Your numbers fail to take into account wealth like real estate or commodities, which are neither debt or credit. For instance my home loan is a huge debt but it is balanced by the asset value of my house, for a net positive on my balance sheet. If you only look at the debt side it does indeed look hopeless.
Music from iTunes does not have DRM anymore, but your iTunes account name is embedded in each file you buy. If that is also true of iTunes Match music files, I think you are onto something.
I might upload a fully anonymous MP3, and get back from Apple a 256kbps AAC with my iTunes name embedded in it. From the perspective of the labels this is a win. If they start seeing this file with my name in it all over the piracy services, they know exactly who to sue. Whereas the MP3 would have been untraceable.
True? I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see if the names are embedded in the files iTunes Match sends back.
Even if we nuked the whole news establishment there would still be a need to establish societal consensus around facts and truth. The news media used to help us do that, and maybe they've made too many mistakes and bad decisions to do that anymore. But what if that process is breaking down in general? How can a society self-organize to solve hard problems if we cannot even establish and agree on basic facts? Anything remotely tough seems to tie us in endless knots these days as people bring up the same arguments again and again and again.
Because in the market, sellers can choose the price they wish to charge, even if most other people think it is too high. After all, many more people want Ferraris than can afford them. That doesn't mean auto theft is a "market failure."
Piracy provides copies of content for free; there is no way the content creator can compete with that and make money. So it is necessary to create legal remedies, which create a "price" for pirated content against which the content creators can legitimately compete.
It should be illegal for any organization--union or corporation--to take money entrusted to them by shareholders or members and use it for political contributions. This small change would significantly reduce the ability of corporations to buy votes, and would do so in an evenhanded manner.
It is currently against federal law for any union or corporation to contribute money from their organizational budget to a federal political campaign. This has been the law for decades, but it is striking how few people know that, including people like yourself who are clearly passionate about the subject.
Only individual U.S. citizens and PACs can give to federal political campaigns. And PACs can only collect money for federal political contributions from individual U.S. citizens. Corporations and unions can fund an attached PAC's operating expenses, but none of that money may pass through to any federal political campaign.
I have other comments on what you posted, but I'll hold back on so that this message comes through clearly.
It's the low rank of the computer science program that makes this a real issue for this professor.
A student who gets a Ph.D. in CS from a top-twenty program, like this guy, has a good chance of ending up at Google working on machine learning (for example). Obviously a strong theoretical grounding will pay off in those cases.
But what about the students who get a bachelors in CS from a 4th-tier program? Not many of those people are going to be inventing the future. Most will end up as web developers, corporate programmers, or IT staff, if they stay in the field at all. If they finish school knowing calculus, but not knowing the practical realities of writing and managing code, they are not well prepared to start their careers. In fact, they are probably at a disadvantage against people who taught themselves programming by actually coding things in their spare time.
The GP's post is incredible informative but neglects consideration of where the fuel comes from. Like coal, uranium must be mined, and it takes quite a bit of mining and processing to produce the little bit of enriched uranium for the generators.
You invited the critique by attempting to argue from the authority of your education. If you can show me a university philosophy or poli sci curriculum that studies Apple, Inc. I'll stand corrected.
Fascism is a political ideology but Apple is not a political entity. Apple cannot be totalitarian since their policies do not carry the force of law and are not enforced by police powers. They just make and sell products, which private citizens choose to buy or not buy.
The metaphor of company:nation is a common one but don't forget that it is a metaphor only. In academia the policies and decisions of a company like Apple would be studied in business class, not poli sci, and certainly not philosophy.
I believe the iPod Touch requires the client app of iTunes to sync, backup, and update the device, but it does not require an Apple ID or connection to the iTunes online store. You won't be able to buy music or apps without that, but if you're ok with that, I believe you can use the iPod Touch without sending any personal info to Apple.
Not only does Apple clearly have a succession plan, they just executed it. They could not be more clear about who is running Apple right now.
As a shareholder myself, I'm satisfied that Tim can get great performance for at least the next 2 years. Beyond that I'll have to see what new product development (Jobs' true genius) looks like.
No sane legal team is going to let their corporation offer open-ended indemnification to all end users of a technology--especially in a heavily patent-encumbered space like video compression.
Under such an agreement, Google's potential liability would scale with the success of whoever is using WebM. That aggregate value could exceed Google's entire market cap. What if a suit is filed? Google would be liable for more than they are worth.
