Say that on one server, the greenskins conquer the dwarfs. Then, they conquer the dwarfs. Then, they conquer the dwarfs. And then, they conquer the... what do you mean that all the dwarfs have rerolled on "more fun" servers?
The question is not whether his speeches remain libre, but whether he can be compelled to make them libre. I write OSS. That isn't good enough for Stallman -- he wants everything I write to be "free software", including the stuff I have not chosen to release under OSS licenses. (Like, say, the stuff that pays the rent.) Stallman makes some speeches available free as in beer. In one of them, he lays out his grand theory of IP.
Way down in that document, he divides IP into 3 segments, and says how he would deal with them.
1) Useful IP: Programs, recipes, instructions on how to do things, must be free.
2) Works that state the views of certain parties: Stallman's speeches fall here, as well as op-eds, etc.
Let me quote directly: "Now here my answer is different, I don't think modified versions of these works contribute to society, all they do is misrepresent the authors. So I propose a compromised copyright system which says that everybody is free non-commercially to redistribute exact copies. But modifications require permission and commercial use require permission."
So there you have it, Stallman is free to remix, derive from, and commercially exploit the fruits of my labor (whether I like it or not), but I am not allowed to modify, derive from, or commercially exploit the fruits of his labor (unless he lets me). That sure sounds fair.
Not relevent to the discussion, but for completeness' sake:
3) Arts and entertainment: movies, paintings, & etc. 10 year exclusive rights to modification and commercial use.
As a communo-socio-anarchist... who can charge five figures per speech.
There is nothing disreputable about figures of some renown accepting renumeration for giving talks. Bill Clinton has made literally hundreds of millions during the Bush presidency, mostly for giving short talks at foreign companies for 6 figures each. Far lower on the ladder are public figures like Bill Cosby, or famous academics, etc.
I fully support Stallman's right to be compensated for the value of his services, at any price mutually agreeable to him and his customers. Sadly, he believes it is morally obligated to confiscate the value of my services, and that the laws should be altered to make this confiscation compulsory. Curiously, he calls this state of affairs "freedom".
Quoting from the GNU Manifesto, with the words inserted to make sense of his metaphors, which often involve a lot of setup:
"[Programmers] deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of [the programs they write]."
"[The government] really ought to break them up, and penalize [people who develop proprietary software] for even trying to [restrict access to their software]."
"Pay for programmers will not disappear, only become less."
Then check out his proposal for a Software Tax. Its four paragraphs long, and if you think about it for more than about a minute you'll realize its like hell on earth for software development. Essentially, the idea is that there will be a transnational IRS which determines software development priorities and allocates fundings on the basis of votes of the largest American corporations. (He describes it differently, because he is totally ignorant of economic reality, and I am not.) He argues that this will result in encouraging creativity.
... are purchase copies of low-budget games developed in relatively short time frames which were released by someone without a pre-existing audience of millions of rabid fans?
Its not like Penny Arcade descended down from heaven yesterday and declared "And let it be possible to sell video games, for money, over the Internet! So it is written, so shall it be done!" Its been done. The overwhelming majority of folks who do it fail to make any significant amount of money relative to the fair-market value of the time invested.
Those statistics aren't representative -- everyone likes hearing about the success stories (hint: most of the ones with numbers in the title). Vastly more numerous are results like these folks:
Several man months of labor. $2,000 worth of sales.
Games are just a tough, tough market to make money in. Your core customers don't want to spend money and fly the Jolly Roger by default. Your product will be obsolete in 3 to 6 months, even for "casual" gaming. You have enormous expenditures for assets to remain competitive. Your customers have rather little loyalty and it is difficult to turn them into ongoing revenue streams.
Compare this to selling software on the shareware model: your core customers have problems and are willign to pay to solve them. Your core customers don't have LimeWire installed. Your product will last for years. Your expenditures on assets may cost less than a date (I started my software business with $60... working on hitting $20k this year, on about 2 hours a week). Your customers provide a built-in base of people to sell upgrades and new related products to, and they are often fanatically loyal to you.
Look at this from Paypal's perspective: you've got millions of people trying to sign up on your system. Statistically speaking, hundreds of thousands of them are not so bright, and will do things like forget they already tried signing up, not see their bank statement and try doing it again, etc. Since the cost of re-authenticating them is less than a buck (mostly for the ACH transfer fees) and the expected lifetime value of the account is still (for Paypal = eBay) anywhere from $10 to several hundred to depending on where you got the lead, obviously you want to let them try it again.
So we've disposed with the rationale for prohibiting 2 verifications. Now we need to draw a line somewhere. Here's what goes through this engineer's brain: it isn't obvious to me that putting the line at 3 is any better than putting it at 2. The possibility of exploit is remote, the damage from exploit is minimal and containable, engineer time is expensive, there might be some legal/regulatory/compliance issues that prohibit me from solving this problem in a minute by arbitrarily setting MAX_VERIFICATION_TRANSFERS to 20, and any restriction multiplied by millions of customers causes support problems and the attendant costs.
