Actually copper is an extremely efficient heat conduit. The reason why you use a paste instead of a solid is that even a polished surface will have irregularities in it. The paste will have a significantly larger amount of surface contact than any solid layer.
And maybe that is exactly the point he is trying to make. The DMCA failed because it did nothing to prevent the RIAA's actions. Then again, maybe I should just go RTFA.
It's been a few years since I'ver perused Corbis for images, but I thought they stuck a Corbis watermark on everything that was publicly accessable on their site.
Seeing as how Vonage is required by law to connect callers to traditional 911 call centers (over standard phone copper) is the injunction, baring Vanage from connecting VoIP calls to POTS calls legal if it prevents those calls?
I wouldn't go so far as to say Monoculture... All jokes aside, there are a lot of highly skilled IT professionals in the government sector, there just also happens to be a large number of incompetent ones as well. The competent ones will continue to run tight ships with secure and functional networks, and the incompetent will continue to run crap piles, although with this regulation they would at least be given "less smelly" crap to add to their respective piles.
The market is hot now in a lot of fields. I do custom business software solutions, and anytime I'm on the market my phone is ringing non-stop and I'm doing multiple interviews each week. I have a bunch of buddies on the Support/Hardware/Networking side of the house too, and they're not slouching either. And I've never worked for an organization who couldn't use a technical writer or business systems analyst. Get a degree, get some hands on time in what ever field of IT you love, and you can go where ever you like. If you want more flexibility and variety, aim for a smaller organization. If you want to focus in one specialty, aim for a larger organization.
To be fair, Clear Channel is a corporate entity, and it's RIAA backing and conservative morals can be flipped in a second if consumers push for it. In the Madison, WI market a clear channel station (92.1) picked up Air America/The Mic and a number of left wing talk shows. After 3 years, Clear Channel was about to pull the plug on it. As soon as word got out though, consumer pressure on the advertisers drove a number of advertisers to go to clear channel and threaten to pull their adds if the station format changed. The end result, we still have a left wing radio station in Madison.
Hah, at my last job my boss called me in to talk about what would be the best option for the company and I.
The option was my departure from the company.
That option lead me to a new job, new office with a view, 3x as much vacation, a professional work atmosphere, and challenging and fun projects in a field that actually helps society.
That option lead them to an employee shortage, lower moral, 2 dropped projects, 6 months added to the time-line of most live projects, and tens of thousands of dollars spent on overtime and head hunting.
"It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government's addressing the problem at its source," a government attorney, Peter D. Keisler, argued in a post-trial brief.
Mr. Keisler then pointed at a child in the back of the the court playing a PSP and continued, "I mean, it's not like I have time to watch this brat."
So IF a publisher fudged their way past the ESRB, and got caught once the boxes were on the shelves, what happens?
(almost) Every distributor returns all of the merchandise at the publishers expense. Production facilities have to be retooled for a new release, and new production runs made. All those boxes have to be shipped out to the distributors again. Some of those companies may not be interested in selling the product any more though. Consumers may be less interested in the watered down version. Future releases from that publisher may have difficulty securing distribution.
So... Aren't they already being fined millions of dollars? What's the point of this bill, let capitalism drive the market.
Even worse, it's a rant about something that happened 7 years ago. And he's still holding a hand full of people accountable for something a corporation did back then.
Why do people get stuck on this whole 'not changing their minds' crap. It's like if you are a war backer, then go to war, come home and say "Ya know, war isn't so grand." You get labeled as a 'flip-flopper' and discredited. At some point along the way it became a social evil to learn from your mistakes and change your mind.
So some board wrote a policy 7 years ago that pissed this guy off, and since then, some of the members of that board have been working on steps that are at odds with that policy. Does it have to be irony? Or could it just be that over the last 7 years their understanding of the Internet and the related social-economic impacts has grown and they have changed their minds?
"You always find yourself needing to do cost-benefit analyses. This one *looks* fairly safe, and the gain could be huge. So far I haven't seen any reasonable projection of large downsides."
Yup, that is my typical approach to problems. Unfortunately this time I blundered into that decision without double checking my facts. For some reason I was thinking of Yellow Fever instead of Malaria. We have an immunization for Yellow Fever, and treatment options. Meaning that the opportune cost (continuing immunization) has a significantly lower potential risk to the environment than the genetic modification of a low in the food chain insect. But, this isn't about yellow fever, it's about Malaria, which we have no immunization for (because it's not a virus) and treatment options (especially in the 3rd world) are severely limited.