That's obviously a worst-case scenario, and perhaps Google has negotiated limited indemnification with a few key partners like Adobe. But they're never going to offer blanket indemnification.
A license grants you rights to make use of technology that Google owns. That is not the same thing as indemnification against submarine patents of which Google is not aware. In other words if a submarine patent surfaces and you get sued, Google is not going to bring their legal team in to defend you.
That is important because WebM does not have a patent pool and has not been litigated. At least H.264 has a patent pool, which means some patents are "surfaced", and if a submarine pops there will be a lot of very big players fighting alongside you.
I loved Inception and appreciated it as a commentary on the movie making and movie watching experiences. But I had never considered it from an allegorical perspective, probably because I am not religious myself. Thanks for your great comment.
Each F-22 is itself an AWACS. So if you have 20 F-22s and 2 AWACS in the theater, you have to kill all 22 of those aircraft to take out AWACS capability. It's not just a matter of chasing off a couple of 707s.
The fundamental basis for U.S. air superiority is not stealth, it is superior data collection and management. That is what the F-22 does better than any other fighter in the world.
With a few very notable exceptions, engineers employed in big corporate jobs are not driving serious, world-changing innovation. That's especially true for jobs that are at risk for being outsourced. By definition, if your job can be outsourced, you are not driving innovation.
True innovation is almost always driven by engineers and scientists starting their own companies and creating something new. Andy Grove is right that job creation only comes with the "scaling up" phase, but before a business can scale up it needs to seriously innovate.
From the perspective of innovation it could be argued that it is *good* that entry level engineers are having trouble finding caretaker or straightforward jobs. Perhaps some of them will decide to try that crazy idea they've had for a while, instead of perfecting the rear rocker arm on the latest SUV.
House of Reps just standardized on Drupal
on
Foundation Drupal 7
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· Score: 1
I've had a lot of awesome experiences in my life. So many, in fact, that I don't remember them all--or all the details. So it is nice once in a while to go back through my photos and videos and remember/relive those experiences--sometimes with people with whom I shared the original experience. Doing this is itself a pleasurable experience, one that is not possible if I don't take and keep some photos.
I'm on board with the idea that taking photos can sometimes get in the way of the experience. But I think you've maybe taken it too far when you're chastising someone who just wants advice on how to hold onto photos he's already taken.
I know you've gotten a ton of other answers, but I think your fundamental difficulty is in the analogy you're trying to employ.
0.999... is not a equation or sum approaching a limit, it is a single number. The fact that we read left to right does not mean that there is any actual evaluation happening as our eyes drift down that long, long row of 9's. Each 9 is not a subsequent point on a line that is approaching an asymptote. The entirety of (0.99... ) represents, itself, a single point on the line of the reals. That point is infinitely close to 1, and is stationary...it's not "approaching" 1, it's already there and it's sitting right on top of it. It's the same point.
There are a half-dozen equivalent smartphones out there now, but when the iPhone was released, it was head and shoulders above the rest, and the industry spent years catching up. Same thing with tablets; there's nothing like the iPad out now although I bet in a year or two there will be plenty.
That's why Apple's stock is tied to perceptions of Steve Jobs' health. It's not the sales now--those are Tim Cook's responsibility, and he's very very good at those. What Jobs does better than anyone is develop new products that lead to significant new lines of revenue. This is why Apple, despite being the 2nd highest valued company in the world, still has a "growth stock" P/E ratio. It's how they get away with holding $40+ billion in cash but not paying a dividend. People believe in Jobs' ability to keep finding new ways to make tons of money. Without that, Apple will become a caretaker brand like Sony or Microsoft or Google, competently managing their legacy businesses, but with a shrinking market share and stagnant stock.
The problem with WebM is that no court has ruled that it does not infringe other video compression patents (of which there are many). Thus major businesses will be reluctant to build it into their products without full indemnification from Google--which I have not seen offered.
A patent grant is only as good as the patent rights behind it. If WebM is found to be infringing after deployment (as GIF was), a patent grant from Google will not shield users of WebM from liability.
We're talking about the products that Amazon sells, not the people who buy from Amazon. Besides, what is the alternative? The government forcing bookstores to distribute certain books, or every book? That doesn't make sense to me. There's no "right" to have your book published, sold or bought, no matter what it's about.
Slashdot Mirror
Your numbers fail to take into account wealth like real estate or commodities, which are neither debt or credit. For instance my home loan is a huge debt but it is balanced by the asset value of my house, for a net positive on my balance sheet. If you only look at the debt side it does indeed look hopeless.