So yeah, I think that not doing the seemingly obvious thing is defensible here. The goal of Paypal/the bnaks/etc isn't to be fraud free, it is to maximize profits. Sometimes, the profit maximizing path means tolerating security risks with minor impact and non-trivial costs to address. Did it work for Paypal in this instance? Well, yeah -- they had about a decade of no problems and then when a problem finally did crop up it cost them less than a man-month to resolve. Easy peasy.
... public school teachers. They'll have their own union, which will vigorously work to expand their budget by touting how totally dependent society is on them. You think the Public Reproductive Health Professionals Union is going to be politically neutral on the question "Should the abortion regime in the United States be determined by state legislatures instead of the U.S. Supreme Court?" Hah. I'm sure they'd sit by as a giant portion of their membership saw their practices illegalized.
(Note for non-Americans: the 50 American states have vastly differing levels of support for abortion. At least two dozen of them would have laws banning all abortions except in the case of rape, incest, or severe risk to the mother within 24 hours of those laws being declared constitutional. On the other hand, California and New York would presumably choose a regulatory regime similar to the one currently in place, probably with a few minor pro-life victories at the margin like on partial-birth abortion, which polls well essentially nowhere.)
Even in the absence of "Oh, wait, as public employees we have the best incentive for political activism because we can vote ourselves money", cash isn't the only reward someone can work for. There are plenty of folks who work for Planned Parenthood who get the same thing out of their job that the lay workers at a Catholic church get out of theirs: the feeling of satisfaction from doing that something they sincerely believe to be good.
OK, so you don't agree with me about abortion. And you probably don't think that in 50 years people will think aborting one in three black children is 1920s eugenics, except with scaleability added.
But lets talk about legislation. See, I don't think saying "If there is a problem, fix it with a law" is an adequate response to "Law consistently fails to solve some problems, for structural reasons". Take the abortion regime in the United States, for example. Ignore the moral dimension for the rest of this post -- you don't have to agree that abortion is bad, you just have to make objective judgements of when it is legally available and when it is not. As a statement of fact, the United States has one of the most permissive abortion regimes in the Western world. Yeah, really.
Has the legal system in the United States hithertofore successfully discriminated between good reasons for abortions and bad reasons? No. Its set up so that it is essentially impossible to force that distinction into law. As a result, despite having a massive political movement dedicated to opposing abortion, and extraordinarily conservative attitudes about sex and abortion relative to peer nations such as many in Europe, the United States in actual practice prohibits far fewer abortions that peer nations in Europe do. (Really: take a look at the gestational limits in Europe. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6235557.stm That is 12 weeks in Belgium, Denmark, etc -- that limit would be and has been stricken as unconstitutionally restrictive in that noted liberal hotspot, Kansas.)
There's a bunch of reasons for that. One is the particularized development of the US abortion regime through the courts. Another is that the current American political consensus is somewhere between "I really do not want to hear about this, ever" and "Well, certainly SOME fraction of abortions are justified, for terrible circumstances which I would never, ever inquire about in polite company". A third is that the primary providers of abortion, who theoretically would end up as expert decisionmakers for legal compliance, are a political movement dedicated to keeping abortion restriction free. As a result, the questions which could theoretically ferret out "good" abortions from "bad" abortions, if one believed that such distinctions existed, can't be legislated and don't get asked.
The same will be true of eugenics.
Would America be socially willing to ask prospective eugenics parents "Excuse me, heard about your problem, so sorry. By the way, was that problem 'Your child is 78% likely to be missing a limb' or 'Your child is 83% likely to be left-handed'"? (Presumably that would be "bad" eugenics, right?) No, we won't be -- egads, that would be a ghastly thing to ask someone, particularly someone who just lost a child because he was headless. So nobody will be asked anything, just like nobody is required to substantiate why they want an abortion.
Would America be willing to impose a coercive state apparatus on eugenicists to ensure that some crazy 1920s-reject racist doesn't recommend 1/3 of black kids for termination? No. Heck, no need for a hypothetical here: we actually do terminate 1/3 of black kids, in the status quo. There is no national coercive apparatus monitoring abortion.
Eugenics will be worth billions upon billions of dollars, with a well-funded lobby, like reproductive medicine is and like abortion is. Children with birth defects, and children with "birth defects" like being left-handed or not predisposed to being athletic or possibly being gay, do not typically have much campaign cash to spend. Which group do you think is going to win in the US political system?
Hideho, IP seller from the Internet here. I sell five figures a year worth of software at $25 a pop (http://www.bingocardcreator.com). Doing that requires getting between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors to my site over the course of a year. I'm going to work out the mediocre band math for you:
Desired income per band member: $20,000 (starving artistry rocks!) Band members: 4
Split with service: 50-50 (and that is HIDEOUSLY generous -- they probably get closer to 10%, whereas software sellers get 96% because they are not forced to use a go-between and can process credit cards efficiently at our price point)
Required sales for band: $200k
Number of sales required: 2 million
Ludicrously high estimated conversion rate: 10%
Required visitors per year: TWENTY MILLION
So no problem, mediocre band, all you have to do is reach an audience about ten times the size of St. Louis every year and you, too, can experience the joys and oppulence of a $20k a year music making lifestyle. That is assuming you are given ludicrously generous terms by the service (you won't be) and have an astoundingly high conversion rate (you won't).