With that in mind, GMing mosquitoes sounds like a decent possibility. I'm still cautious, but when the opportune cost (continuing the current lack of progress) costs hundreds of thousands of lives a year, the risk vs reward is starting to look promising.
There is no distinction made based on fuel types or even engines. A TDI is going to have a drastically different cost per mile than a W8 and both are available on the same cars. The same with so many of these models. To lump a V-8 mustang in with it's detuned v6 econo-box version is hardly going to present any type of accurate data.
Why? There is no max number. Hell, someone could fly to the moon, record some data, make an observation based on that data (the goal of the trip to the moon) and then have a catastrophic failure on re-entry. Billions of dollars down the tube, unless someone manage to make a backup of the data that the observer recorded, in which case the observation could be remade for an insignificant investment as compared to sending another mission to the moon.
Any time you are working with a large investment you should keep an eye on your opportune, and potential opportune costs. (What is the cost of doing it this way, what is the cost of not doing it this way, what is the cost if something goes wrong) Being able to explain to your pointy hair manager that the code repository represents a $4 million investment that would cost $1.25 million in labor to recreate might be just the angle you need to justify spending $15,000 on a new backup system.
In this specific case, it wasn't true. But it is totally plausible.
Lets say your goal is to come up with trending data dealing with the US population. If you spend 50 years gathering Census data, forming your theories you want to test or patterns you want to investigate, and finally create an application to produce easily readable reports based on that information, then you could easily have spent billions upon billions of dollars on the project as a whole. But if you were to lose everything but the paper records and what not, all you would have to recreate is the application portion and data entry. Which could, as I've previously mentioned, be done at a fraction of the cost of the initial investment. Yes, it is an extreme case that would have a 10s of billions of dollars invested to a hundreds of thousands of dollars opportune cost, but the possibility is very real.
"The unintended consequences of these GM mosquitoes would have to be severe in order to outweigh such a colossal improvement in lifespan and quality-of-life as this would bring to all the unfashionable places in the world."
Now that is an excellent point! You'll have to excuse my miss-statement in my original post. I had Yellow Fever (easily immunized) and Malaria (not immunizable) backwards.
Thanks for the correction. My statement was a bit on the sweeping side. The outcome will still be a higher population of Mosquitoes, as "traditional" means of mosquito population control will only be effected by the reduction of malaria related mosquito deaths.
In this specific case ($48bil -> $200k) the $48 billion was not the value of the file, the investment into the file, or anything else dealing with the file. The file only described the $48bil. In this case it's just a matter of poor/sensational headlining that makes it sound so extreme.
But I still stand by the fact that a huge investment value can have a (comparatively) insignificant opportunity cost. Especially in situations where part of the huge investment is tooling up a system to be capable of the goal. Even if you lose what ever product you were working on, if you retain the tools and the knowledge, your reconstruction cost will be much much lower.
Lets say you have a small software development company. You have 6 employees that cost you on average of $90k per year each (including taxes, 401k match, health care, salary, office space, etc...) Now lets say that it takes you 2 years to build your application. Over those two years your team spent 20% of the time in meetings, 15% of the time goofing off, 10% of the time debugging, 20% of the time designing/planning, 5% of the time training, and the rest (25%) actually making progress on code.
Your investment for that final product is roughly $1.08 million dollars.
Now, imagine the day before you are sending the code off to the press to go gold, you lose everything. Luckily, you retain all of your staff, and they are all very familiar with the project. At this point, they can start working on recoding the entire project. No more meetings, no more design decisions, no more planning, no more training, and less goofing off. You can now re-create that final product in about 35% of the total time.
Your opportune cost to replace the final product is roughly $378,000.
So yes, the file could have absolutely been worth $38 Billion, yet only cost $200,000 to recreate.
Thanks for that, I had to double check after you said that, I had Malaria and Yellow Fever mixed up. Yellow Fever has the Immunization, Malaria doesn't.
Even if you completely rule out any possibility of a new, or mutated virus/disease that may occur due to lack of competition of resources, you still have the numerous other mosquito borne diseases that will be on the rise due to the increase in mosquito population. Yellow Fever, West Nile, Encephalitis, and a hand full of other wonderful ailments would not be effect by the alteration, but would be effected by the increase in population.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually copper is an extremely efficient heat conduit. The reason why you use a paste instead of a solid is that even a polished surface will have irregularities in it. The paste will have a significantly larger amount of surface contact than any solid layer.
-Rick
And maybe that is exactly the point he is trying to make. The DMCA failed because it did nothing to prevent the RIAA's actions. Then again, maybe I should just go RTFA.
