadow Fell Across The Land. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/05/news/citiz
Also, I don't know if subtleties of domestic politics make it abroad that often, but while Dubya's Republican Party is often depicted as being anti-immigrant, and that might well be true for a large part of the party base (also true for a large portion of the Democratic base), Dubya is personally *extraordinarily* pro-immigration. He wanted comprehensive immigration reform, which would have included a mass legalization of illegal immigrants living in the US, to be his domestic legacy. It failed for a couple of reasons, including opposition from broad portions of the bases of both parties and absolutely incompetent political maneuvering. (I think that is distressingly common in the Bush administration, and I say this having voted for him twice.)
(Disclaimer: I'm actually an expat in Japan, but I feel like waving the flag a little bit this close to the Fourth of July. America should be justifiably proud of how it treats immigrants, in the main. The system has its fair share of issues, but its nothing intractable, and its so much better than Japan its not even funny.)
(P.P.S. On the general topic of the thread, to all Slashdotters who worry that the immigrants are forcing you into poverty: learn to compete. I got a degree in Japanese along with my IT skills, and now on either side of the Pacific for jobs which require a bilingual English/Japanese engineer I can compete quite favorably with folks making a tenth of my salary, because if they can't speak both languages than hiring ten of them still won't replace me. Languages are just one way you can make yourself something other than an interchangeable cog. Domain expertise, business skills, communication skills, a finance background, proficiency in obscure legacy technologies, jumping early onto new ships like the Ruby on Rails boomlet, etc, etc.)
If you say "Yeah, please, root my box so that I can get free movies.", then it is NO LONGER UNAUTHORIZED.
Crikey, with criminals who have brains THAT rotted by junk, you would think it would be easier to lock them all up. "Whoa man, I just had this trip and got a real good idea to get one over on Johnny Law. Here it goes: Ask him, man, are you a cop? And he'll say yeah. And then I'll say 'Well then I will not sell you this here kilogram of weed, because that would be, like, illegal.'"
Look at this from Dell's perspective: the LAST thing they want is someone getting Linux installed on their computer by mistake. You can make plenty of flubups in configuring your Dell and, you know what, 99% of them are recoverable. Buy 1GB of RAM instead of 2? Probably won't notice it. Forget the carrying case? You can buy it at the store. Install Ubuntu instead of Vista Basic? Well, congratulations, thats a nice paperweight you've got there. (Yep, sorry: put 90% of America in front of Ubuntu and its a paperweight that can't run Office, IE, iTunes, or World of Warcraft.)
When Dell delivers paperweights, that will be THEIR problem, not Slashdot's problem. They're the ones that are going to field the "ZOMG WTF is this brown POS on my desktop" So they're going to bury Ubuntu where you can't find it unless you're actively looking for it.
There are at least two viable operating systems for a consumer PC which are not Windows. (Mac OS X and whatever the version before that was. Sorry, Ubuntu, I love you but far too many of your FAQs include the forbidden words "Then, open a terminal and..."). These OSes have the key software you need for business and home use: email clients, browsers, Microsoft Office*. Customers. Aren't. Buying. Them. Sure, customers might not be buying them because Microsoft gets all the software, all of the mindshare, and all of the workplace use. However, Apple has a sweet interlock thing going on themselves with the "If you use either the best music download service OR the best MP3 player, you are locked into our upgrade treadmill for life. If you don't use our music service, you can forget about legal downloads of the majority of music available to American consumers because only we have the market power to force all to sell at our store. Care to join the cult?" thing.
Disclaimer: Desktop is Windows, server is Ubuntu, music library iTunes/iPod and a quirky little Sony service which I use to get Sony Japan stuff that is not available on iTunes (yeah, sucks to be Apple when the other megacorp is rich enough to say "Piss off, we have our own ecosystem to worry about vertical integrations with".)
* Microsoft Office is not in a category by itself just because Microsoft starved out all their competitors. Its in a category by itself because its just far and away superior to the competitors, even when the competitors cost $200 less. I use OpenOffice on my home computer because I was too cheap to pony up for a copy of Office for my once-monthly non-work-related wordprocessing or budget simulation and, crikey, Word/Excel beats Writer/Calc so much it isn't funny.