Want to see the math for "oodles and oodles of cash" at the 10 cent pricepoint? Here it is: step #1, be the guy that collects 80% of the sales from tens of thousands of bands making no significant money each. There is no step #2. The guy who wins big on the long tail is the aggregator. (Same in my business, incidentally. Of the $2,000 I sold last month, Google got about $600. Not a bad deal for them, since that $600 of revenue required no marginal work on their part -- they have me working harder every month to make them *more* money!)
For a third grader doing natural science, I can understand making a wind sock. Its cheap and while it is pointless makework, it allows them to get hands-on experience with the notion that you can gather data from the world around you using an instrument designed for the purpose. Granted, it is noisy and imprecise data, of no practical use to the third grader.
The craft that deployed this particular windsock cost $420 million. At the risk of earning myself another -1 Troll for requesting that government programs deliver results: what is the scientific purpose of this experiment that justifies the significant cost going into it?
To the best of my ability to read, we just spent a few million dollars so that we could learn the direction the wind was blowing. At one point. On a rock. A rock very, very far away from here. Where no humans fly, boat, or do anything else which benefits in the slightest from wind directional data.
Look at China folks: the future is there. You will find it about as difficult to *buy* a video game as it is to buy a buggy whip that costs $100 million to produce. There will be no companies stupid enough to offer them for sale, just as there are essentially no companies in China which *sell* consumer software. Instead, you'll be allowed to rent games and little bits of games (a Sword of Slashdotting, +50% experience for a week, your wedding hosted in the MMORPG of your choice for only $69.99).
Then the pirate enforcement will move inwards, against business partners and developers, who are the only folks that can cause the only problem that matters: a full leak of the server source code. (We are well past the time where a group can just remake the server architecture for an AAA game using the client and observation of the retail game as a design spec.)
(I love DEFCON, too. Its a perversely fun game. Speaking of which: You know the difference between NASA and the nuclear arms race? One of them is a way to channel billions to defense contractors by exploiting the hopes and fears of Americans... and the other one involves nuclear weapons.)
The dart was thrown at a dartboard which is unmarked. There may or may not be a bullseye on the dartboard -- we're not sure, hence why we're throwing darts at it -- but we're not exactly sure what would consitute a bullseye.
The dart throwers, in our funny dart game, do not declare certain scores for outcomes in advance and then evaluate the dart based on the outcome of throwing it. Rather, they will get the results back and then score them, based on criteria which are based on caprice and whimsy cloaked in a thin veneer of "its scientific, if you criticize us you must be against science".
I'll spoil it for you: the conclusion will be, inevitably, that this $420 million dart was "a learning experience" (a wonderful phrase, because it is true by definition and means the dart can literally never fail, because we'd learn something even if the dart crash-landed into the dartboard as darts are wont to do), but that we need to throw more and more expensive darts. Why are we throwing darts? Well, there might be a bullseye out there... and you DO support science, right?
Personally I hope they hit the FSM's Noodly Appendage one of these times. That would be kind of cool. Granted, it doesn't exist, but I've got as much reason to believe in it as I do to believe in any of the things that could plausibly be called a bullseye.
I would hate as much as the next guy to see pirates (yeah, yeah, I know there are folks out there who just want to code 2D Tetris to work on your Wii... and there are about 10,000 pirates for every one of you, who want to play first-party Nintendo games for free) take down an IP producer I liked.
That being said, it isn't going to happen to Nintendo: they are largely pitching the console at folks who both don't pirate games and wouldn't know how to if they did (targetting customers who enjoy paying money for your product -- a novel concept!). They've sold a bazillion units -- and every one at a profit, thank you very much. They can update the firmware to remove this channel and the exploit any time you put in a first-party disk, and with the Nintendo model they can be reasonably certain that any console which is turned on in 2008 will play one of the next three Big Series releases from Nintendo. They have caused a resurgence in interest in alternate peripherals (credit also to Guitar Hero), which means that just stealing the game itself doesn't get you all of the fun. They have a very friendly online purchasing experience for many old games, which makes it less appealing to use the system as an SNES emulator (a very popular "homebrew" application in my experience).
So I'm not worried about Nintendo. Good thing, too, as I own stock in them.
... you can afford to do two, nay, three things at once!
Seriously though -- Microsoft is close to saturation of their two big moneymakers, Windows and Office, throughout the Western world. They can continue milking them for years via the upgrade cycle and expanding the share elsewhere, and they will, but just doing that doesn't put up the big numbers. So they're going to constantly try going after new markets and, eventually they think, they're going to succeed big in one. Like, "What do you mean Apple Computers makes MP3 players?! They're a computer company!" big.