-Rick
It's been a few years since I'ver perused Corbis for images, but I thought they stuck a Corbis watermark on everything that was publicly accessable on their site.
-Rick
Seeing as how Vonage is required by law to connect callers to traditional 911 call centers (over standard phone copper) is the injunction, baring Vanage from connecting VoIP calls to POTS calls legal if it prevents those calls?
-Rick
I wouldn't go so far as to say Monoculture... All jokes aside, there are a lot of highly skilled IT professionals in the government sector, there just also happens to be a large number of incompetent ones as well. The competent ones will continue to run tight ships with secure and functional networks, and the incompetent will continue to run crap piles, although with this regulation they would at least be given "less smelly" crap to add to their respective piles.
-Rick
The market is hot now in a lot of fields. I do custom business software solutions, and anytime I'm on the market my phone is ringing non-stop and I'm doing multiple interviews each week. I have a bunch of buddies on the Support/Hardware/Networking side of the house too, and they're not slouching either. And I've never worked for an organization who couldn't use a technical writer or business systems analyst. Get a degree, get some hands on time in what ever field of IT you love, and you can go where ever you like. If you want more flexibility and variety, aim for a smaller organization. If you want to focus in one specialty, aim for a larger organization.
-Rick
To be fair, Clear Channel is a corporate entity, and it's RIAA backing and conservative morals can be flipped in a second if consumers push for it. In the Madison, WI market a clear channel station (92.1) picked up Air America/The Mic and a number of left wing talk shows. After 3 years, Clear Channel was about to pull the plug on it. As soon as word got out though, consumer pressure on the advertisers drove a number of advertisers to go to clear channel and threaten to pull their adds if the station format changed. The end result, we still have a left wing radio station in Madison.
-Rick
Hah, at my last job my boss called me in to talk about what would be the best option for the company and I.
The option was my departure from the company.
That option lead me to a new job, new office with a view, 3x as much vacation, a professional work atmosphere, and challenging and fun projects in a field that actually helps society.
That option lead them to an employee shortage, lower moral, 2 dropped projects, 6 months added to the time-line of most live projects, and tens of thousands of dollars spent on overtime and head hunting.
-Rick
This is one craptastic piece of sensationalism in print.
-Rick
"It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government's addressing the problem at its source," a government attorney, Peter D. Keisler, argued in a post-trial brief.
Mr. Keisler then pointed at a child in the back of the the court playing a PSP and continued, "I mean, it's not like I have time to watch this brat."
-Rick
So IF a publisher fudged their way past the ESRB, and got caught once the boxes were on the shelves, what happens?
(almost) Every distributor returns all of the merchandise at the publishers expense. Production facilities have to be retooled for a new release, and new production runs made. All those boxes have to be shipped out to the distributors again. Some of those companies may not be interested in selling the product any more though. Consumers may be less interested in the watered down version. Future releases from that publisher may have difficulty securing distribution.
So... Aren't they already being fined millions of dollars? What's the point of this bill, let capitalism drive the market.
-Rick
Even worse, it's a rant about something that happened 7 years ago. And he's still holding a hand full of people accountable for something a corporation did back then.
Why do people get stuck on this whole 'not changing their minds' crap. It's like if you are a war backer, then go to war, come home and say "Ya know, war isn't so grand." You get labeled as a 'flip-flopper' and discredited. At some point along the way it became a social evil to learn from your mistakes and change your mind.
So some board wrote a policy 7 years ago that pissed this guy off, and since then, some of the members of that board have been working on steps that are at odds with that policy. Does it have to be irony? Or could it just be that over the last 7 years their understanding of the Internet and the related social-economic impacts has grown and they have changed their minds?
-Rick
"You always find yourself needing to do cost-benefit analyses. This one *looks* fairly safe, and the gain could be huge. So far I haven't seen any reasonable projection of large downsides."
Yup, that is my typical approach to problems. Unfortunately this time I blundered into that decision without double checking my facts. For some reason I was thinking of Yellow Fever instead of Malaria. We have an immunization for Yellow Fever, and treatment options. Meaning that the opportune cost (continuing immunization) has a significantly lower potential risk to the environment than the genetic modification of a low in the food chain insect. But, this isn't about yellow fever, it's about Malaria, which we have no immunization for (because it's not a virus) and treatment options (especially in the 3rd world) are severely limited.
With that in mind, GMing mosquitoes sounds like a decent possibility. I'm still cautious, but when the opportune cost (continuing the current lack of progress) costs hundreds of thousands of lives a year, the risk vs reward is starting to look promising.