That would require them to have a competitor in the corporate desktop market. In my entire career I haven't seen a Mac being used by someone not involved in creative work, to say nothing of some accountant running their reports on Ubuntu or Slackware.
Poor Scientologists, they're about to receive billions of letters from profit-seeking quackpots pushing quasi-scientific remedies with no chance of working to try to hook the gullible and stupid...
Wait, there is some poetic justice here.
... also wondering if certain Europeans remember Munich, Pan Am 103, and the Achille Lauro. Although if you want to split hairs, I suppose you could say that the third was in the ocean, the second flying, and the first Israelis*, so they hardly count.
* And a German police officer.
... by not wasting tens of millions of the tuition dollars paid by non-infringing students to dig in to fight a legal battle that they will lose, on behalf of a fraction of students who are Clearly In The Wrong.
What is the University supposed to do, tell the RIAA "Stuff your letters. We don't want to talk to you"? The RIAA will get their legal department working on a very short, to the point letter to University counsel. Counsel, if they have the sense God gave a retarded squirrel, will comply with the RIAA's quite reasonable requests. If they don't, the RIAA will sue the students as John Does 1 through X, add the University to the suit for contributory infringement, and use the discovery process to compel the University to disclose the identities of their co-defendents. The University will fight it, and they will lose, because the RIAA is in the right. (They may well prevail on their defenses against the claim of contributory infringement. Oh well, the RIAA gets the scalps that they wanted either way.) Their works are copyrighted, they are being pirated, they have evidence, and they are within their legal rights to file suits and use the legal process to compel production of material facts from parties with access to them. If you try to obstruct their suit, you'll be added to it.
Also, is it really just to give college students an out that the rest of the world doesn't have? Why does the fact that you (or your parents, or someone who you managed to convince to bankroll your eduction) are able to cough up $X0,000 for your education mean you get a pass from the law? Even supposing that I thought the RIAA's conduct was mostly in the wrong, and I am largely untroubled by it, I see no reason why we should let it steamroll the working class and legally unsavvy while protecting the (mostly) privileged folks attending a college that can afford sharp lawyers. (Despite being mildly worried about societal privilege, I am a card-carrying Republican. I think I'll vote for three tax cuts in penance for the previous paragraph.) If you want a change to the law for everyone, great -- let a few sons of politicians get hit for $5,000 fines with added public embarassment and you'll see the law changed PDQ.
Why infantilize college students -- specious arguments aside, they all know that piracy is illegal by now. Let them take responsibility for their actions.
You managed to say "Its the piracy, stupid" without getting modded down. That takes some serious skill on Slashdot. And yes, "Its the piracy, stupid".
The average customer doesn't give a toot about "do whatever they want with their music", since what they want to do with their music is "play it", and DRM typically permits that. The average customer does not care that they cannot play music imported from Japan's Sony store on their Linux box, chiefly because the average customer is buying made-in-the-USA bubblegum pop to play on their Windows machine, iPod, or CD player. If you're the average customer, you could grow old and die without DRM ever inconveniencing you enough to notice. (No, the average customer does not care that if their Windows box dies and their iPod dies then they lose access to their music library. The average customer does not *have* a music library -- they have a selection of CDs they are listening to right now. Many of them are in the wrong CD cases, liner notes have been lost, and some are bare on the dresser. Not having access to that selection in 6 months doesn't concern them, because they will be listening to new CDs in 6 months, because to the average customer music is an experience like seeing a movie in theatres and half of the fun is that it is new.)
The flexibility of buying only the tracks you like is a great feature of iTunes, but nobody is filling up those 4 GB iPods* at ~25 cents per MB. The iPod is a cultural phenomenon, selling 100 million units worldwide. The iTunes store has sold about 300 million *songs*, and it is joined at the hip. Three songs per machine -- if one buyer buys a 12 song album, on average three buyers buy nothing. Are these three songs per machine causing the decline in CD sales? They must have been darn good songs!
No, really: its the piracy, stupid.