And then they're going to take that success and do exactly what Apple did with the iPod -- tie it straight back into The Empire, and make megabucks. iTunes is already just a marketing expense to sell iPods and iPods are eventually going to be just a PR campaign to sell Macs which happens to generate a few dollars on the side.
And if this idea, or the XBox, or MSN, or the Zune, or that new touch screen table, or a thousand ideas fail -- so what? They've got $30 billion in the bank, patience, and a certain bit of maniacal efficiency in their favor. Sooner or later, they'll find their iPod.
Here is the story in sixty seconds: hopelessly geeky computer programmer stops drunken conduct directed against flawlessly perfect lady on train one day. She falls for him. He's freaked out of his mind and totally incapable of dealing with this situation, but his buddies on the Internet talk him through it.
Its essentially a romance comedy "based on a true story", which is actually touching at points, particularly if you understand where the geek is coming from or why it is exceptional and praiseworthy that someone would stick up for a woman he didn't know on a crowded train. The second of these makes a little more sense in Japan than it would in America, but I suppose you could do a romance comedy about alientation in the big city (isn't that, hmm, all of them?) which would be similar.
(I could say that "Netcraft confirms it" but anyone doubting that Slashdot runs Linux probably needs to accept evolution, the moon landing, and the theory of gravity before clicking on this link: http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?position=limited&host=slashdot.org.)
I do an hour a day every day and I've put on 10 pounds straight to the midsection in the last year. Granted, since I'm about 6'2" and my new weight is 145 I'm not exactly the poster child for the obesity crisis, but you're going to need slightly more than bicycling to get out of the IT rut.
I find myself in it for a triple whammy of reasons:
1) Crazy long hours means I cut my gym time from 3 times a week to once a month. 2) Crazy long hours means I now eat out constantly, and many of my favorites are just not healthy at all. 3) My energy level after the long day and commute is zero so to the extent that I used to get "free" excercize for simple things like taking a quick jaunt to the video store, I no longer do such things, but rather just crash or make due with downloads/Netflix-equivalents.
My goal for this summer is to cook more, develop some new habits for when I eat out (more salad, less all-you-can-eat pizza, etc), get out a bit more, and above all cut out an hour or two a day.
We'll make a complex, non-regulated, non-transparent system where anyone who puts up a windmill will have to pay someone in another country to cut down a tree, thus preserving the net amount of wind in the system. Hollywood and Al Gore will love it, and they'll rush to make themselves "wind neutral" -- which in Al Gore's case will be great, since he can actually sell a whole bunch of wind offsets.
A portion of all wind offsets sales will be reserved to defend the patent lawsuit from the Catholic Church, who will complain they got to this indulgences idea a few centuries before anyone else did.
Japanese corporations typically pay based on seniority, not based on job classification, at least within a given rank. As a result, at my company, if you're a new graduate with a degree in English literature and you get a job as entry level sales staff, you get the entry level salary, which is $2,200 a month. If you have a degree in computer science and get a job as an entry level programmer, you get the entry level salary, which is $2,200 a month. (Yeah, really, in a major Japanese metropolitan area. My fellow graduates from a US engineering institution think I'm flipping insane, and indeed in strictly dollars per hour terms I must be. Luckily I started with a few years of seniority baked in.)
You'll also regularly be expected to put in heroic hours (difference with America: we actually do get overtime pay) when something breaks, which is not typically required of sales staff, although approximately nobody on Slashdot would think our sales staff puts in slacker hours.
Given that you're not compensated extra for being an engineer, and engineering is a more difficult course of study in college (you actually have to, you know, work -- most majors treat college as a 4 year reprieve between murderously difficult high school and murderously difficult life), and that most of your training is going to be on the job anyhow, why bother studying engineering unless you have a particular passion for it?
I should note that I'm in charge of managing our new team of Indians because the suits here are as in thrall of the "Why pay a senior engineer $40k when we could pay him $20k?" logic that American suits are. Not to disparage my Indian coworkers at all -- like my Japanese coworkers, we get the usual mix of engineering supermen and people who could not be taught to make peanut butter sandwitches if they were issued a subordinate to butter the bread.
The cinder block resents the implication that its acting abilities are as bad as Keanu Reeves'. See that, right over there? That is it being resentful. Its a subtle difference, granted, but at least the thing isn't saying "Whoa".
Your generation looks back at the movies of yesteryear and remembers Star Wars. My generation looks back at the movies of yesteryear and remembers... Star Wars.
Slashdot Mirror
Spiderman: Slashdotter with hot girlfriend and superpowers.
Superman: Jesus Christ in a cape.
Watchmen: ???
Say that on one server, the greenskins conquer the dwarfs. Then, they conquer the dwarfs. Then, they conquer the dwarfs. And then, they conquer the... what do you mean that all the dwarfs have rerolled on "more fun" servers?
People don't play MMORPGs to have fun losing.
