Right now China holds U.S. instruments in the amount of about $1 trillion. This is about 1/9th of the "public debt", which currently stands at about $9 trillion. But that is a NET number, not gross. Every day some number of bonds are being paid off, and some number of new bonds are being issued. The $9 trillion merely represents the long-term aggregate of the difference between those two numbers.
The total trading volume of U.S. public bonds, all types, is just under $1 trillion PER DAY. In other words the Chinese hold about one day's worth of trading volume. That is still significant, but it's not anywhere near the huge danger that people portray it as.
That's the goal of the activism. You probably have a feeling about Apple and their environmental policies now. It has entered your mind as an aspect of what Apple, as a company, does. You might even feel sympathetic toward them--they're trying to do good, and got unfairly trashed for it. Whereas before you probably did not hold much of an opinion about Apple's environmental policies at all. See the change?
Greenpeace, and other edge activists, will happily sell out their own image to generate change. They don't care if you hate their guts and think they are a bunch of immature idiots. What they want is for your thinking about Apple--and other computer companies--to include environmental policy. Mission accomplished, I'd say.
And I should add that this type of "edge" tactic way, way predates environmentalists. Think KKK. Think John Brown. Think Al Qaida. Redefine the edge and you will probably shift the middle too.
Greenpeace used it well here but it's not like they invented the tactic. They're not even really on the edge of their own issue anymore... Earth First and ELF are beyond them.
If you know your rights you can sign lots of stuff
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
There are quite a few limits on what contracts can do, regardless of what they say. For instance NDAs are only valid for information that can be considered secret. The name of Google, and the fact that you interviewed there, does not meet that qualification. So whether it's there in writing or not doesn't matter. You can just ignore any language you know to be unenforceable.
Of course this still requires one to be knowledgable and to read the contract.
First of all the posting of this document is a huge, huge, huge win for Greenpeace. I think it's hard to overemphasize the extent to which this is a victory.
To understand why, you have to understand the role of edge activism. It's not to have a reasoned debate or to propose sober, moderate solutions. The goal is instead to move the center of the discussion in your direction, by stretching the edge of the issue. This means that a whole lot of things that are off the table for centrist organizations--like the Sierra Club--might be great tactics for Greenpeace. This includes exaggeration, hyperbole, heck even making stuff up. The goal is get your target to respond and clarify--thus simultaneously conferring importance to the subject, importance to you, and providing evidence of change.
In this case Greenpeace has prompted Apple into moving from no-show to professed industry leadership. Basically they have succeeded in forcing/convincing Apple to create a whole new set of criteria they have to live up to. And by virtue of such high-profile communication, Apple is telling the industry and world that this issue is very important.
This makes it even easier for moderate groups to do their work too. In comparison to the edge guys they look like saints, so they are able to garner more trust (they're the good cop, Greenpeace is the bad cop).They also have a new story to tell that illustrates how important environmental efforts are. And they now have a new set of benchmarks they can hold industries to--and best of all the benchmarks are self-imposed by Apple.
They tend to think of things in terms of problems to be solved, which is exactly the wrong way to consider issues of emotion, psychology, love, etc. The whole framing of the question--as a challenge to be overcome--is wrong.
Rather, the proper way to handle the issue is to study how people handle emotional issues now, and make sure the mission design allows for it. For instance crew members could be cross-trained, so that if a conflict develops the roles can be shuffled to reduce personal contact between two members. Or, the ship could be configurable, so that a person can "pick up" their tasking and take it into another room. Or choose to sleep and eat "downstairs" instead of "upstairs."
These are not new issues and if they haven't been "solved" yet, they won't be solved. Period. It's a question of management--how do people manage their emotional swings. Because the issue is way bigger than just sex and death. Over longer periods of time people tend to experience larger emotional movements, so you will also have issues of depression, elation, anger, jealousy, etc.
But it's not like these are new problems. Look in any sizable organization and you will find people managing these sorts of issues every day. Find the ones who make it work and study what they do. Or better yet, study who they are and try to find more for your mission.
This reads more like a geek fantasy or satire than actual insight. I honestly had to reread a couple times to make sure it wasn't a reference to Dr. Strangelove. Assuming it's not...
We're not Moties--there is no physical necessity for sexual intercourse the way there is for vitamin D. There are strong emotional and psychological urges, yes. But these are closely tied to issues of upbringing and culture, so to try to ignore those contexts would be counterproductive. Sex can't be separated from love and lust and we shouldn't try. Instead the solution should be to provide outlets that are appropriate and workable within the cultural and interpersonal context of the team.