-Rick
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/2/12/115426/ 732
-Rick
There is no distinction made based on fuel types or even engines. A TDI is going to have a drastically different cost per mile than a W8 and both are available on the same cars. The same with so many of these models. To lump a V-8 mustang in with it's detuned v6 econo-box version is hardly going to present any type of accurate data.
-Rick
And hopefully in response to any attempt to force DRMs on their sales DT will spam David Hasselhoff's latest album to all of their voice mail boxes.
-Rick
"So put a number on the possibility."
Why? There is no max number. Hell, someone could fly to the moon, record some data, make an observation based on that data (the goal of the trip to the moon) and then have a catastrophic failure on re-entry. Billions of dollars down the tube, unless someone manage to make a backup of the data that the observer recorded, in which case the observation could be remade for an insignificant investment as compared to sending another mission to the moon.
Any time you are working with a large investment you should keep an eye on your opportune, and potential opportune costs. (What is the cost of doing it this way, what is the cost of not doing it this way, what is the cost if something goes wrong) Being able to explain to your pointy hair manager that the code repository represents a $4 million investment that would cost $1.25 million in labor to recreate might be just the angle you need to justify spending $15,000 on a new backup system.
-Rick
In this specific case, it wasn't true. But it is totally plausible.
Lets say your goal is to come up with trending data dealing with the US population. If you spend 50 years gathering Census data, forming your theories you want to test or patterns you want to investigate, and finally create an application to produce easily readable reports based on that information, then you could easily have spent billions upon billions of dollars on the project as a whole. But if you were to lose everything but the paper records and what not, all you would have to recreate is the application portion and data entry. Which could, as I've previously mentioned, be done at a fraction of the cost of the initial investment. Yes, it is an extreme case that would have a 10s of billions of dollars invested to a hundreds of thousands of dollars opportune cost, but the possibility is very real.
-Rick
"The unintended consequences of these GM mosquitoes would have to be severe in order to outweigh such a colossal improvement in lifespan and quality-of-life as this would bring to all the unfashionable places in the world."
Now that is an excellent point! You'll have to excuse my miss-statement in my original post. I had Yellow Fever (easily immunized) and Malaria (not immunizable) backwards.
-Rick
Thanks for the correction. My statement was a bit on the sweeping side. The outcome will still be a higher population of Mosquitoes, as "traditional" means of mosquito population control will only be effected by the reduction of malaria related mosquito deaths.
-Rick
In this specific case ($48bil -> $200k) the $48 billion was not the value of the file, the investment into the file, or anything else dealing with the file. The file only described the $48bil. In this case it's just a matter of poor/sensational headlining that makes it sound so extreme.
But I still stand by the fact that a huge investment value can have a (comparatively) insignificant opportunity cost. Especially in situations where part of the huge investment is tooling up a system to be capable of the goal. Even if you lose what ever product you were working on, if you retain the tools and the knowledge, your reconstruction cost will be much much lower.
-Rick
2 words that would make me go out and pick up a Creative card...
Linux Drivers
-Rick
Lets say you have a small software development company. You have 6 employees that cost you on average of $90k per year each (including taxes, 401k match, health care, salary, office space, etc...) Now lets say that it takes you 2 years to build your application. Over those two years your team spent 20% of the time in meetings, 15% of the time goofing off, 10% of the time debugging, 20% of the time designing/planning, 5% of the time training, and the rest (25%) actually making progress on code.
Your investment for that final product is roughly $1.08 million dollars.
Now, imagine the day before you are sending the code off to the press to go gold, you lose everything. Luckily, you retain all of your staff, and they are all very familiar with the project. At this point, they can start working on recoding the entire project. No more meetings, no more design decisions, no more planning, no more training, and less goofing off. You can now re-create that final product in about 35% of the total time.
Your opportune cost to replace the final product is roughly $378,000.
So yes, the file could have absolutely been worth $38 Billion, yet only cost $200,000 to recreate.
-Rick
"Because there is no immunization for malaria"
Thanks for that, I had to double check after you said that, I had Malaria and Yellow Fever mixed up. Yellow Fever has the Immunization, Malaria doesn't.
-Rick
Even if you completely rule out any possibility of a new, or mutated virus/disease that may occur due to lack of competition of resources, you still have the numerous other mosquito borne diseases that will be on the rise due to the increase in mosquito population. Yellow Fever, West Nile, Encephalitis, and a hand full of other wonderful ailments would not be effect by the alteration, but would be effected by the increase in population.
-Rick