The question is not whether his speeches remain libre, but whether he can be compelled to make them libre. I write OSS. That isn't good enough for Stallman -- he wants everything I write to be "free software", including the stuff I have not chosen to release under OSS licenses. (Like, say, the stuff that pays the rent.) Stallman makes some speeches available free as in beer. In one of them, he lays out his grand theory of IP.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_Software_and_Beyond:_Human_Rights_in_the_Use_of_Software
Way down in that document, he divides IP into 3 segments, and says how he would deal with them.
1) Useful IP: Programs, recipes, instructions on how to do things, must be free.
2) Works that state the views of certain parties: Stallman's speeches fall here, as well as op-eds, etc.
Let me quote directly: "Now here my answer is different, I don't think modified versions of these works contribute to society, all they do is misrepresent the authors. So I propose a compromised copyright system which says that everybody is free non-commercially to redistribute exact copies. But modifications require permission and commercial use require permission."
So there you have it, Stallman is free to remix, derive from, and commercially exploit the fruits of my labor (whether I like it or not), but I am not allowed to modify, derive from, or commercially exploit the fruits of his labor (unless he lets me). That sure sounds fair.
Not relevent to the discussion, but for completeness' sake:
3) Arts and entertainment: movies, paintings, & etc. 10 year exclusive rights to modification and commercial use.
As a communo-socio-anarchist... who can charge five figures per speech.
There is nothing disreputable about figures of some renown accepting renumeration for giving talks. Bill Clinton has made literally hundreds of millions during the Bush presidency, mostly for giving short talks at foreign companies for 6 figures each. Far lower on the ladder are public figures like Bill Cosby, or famous academics, etc.
I fully support Stallman's right to be compensated for the value of his services, at any price mutually agreeable to him and his customers. Sadly, he believes it is morally obligated to confiscate the value of my services, and that the laws should be altered to make this confiscation compulsory. Curiously, he calls this state of affairs "freedom".
Quoting from the GNU Manifesto, with the words inserted to make sense of his metaphors, which often involve a lot of setup:
"[Programmers] deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of [the programs they write]."
"[The government] really ought to break them up, and penalize [people who develop proprietary software] for even trying to [restrict access to their software]."
"Pay for programmers will not disappear, only become less."
Then check out his proposal for a Software Tax. Its four paragraphs long, and if you think about it for more than about a minute you'll realize its like hell on earth for software development. Essentially, the idea is that there will be a transnational IRS which determines software development priorities and allocates fundings on the basis of votes of the largest American corporations. (He describes it differently, because he is totally ignorant of economic reality, and I am not.) He argues that this will result in encouraging creativity.
... are purchase copies of low-budget games developed in relatively short time frames which were released by someone without a pre-existing audience of millions of rabid fans?
Its not like Penny Arcade descended down from heaven yesterday and declared "And let it be possible to sell video games, for money, over the Internet! So it is written, so shall it be done!" Its been done. The overwhelming majority of folks who do it fail to make any significant amount of money relative to the fair-market value of the time invested.
http://www.gameproducer.net/category/sales-statistics/
Those statistics aren't representative -- everyone likes hearing about the success stories (hint: most of the ones with numbers in the title). Vastly more numerous are results like these folks:
http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/09/20/sales-statistics-pharaohs-curse-gold-2000-yearly-sales/
Several man months of labor. $2,000 worth of sales.
Games are just a tough, tough market to make money in. Your core customers don't want to spend money and fly the Jolly Roger by default. Your product will be obsolete in 3 to 6 months, even for "casual" gaming. You have enormous expenditures for assets to remain competitive. Your customers have rather little loyalty and it is difficult to turn them into ongoing revenue streams.
Compare this to selling software on the shareware model: your core customers have problems and are willign to pay to solve them. Your core customers don't have LimeWire installed. Your product will last for years. Your expenditures on assets may cost less than a date (I started my software business with $60... working on hitting $20k this year, on about 2 hours a week). Your customers provide a built-in base of people to sell upgrades and new related products to, and they are often fanatically loyal to you.
Look at this from Paypal's perspective: you've got millions of people trying to sign up on your system. Statistically speaking, hundreds of thousands of them are not so bright, and will do things like forget they already tried signing up, not see their bank statement and try doing it again, etc. Since the cost of re-authenticating them is less than a buck (mostly for the ACH transfer fees) and the expected lifetime value of the account is still (for Paypal = eBay) anywhere from $10 to several hundred to depending on where you got the lead, obviously you want to let them try it again.
So we've disposed with the rationale for prohibiting 2 verifications. Now we need to draw a line somewhere. Here's what goes through this engineer's brain: it isn't obvious to me that putting the line at 3 is any better than putting it at 2. The possibility of exploit is remote, the damage from exploit is minimal and containable, engineer time is expensive, there might be some legal/regulatory/compliance issues that prohibit me from solving this problem in a minute by arbitrarily setting MAX_VERIFICATION_TRANSFERS to 20, and any restriction multiplied by millions of customers causes support problems and the attendant costs.