Think of what would happen if the government instituted a pithy 5% consumption tax on Azeroth. Across all US servers. And then opened an office to sell the resulting gold for US dollars. That would be an entirely real headache for an entirely real several-hundred-million-dollars.
(If this strikes you as unlikely, replace it with them taxing gold-for-dollars transactions, as they already theoretically do. All they need is a way to actually discover that the transactions are taking place, in the same way that your bank is required to report to the government any year they pay you more than $10 in dividends.)
... but how open are they with, hmm, Turkey? (And anti-immigrant sentiment hits Eastern Europeans all the time, too. What was that called, the Polish plumber problem?)
Yep. When you get to that level of management, it is a more efficient use of your time to have a trusted aide or secretary read 100 emails and summarize them into the 5 things you need to worry about this afternoon than it is to read the emails yourself. Its the same reason why he doesn't make his own appointments, despite the low demands of carrying a paper notebook in his pocket to record them in.
The facts always support the hypothesis because the hypothesis changes to fit the facts! Mark my words, if we had ten years of cold weather and scaremongering activists and opportunistic climatologists will be warning of a coming ice age which we can only avoid by going green. Its happened before, after all. (The scaremongering, not the ice age. Well, OK, technically we have had an ice age before, too.)
... I'd never leave the house again.
:includes => {:really_big_fangs} :limbs, :in => {6..MAX_INT} :food_sources, :class_name => :human
acts_as_predator,
validates_number_of
has_many
Planet.find(:all).destroy!
(It is so much more fun to write Rails jokes than Perl jokes. The only problem is that there is a two-year delay between when you run them and when people laugh...)
Take the American West or Alaska, for example. That whole "Hmm, you need to have a direct line of sight between point A and point B" is a bit of a bummer once you think of trees, hills, buildings, etc, which could possibly get in the way of the signal. Putting point B on top of a mountain makes it marginally easier, but of course if we tried that here environmentalists would probably object.
(Why would environmentalists object to saving 250 miles of wilderness from having cables and an access road plowed through them? I don't know, but if they can simultaneously say that global warming is going to be the end of the world as we know it unless Peak Oil gets us first but for Gaea's sake DON'T USE NUKES, they can probably manage it.)
... that way, if it breaks down on your grandmother, all she has to do is pull out her trusty toolkit, break out the blueprints, locate the part at fault in the engine, fashion a replacement for it out of chewing gum, and she will be on her way...
(I am not usually this cynical, but after 3 hours spent yesterday trying to get Beryl running on a coworker's new Ubuntu-inside-a-VM I am not in the best of humor when it comes to OSS today. He was very big on installing Beryl after he saw videos on Youtube of how cool it looked compared to Vista. Key distinction: Vista could have been installed on his machine by a trained monkey.)
... unless you lived in any of the countries America and the USSR ended up using as proxy battlefields. Then the war was a lot less cold and trading in the war for a blowhard senator starts looking pretty darn attractive.
(I never really get the comparisons of McCarthyism and Communist purges. Not saying that parent is engaging in them, but I heart a lot of that sort of talk in college from folks who were, in the main, fortunate that their only exposure to Communism was the Che Guevara shirt they wore in high school. McCarthy's political machinations resulted in some people getting fired and being unable to find work. Thats bad. Communism resulted in millions of people being executed and many more millions being killed by democide (intentional artificial famines and the like). Thats worse.)
... believe they are in the top 1% of the talent at their company.
For what its worth, I'm in the other 20%. I have no illusions that I am the best hacker I've ever met, or even the 47th best. I produce code which, on a great day, has bits of brilliance, on a good day, is solid and worksmanlike, and on a bad day is junk which I'll have to replace the next day... just like almost every other programmer I have ever met.
... that $3 million of the $5 million that the school district absconded with is being taken from the pockets of retired or soon-to-be-retired working Americans. (Sorry, old rhetorical trick I picked up in college to deflate the balloons of folks who liked to make every issue into The Class Struggle. Most billion dollar companies, once you trace through the intermediaries like pensions and mutual funds, as a series of thousand dollar chunks. Many of the owners or beneficiaries of these chunks would not strike you as being very wealthy, or even as being investors, if you were to bump into them in the checkout at the supermarket.)
Write them.