Music from iTunes does not have DRM anymore, but your iTunes account name is embedded in each file you buy. If that is also true of iTunes Match music files, I think you are onto something.
I might upload a fully anonymous MP3, and get back from Apple a 256kbps AAC with my iTunes name embedded in it. From the perspective of the labels this is a win. If they start seeing this file with my name in it all over the piracy services, they know exactly who to sue. Whereas the MP3 would have been untraceable.
True? I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see if the names are embedded in the files iTunes Match sends back.
Even if we nuked the whole news establishment there would still be a need to establish societal consensus around facts and truth. The news media used to help us do that, and maybe they've made too many mistakes and bad decisions to do that anymore. But what if that process is breaking down in general? How can a society self-organize to solve hard problems if we cannot even establish and agree on basic facts? Anything remotely tough seems to tie us in endless knots these days as people bring up the same arguments again and again and again.
Because in the market, sellers can choose the price they wish to charge, even if most other people think it is too high. After all, many more people want Ferraris than can afford them. That doesn't mean auto theft is a "market failure."
Piracy provides copies of content for free; there is no way the content creator can compete with that and make money. So it is necessary to create legal remedies, which create a "price" for pirated content against which the content creators can legitimately compete.
It should be illegal for any organization--union or corporation--to take money entrusted to them by shareholders or members and use it for political contributions. This small change would significantly reduce the ability of corporations to buy votes, and would do so in an evenhanded manner.
It is currently against federal law for any union or corporation to contribute money from their organizational budget to a federal political campaign. This has been the law for decades, but it is striking how few people know that, including people like yourself who are clearly passionate about the subject.
Only individual U.S. citizens and PACs can give to federal political campaigns. And PACs can only collect money for federal political contributions from individual U.S. citizens. Corporations and unions can fund an attached PAC's operating expenses, but none of that money may pass through to any federal political campaign.
I have other comments on what you posted, but I'll hold back on so that this message comes through clearly.
It's the low rank of the computer science program that makes this a real issue for this professor.
A student who gets a Ph.D. in CS from a top-twenty program, like this guy, has a good chance of ending up at Google working on machine learning (for example). Obviously a strong theoretical grounding will pay off in those cases.
But what about the students who get a bachelors in CS from a 4th-tier program? Not many of those people are going to be inventing the future. Most will end up as web developers, corporate programmers, or IT staff, if they stay in the field at all. If they finish school knowing calculus, but not knowing the practical realities of writing and managing code, they are not well prepared to start their careers. In fact, they are probably at a disadvantage against people who taught themselves programming by actually coding things in their spare time.
The GP's post is incredible informative but neglects consideration of where the fuel comes from. Like coal, uranium must be mined, and it takes quite a bit of mining and processing to produce the little bit of enriched uranium for the generators.
You invited the critique by attempting to argue from the authority of your education. If you can show me a university philosophy or poli sci curriculum that studies Apple, Inc. I'll stand corrected.
Fascism is a political ideology but Apple is not a political entity. Apple cannot be totalitarian since their policies do not carry the force of law and are not enforced by police powers. They just make and sell products, which private citizens choose to buy or not buy.
The metaphor of company:nation is a common one but don't forget that it is a metaphor only. In academia the policies and decisions of a company like Apple would be studied in business class, not poli sci, and certainly not philosophy.
I believe the iPod Touch requires the client app of iTunes to sync, backup, and update the device, but it does not require an Apple ID or connection to the iTunes online store. You won't be able to buy music or apps without that, but if you're ok with that, I believe you can use the iPod Touch without sending any personal info to Apple.
Not only does Apple clearly have a succession plan, they just executed it. They could not be more clear about who is running Apple right now.
As a shareholder myself, I'm satisfied that Tim can get great performance for at least the next 2 years. Beyond that I'll have to see what new product development (Jobs' true genius) looks like.
No sane legal team is going to let their corporation offer open-ended indemnification to all end users of a technology--especially in a heavily patent-encumbered space like video compression.
Under such an agreement, Google's potential liability would scale with the success of whoever is using WebM. That aggregate value could exceed Google's entire market cap. What if a suit is filed? Google would be liable for more than they are worth.
That's obviously a worst-case scenario, and perhaps Google has negotiated limited indemnification with a few key partners like Adobe. But they're never going to offer blanket indemnification.
A license grants you rights to make use of technology that Google owns. That is not the same thing as indemnification against submarine patents of which Google is not aware. In other words if a submarine patent surfaces and you get sued, Google is not going to bring their legal team in to defend you.