So yeah, I think that not doing the seemingly obvious thing is defensible here. The goal of Paypal/the bnaks/etc isn't to be fraud free, it is to maximize profits. Sometimes, the profit maximizing path means tolerating security risks with minor impact and non-trivial costs to address. Did it work for Paypal in this instance? Well, yeah -- they had about a decade of no problems and then when a problem finally did crop up it cost them less than a man-month to resolve. Easy peasy.
... public school teachers. They'll have their own union, which will vigorously work to expand their budget by touting how totally dependent society is on them. You think the Public Reproductive Health Professionals Union is going to be politically neutral on the question "Should the abortion regime in the United States be determined by state legislatures instead of the U.S. Supreme Court?" Hah. I'm sure they'd sit by as a giant portion of their membership saw their practices illegalized.
(Note for non-Americans: the 50 American states have vastly differing levels of support for abortion. At least two dozen of them would have laws banning all abortions except in the case of rape, incest, or severe risk to the mother within 24 hours of those laws being declared constitutional. On the other hand, California and New York would presumably choose a regulatory regime similar to the one currently in place, probably with a few minor pro-life victories at the margin like on partial-birth abortion, which polls well essentially nowhere.)
Even in the absence of "Oh, wait, as public employees we have the best incentive for political activism because we can vote ourselves money", cash isn't the only reward someone can work for. There are plenty of folks who work for Planned Parenthood who get the same thing out of their job that the lay workers at a Catholic church get out of theirs: the feeling of satisfaction from doing that something they sincerely believe to be good.
Hint: its what happens right after "tested and".
OK, so you don't agree with me about abortion. And you probably don't think that in 50 years people will think aborting one in three black children is 1920s eugenics, except with scaleability added.
But lets talk about legislation. See, I don't think saying "If there is a problem, fix it with a law" is an adequate response to "Law consistently fails to solve some problems, for structural reasons". Take the abortion regime in the United States, for example. Ignore the moral dimension for the rest of this post -- you don't have to agree that abortion is bad, you just have to make objective judgements of when it is legally available and when it is not. As a statement of fact, the United States has one of the most permissive abortion regimes in the Western world. Yeah, really.
Has the legal system in the United States hithertofore successfully discriminated between good reasons for abortions and bad reasons? No. Its set up so that it is essentially impossible to force that distinction into law. As a result, despite having a massive political movement dedicated to opposing abortion, and extraordinarily conservative attitudes about sex and abortion relative to peer nations such as many in Europe, the United States in actual practice prohibits far fewer abortions that peer nations in Europe do. (Really: take a look at the gestational limits in Europe. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6235557.stm That is 12 weeks in Belgium, Denmark, etc -- that limit would be and has been stricken as unconstitutionally restrictive in that noted liberal hotspot, Kansas.)
There's a bunch of reasons for that. One is the particularized development of the US abortion regime through the courts. Another is that the current American political consensus is somewhere between "I really do not want to hear about this, ever" and "Well, certainly SOME fraction of abortions are justified, for terrible circumstances which I would never, ever inquire about in polite company". A third is that the primary providers of abortion, who theoretically would end up as expert decisionmakers for legal compliance, are a political movement dedicated to keeping abortion restriction free. As a result, the questions which could theoretically ferret out "good" abortions from "bad" abortions, if one believed that such distinctions existed, can't be legislated and don't get asked.
The same will be true of eugenics.
Would America be socially willing to ask prospective eugenics parents "Excuse me, heard about your problem, so sorry. By the way, was that problem 'Your child is 78% likely to be missing a limb' or 'Your child is 83% likely to be left-handed'"? (Presumably that would be "bad" eugenics, right?) No, we won't be -- egads, that would be a ghastly thing to ask someone, particularly someone who just lost a child because he was headless. So nobody will be asked anything, just like nobody is required to substantiate why they want an abortion.
Would America be willing to impose a coercive state apparatus on eugenicists to ensure that some crazy 1920s-reject racist doesn't recommend 1/3 of black kids for termination? No. Heck, no need for a hypothetical here: we actually do terminate 1/3 of black kids, in the status quo. There is no national coercive apparatus monitoring abortion.
Eugenics will be worth billions upon billions of dollars, with a well-funded lobby, like reproductive medicine is and like abortion is. Children with birth defects, and children with "birth defects" like being left-handed or not predisposed to being athletic or possibly being gay, do not typically have much campaign cash to spend. Which group do you think is going to win in the US political system?
Hideho, IP seller from the Internet here. I sell five figures a year worth of software at $25 a pop (http://www.bingocardcreator.com). Doing that requires getting between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors to my site over the course of a year. I'm going to work out the mediocre band math for you:
Desired income per band member: $20,000 (starving artistry rocks!)