Generally I would expect that not needing packaging, delivery trucks, shelf space, etc, would result in the end product being cheaper due to the lack of need to pay for all that stuff... but no, somehow delivering less is a "feature" that makes sense to pay extra money for.
See, here's your problem right here. You're under the mistaken idea that price and cost are more than vaguelly related. You might want to try framing price in terms of perceived value instead. To some people being able to buy one song at a time from their couch has higher perceived value than buying a CD at Target. Thus a higher price is supported.
This framing has the added benefit of allowing for different perceptions and opinions without value judgments. So you might have a different perception of value, and that's fine. You can go to Target and pay less for the CD, and everyone's happy. Yay for the free market.
The word "jaunt" predates Bester by a long shot. Bester didn't coin the word--he's just being clever with an existing one. Might be time to expand your canon beyond sci-fi.
I use my personal phone only occasionally for business and even I have all the important numbers saved--which means I have to look at the screen anyway because you can't "touch scroll". The really important ones have voice dial commands assigned to them so I don't have to dial at all.
The need to "touch dial" is way over-rated. I don't know anyone who keeps all their important phone numbers in their head and dials them manually while they're driving. Everyone just goes to contacts or recent calls, and the iPhone is designed to make that process as easy as possible. That was one of the big points of Jobs' presentation--the way people use phones has changed. Finding saved numbers is now the norm; actually dialing digits is the outlier.
Maybe if you were strictly constrained to regard physical complexity only, you might be right. But that doesn't make much sense because the whole point of intelligence is that the genes get to punt by delegating adaption to a real-time system. If you take into account the adaptions created by that system--our languages, cultures, and technologies--clearly we are more complex than chimps. We are impressed when they use sticks to fish for termites--but most of us know they do this because we watched it on our color televisions in our climate-controlled dwellings.
The whole point of evolution is that it describes how complexity can arise from simplicity without the need for supernatural direction. If we pretend that that actually doesn't happen, for the political sake of saying that man is not the "pinnacle", then what the heck are we studying? When behavior is taken into account it is an accurate statement that man is the most complex organism on the planet today. We are so evolutionarily successful that one of our biggest concerns is the rate at which we out-compete other species for resources.
Products like the iPod don't die, they fade away. What you'll see in the next few years is the strange combination of iPod sales that are flat or growing, but steadily falling marketshare as the market grows, and more and companies put out products that are "good enough" to steal a few sales. In the aggregate, over time, the crowd will overwhelm any one company's share.
A semi-relevant example I can think of off the top of my head is the IBM PC. IBM always made great PCs, but in the end they lost the lead of the market to the "other" category. Today the largest single PC manufacturer in the world by marketshare is Dell, but even they have under 25% share. Expect the same thing to happen to Apple in the category of portable digital music players. They see the writing on the wall, which is why they are aggressively moving into a new market with the iPhone.
Betamax lost the format war more because of bad marketing, licensing, and format confusion than because of lockin.
I didn't say "lockin", you did. I said popularity, which is not the same thing, and I would argue is dependent on things like marketing, licensing, and consumer confusion. Maybe you think I'm trying to make a point about Apple's "lockin?" Well I'm not. My point is that success sometimes has more to do with marketing than engineering, and I think BetaMax makes that point fairly well.
MP3 is simply the most popular format, to the point that the generic term for things like iPods and Zunes is "MP3 player." If you want a better point of comparison, how about Ogg vs. MP3. Ogg is losing (lost, I would say), because outside of the geeks no one knows what it is.
AAC is already a widely adopted standard (not as widely as mp3, I'll grant, but I'll ask one simple question: what percentage of players in the hands of consumers can play AAC? Considering that it includes the iPod, the Zune, the PSP, and a great many phones its probably quite high).
See, I happen to think that is the wrong question. I wonder how many people know that their player plays AAC without having to look it up. The Slashdot crowd is generally more tech-savvy than the average person, and even here there have been a number of comments from people believing that AAC is propietary.
Every digital music device can play it, and it's already a more well-known and common standard than AAC.
I know AAC is technically superior to MP3, but so was Betamax. Popularity beats technology a lot of the time, especially when the technical advantage is not exactly glaringly obvious.
Either way WMA is going down thought. As it should.
First, there is no such thing as objective reporting. Everything is biased. Period.
This is not on the thread topic but I have to call this. People always have biases, but reporting can be objective--for example, "I let go of a hammer and it fell to the ground." There is nothing biased about that; it is an objective report of what happened.
Obviously the little snark in the summary does not fit anyone's definition of objective, but to jump from that to a blanket denial of objective reporting is not supported. Things are not so binary. If we can identify and acknowledge bias then we can compensate for it--either by providing "equal time" to differing view points or (better) sticking to reporting straight facts and clearly separating any analysis or opinion. The poster failed at that, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
What web 2.0 and the semantic web can do together is better than #1 and #2. Instead of a dedicated team of 20 you get a completely arbitrary and undedicated team of 20 million doing their best to tag content with keywords.