That is important because WebM does not have a patent pool and has not been litigated. At least H.264 has a patent pool, which means some patents are "surfaced", and if a submarine pops there will be a lot of very big players fighting alongside you.
I loved Inception and appreciated it as a commentary on the movie making and movie watching experiences. But I had never considered it from an allegorical perspective, probably because I am not religious myself. Thanks for your great comment.
On the other hand, Steve Jobs is not going around submitting resumes; he started his own company.
Each F-22 is itself an AWACS. So if you have 20 F-22s and 2 AWACS in the theater, you have to kill all 22 of those aircraft to take out AWACS capability. It's not just a matter of chasing off a couple of 707s.
The fundamental basis for U.S. air superiority is not stealth, it is superior data collection and management. That is what the F-22 does better than any other fighter in the world.
With a few very notable exceptions, engineers employed in big corporate jobs are not driving serious, world-changing innovation. That's especially true for jobs that are at risk for being outsourced. By definition, if your job can be outsourced, you are not driving innovation.
True innovation is almost always driven by engineers and scientists starting their own companies and creating something new. Andy Grove is right that job creation only comes with the "scaling up" phase, but before a business can scale up it needs to seriously innovate.
From the perspective of innovation it could be argued that it is *good* that entry level engineers are having trouble finding caretaker or straightforward jobs. Perhaps some of them will decide to try that crazy idea they've had for a while, instead of perfecting the rear rocker arm on the latest SUV.
http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2011/01/11/house-websites-go-to-drupal.aspx
The House of Representatives will be moving all their sites to Drupal; the freshmen of the 112th Congress get theirs first. Here's one example:
http://brooks.house.gov/
I've had a lot of awesome experiences in my life. So many, in fact, that I don't remember them all--or all the details. So it is nice once in a while to go back through my photos and videos and remember/relive those experiences--sometimes with people with whom I shared the original experience. Doing this is itself a pleasurable experience, one that is not possible if I don't take and keep some photos.
I'm on board with the idea that taking photos can sometimes get in the way of the experience. But I think you've maybe taken it too far when you're chastising someone who just wants advice on how to hold onto photos he's already taken.
No, this is incorrect, only equations and sums approach limits.
The series 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + .... approaches a limit.
0.99999... is a number. It does not approach anything, it simply is. It just happens to be a number that looks messy in our decimal notation.
A number written like 0.99... does not have a right edge. The 9's continue forever.
I know you've gotten a ton of other answers, but I think your fundamental difficulty is in the analogy you're trying to employ.
0.999... is not a equation or sum approaching a limit, it is a single number. The fact that we read left to right does not mean that there is any actual evaluation happening as our eyes drift down that long, long row of 9's. Each 9 is not a subsequent point on a line that is approaching an asymptote. The entirety of (0.99... ) represents, itself, a single point on the line of the reals. That point is infinitely close to 1, and is stationary...it's not "approaching" 1, it's already there and it's sitting right on top of it. It's the same point.
Hopefully this geometric analogy will help. ;-)
There are a half-dozen equivalent smartphones out there now, but when the iPhone was released, it was head and shoulders above the rest, and the industry spent years catching up. Same thing with tablets; there's nothing like the iPad out now although I bet in a year or two there will be plenty.
That's why Apple's stock is tied to perceptions of Steve Jobs' health. It's not the sales now--those are Tim Cook's responsibility, and he's very very good at those. What Jobs does better than anyone is develop new products that lead to significant new lines of revenue. This is why Apple, despite being the 2nd highest valued company in the world, still has a "growth stock" P/E ratio. It's how they get away with holding $40+ billion in cash but not paying a dividend. People believe in Jobs' ability to keep finding new ways to make tons of money. Without that, Apple will become a caretaker brand like Sony or Microsoft or Google, competently managing their legacy businesses, but with a shrinking market share and stagnant stock.
The problem with WebM is that no court has ruled that it does not infringe other video compression patents (of which there are many). Thus major businesses will be reluctant to build it into their products without full indemnification from Google--which I have not seen offered.
A patent grant is only as good as the patent rights behind it. If WebM is found to be infringing after deployment (as GIF was), a patent grant from Google will not shield users of WebM from liability.
We're talking about the products that Amazon sells, not the people who buy from Amazon. Besides, what is the alternative? The government forcing bookstores to distribute certain books, or every book? That doesn't make sense to me. There's no "right" to have your book published, sold or bought, no matter what it's about.