Band members: 4
Required income for band: $80k
Expenses (band promotional/community website, equipment, etc): $20k
Split with service: 50-50 (and that is HIDEOUSLY generous -- they probably get closer to 10%, whereas software sellers get 96% because they are not forced to use a go-between and can process credit cards efficiently at our price point)
Required sales for band: $200k
Number of sales required: 2 million
Ludicrously high estimated conversion rate: 10%
Required visitors per year: TWENTY MILLION
So no problem, mediocre band, all you have to do is reach an audience about ten times the size of St. Louis every year and you, too, can experience the joys and oppulence of a $20k a year music making lifestyle. That is assuming you are given ludicrously generous terms by the service (you won't be) and have an astoundingly high conversion rate (you won't).
Want to see the math for "oodles and oodles of cash" at the 10 cent pricepoint? Here it is: step #1, be the guy that collects 80% of the sales from tens of thousands of bands making no significant money each. There is no step #2. The guy who wins big on the long tail is the aggregator. (Same in my business, incidentally. Of the $2,000 I sold last month, Google got about $600. Not a bad deal for them, since that $600 of revenue required no marginal work on their part -- they have me working harder every month to make them *more* money!)
For a third grader doing natural science, I can understand making a wind sock. Its cheap and while it is pointless makework, it allows them to get hands-on experience with the notion that you can gather data from the world around you using an instrument designed for the purpose. Granted, it is noisy and imprecise data, of no practical use to the third grader.
The craft that deployed this particular windsock cost $420 million. At the risk of earning myself another -1 Troll for requesting that government programs deliver results: what is the scientific purpose of this experiment that justifies the significant cost going into it?
Here's the paper:
http://www.marslab.dk/Filer%20til%20Telltale/4thPolar.pdf
To the best of my ability to read, we just spent a few million dollars so that we could learn the direction the wind was blowing. At one point. On a rock. A rock very, very far away from here. Where no humans fly, boat, or do anything else which benefits in the slightest from wind directional data.
Look at China folks: the future is there. You will find it about as difficult to *buy* a video game as it is to buy a buggy whip that costs $100 million to produce. There will be no companies stupid enough to offer them for sale, just as there are essentially no companies in China which *sell* consumer software. Instead, you'll be allowed to rent games and little bits of games (a Sword of Slashdotting, +50% experience for a week, your wedding hosted in the MMORPG of your choice for only $69.99).
Then the pirate enforcement will move inwards, against business partners and developers, who are the only folks that can cause the only problem that matters: a full leak of the server source code. (We are well past the time where a group can just remake the server architecture for an AAA game using the client and observation of the retail game as a design spec.)
... who simulates nuclear war... for fun? ;)
(I love DEFCON, too. Its a perversely fun game. Speaking of which: You know the difference between NASA and the nuclear arms race? One of them is a way to channel billions to defense contractors by exploiting the hopes and fears of Americans... and the other one involves nuclear weapons.)
The lander is a $420 million dart.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/070201_phoenix_update.html
The dart was thrown at a dartboard which is unmarked. There may or may not be a bullseye on the dartboard -- we're not sure, hence why we're throwing darts at it -- but we're not exactly sure what would consitute a bullseye.
The dart throwers, in our funny dart game, do not declare certain scores for outcomes in advance and then evaluate the dart based on the outcome of throwing it. Rather, they will get the results back and then score them, based on criteria which are based on caprice and whimsy cloaked in a thin veneer of "its scientific, if you criticize us you must be against science".
I'll spoil it for you: the conclusion will be, inevitably, that this $420 million dart was "a learning experience" (a wonderful phrase, because it is true by definition and means the dart can literally never fail, because we'd learn something even if the dart crash-landed into the dartboard as darts are wont to do), but that we need to throw more and more expensive darts. Why are we throwing darts? Well, there might be a bullseye out there... and you DO support science, right?
Personally I hope they hit the FSM's Noodly Appendage one of these times. That would be kind of cool. Granted, it doesn't exist, but I've got as much reason to believe in it as I do to believe in any of the things that could plausibly be called a bullseye.
I would hate as much as the next guy to see pirates (yeah, yeah, I know there are folks out there who just want to code 2D Tetris to work on your Wii... and there are about 10,000 pirates for every one of you, who want to play first-party Nintendo games for free) take down an IP producer I liked.
That being said, it isn't going to happen to Nintendo: they are largely pitching the console at folks who both don't pirate games and wouldn't know how to if they did (targetting customers who enjoy paying money for your product -- a novel concept!). They've sold a bazillion units -- and every one at a profit, thank you very much. They can update the firmware to remove this channel and the exploit any time you put in a first-party disk, and with the Nintendo model they can be reasonably certain that any console which is turned on in 2008 will play one of the next three Big Series releases from Nintendo. They have caused a resurgence in interest in alternate peripherals (credit also to Guitar Hero), which means that just stealing the game itself doesn't get you all of the fun. They have a very friendly online purchasing experience for many old games, which makes it less appealing to use the system as an SNES emulator (a very popular "homebrew" application in my experience).
So I'm not worried about Nintendo. Good thing, too, as I own stock in them.
... you can afford to do two, nay, three things at once!
Seriously though -- Microsoft is close to saturation of their two big moneymakers, Windows and Office, throughout the Western world. They can continue milking them for years via the upgrade cycle and expanding the share elsewhere, and they will, but just doing that doesn't put up the big numbers. So they're going to constantly try going after new markets and, eventually they think, they're going to succeed big in one. Like, "What do you mean Apple Computers makes MP3 players?! They're a computer company!" big.
And then they're going to take that success and do exactly what Apple did with the iPod -- tie it straight back into The Empire, and make megabucks. iTunes is already just a marketing expense to sell iPods and iPods are eventually going to be just a PR campaign to sell Macs which happens to generate a few dollars on the side.
And if this idea, or the XBox, or MSN, or the Zune, or that new touch screen table, or a thousand ideas fail -- so what? They've got $30 billion in the bank, patience, and a certain bit of maniacal efficiency in their favor. Sooner or later, they'll find their iPod.
Here is the story in sixty seconds: hopelessly geeky computer programmer stops drunken conduct directed against flawlessly perfect lady on train one day. She falls for him. He's freaked out of his mind and totally incapable of dealing with this situation, but his buddies on the Internet talk him through it.
Its essentially a romance comedy "based on a true story", which is actually touching at points, particularly if you understand where the geek is coming from or why it is exceptional and praiseworthy that someone would stick up for a woman he didn't know on a crowded train. The second of these makes a little more sense in Japan than it would in America, but I suppose you could do a romance comedy about alientation in the big city (isn't that, hmm, all of them?) which would be similar.
lynx http://www.slashdot.org/
.)
(I could say that "Netcraft confirms it" but anyone doubting that Slashdot runs Linux probably needs to accept evolution, the moon landing, and the theory of gravity before clicking on this link: http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?position=limited&host=slashdot.org
... Seven of Nine? I guess its true, there are all sorts of weirdoes on the Internet...
I do an hour a day every day and I've put on 10 pounds straight to the midsection in the last year. Granted, since I'm about 6'2" and my new weight is 145 I'm not exactly the poster child for the obesity crisis, but you're going to need slightly more than bicycling to get out of the IT rut.
I find myself in it for a triple whammy of reasons:
1) Crazy long hours means I cut my gym time from 3 times a week to once a month.
2) Crazy long hours means I now eat out constantly, and many of my favorites are just not healthy at all.
3) My energy level after the long day and commute is zero so to the extent that I used to get "free" excercize for simple things like taking a quick jaunt to the video store, I no longer do such things, but rather just crash or make due with downloads/Netflix-equivalents.
My goal for this summer is to cook more, develop some new habits for when I eat out (more salad, less all-you-can-eat pizza, etc), get out a bit more, and above all cut out an hour or two a day.
We'll make a complex, non-regulated, non-transparent system where anyone who puts up a windmill will have to pay someone in another country to cut down a tree, thus preserving the net amount of wind in the system. Hollywood and Al Gore will love it, and they'll rush to make themselves "wind neutral" -- which in Al Gore's case will be great, since he can actually sell a whole bunch of wind offsets.
A portion of all wind offsets sales will be reserved to defend the patent lawsuit from the Catholic Church, who will complain they got to this indulgences idea a few centuries before anyone else did.
... is a +5, "Telling Slashdot what it likes to hear" moderation.
;)
-- Posted from my Vista machine
After all, the survey missed classifying Vista as malware -- how accurate could it possibly be?
Japanese corporations typically pay based on seniority, not based on job classification, at least within a given rank. As a result, at my company, if you're a new graduate with a degree in English literature and you get a job as entry level sales staff, you get the entry level salary, which is $2,200 a month. If you have a degree in computer science and get a job as an entry level programmer, you get the entry level salary, which is $2,200 a month. (Yeah, really, in a major Japanese metropolitan area. My fellow graduates from a US engineering institution think I'm flipping insane, and indeed in strictly dollars per hour terms I must be. Luckily I started with a few years of seniority baked in.)
You'll also regularly be expected to put in heroic hours (difference with America: we actually do get overtime pay) when something breaks, which is not typically required of sales staff, although approximately nobody on Slashdot would think our sales staff puts in slacker hours.
Given that you're not compensated extra for being an engineer, and engineering is a more difficult course of study in college (you actually have to, you know, work -- most majors treat college as a 4 year reprieve between murderously difficult high school and murderously difficult life), and that most of your training is going to be on the job anyhow, why bother studying engineering unless you have a particular passion for it?
I should note that I'm in charge of managing our new team of Indians because the suits here are as in thrall of the "Why pay a senior engineer $40k when we could pay him $20k?" logic that American suits are. Not to disparage my Indian coworkers at all -- like my Japanese coworkers, we get the usual mix of engineering supermen and people who could not be taught to make peanut butter sandwitches if they were issued a subordinate to butter the bread.
The cinder block resents the implication that its acting abilities are as bad as Keanu Reeves'. See that, right over there? That is it being resentful. Its a subtle difference, granted, but at least the thing isn't saying "Whoa".
Your generation looks back at the movies of yesteryear and remembers Star Wars. My generation looks back at the movies of yesteryear and remembers... Star Wars.