But how do you get them to do it? That is the hardest part. If they're not dedicated, I doubt they will be doing their best. BTW I mean (and meant) "dedicated" in the emotional sense, not the tasking sense.
It's not hard to aggregate one small group of people in the entire world who LOVE hamsters and will build out the ultimate hamster Web page, or at least a good hamster resource. In fact due to targeted advertising there is sometimes a monetary reward for such focused effort.
It's considerably harder (for me anyway) to imagine that everyone who ever looks at any Web page about hamsters will bother clicking in and adding or editing tags. Most Web surfers are just passive.
In addition the good tags will only drown out the bad for the most popular subjects. For niche assets where there might only be a few tag edits in total, it only takes a few bad tags to pollute the usefulness. The long tail suffers the most.
Due to legacy regulation held over from analog telephony/cable days.
Cable ISPs do not, thanks to a recent decision by the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That is the whole basis of this fight right now. The telephony guys want Congress to strip their offerings of common carrier status so they can compete with the cable guys. But that would also strip all the protections we've come to take for granted about the Internet, like not blocking Web sites based on political speech, etc.
All the existing regulatory structure will be completely useless if that happens, because it's all based on statutory authority. A new law from Congress overrides existing laws and existing regulatory power. If the new law says that ISPs are not common carrier, then they are essentially private networks and are free to limit their traffic however they see fit--and the FCC would have nothing to say about it. When it comes to threats from Congress, FCC assurances are not worth the paper they're printed on.
It is a real danger and just because it's "hard to imagine" doesn't mean we should ignore it.
1) A search service that indexes all of Romario's goals. 2) A manually built asset that aggregates all of Romario's goals. 3) A standard system of semantic tags that self-identifies all Romario goal assets.
#1 is Google. As you point out now it relies primarily on keywords but you oversell the problem in two ways. First of all most video hosting sites already provide author and/or community tagging--thus providing a way for keywords to be assigned. Second, you're comparing a future semantic Web against the Google of today.
#2 can be provided by commercial video companies now ("1,000 Great Man U Goals," etc). It's also possible that a fan site could do the manual labor to find, upload, and keyword the videos.
#3 is the "semantic Web" approach, wherein all content providers follow a standard for self-identifying their content in a computer-parsable way.
The thing that distinguishes 1 and 2 from 3 is the scope of work required. #1 and #2 rely on a small team of dedicated people to accomplish the task. #3 relies on a very broad group of people of varying levels of dedication.
If you're talking practically about the solution, none of those approaches are going to to get to 100%. As others have pointed out there is a real human semantic problem in identifying which goals of Romario to count, how far back to look, etc.
But the key is that #1 and #2 are approaches of a scope that we know can work. #3 seems unlikely to get the buy-in and effort required.
It's not like they are profiting from playing the songs. They're funded with public money already, so the payments for these royalties are going straight from our tax dollars to the music labels. Congress should just exempt them from royalty payments altogether via legislation--problem solved. In fact that would be a net win for taxpayers, since we'd get the same public service at a lower cost.
The base reason for doing this is to conserve and rearrange our use of the airwave spectrum--analog TV is a very inefficient use of bandwidth. Once the conversion to DTV over the air is done, the freed spectrum will be redistributed via FCC auctions. The revenue from these auctions and licensing fees is likely to offset the cost of the TV tuner handout, probably several times over. Yes, we'll still be paying for it, but the cost will be distributed into the fees for new services, funding economic growth as they pass through the businesses providing the services. Overall this project is going to have a huge net positive effect on economic growth, more than offsetting the administrative cost of distributing the coupons.
Also a number of studies have shown that the federal government is in fact very efficient at delivering some services. The IRS is very efficient. Medicare operates with far lower administrative cost than any private insurance company. The Postal Service is far more efficient at bulk mail service than private shipping companies. Etc.
[rant]I'm sick to death of the over-hyped meme that the government is always inefficient. It's a marketing campaign by those who seek to supplant government services and profit off the greater inefficiencies. In fact for a private contractor to the government the incentive is to be as inefficient as they can get away with, because it increases their profit margins. Salaried and budgeted government workers do not have that option.[/rant]
1. Your brain is connected to something--that something is the rest of your body. There are numerous studies that show a direct correlation between physical activity and health of the brain, not to mention psychological well-being.
The specter of "competition with China" is like begging us to please think of the children--a meaningless appeal to emotion. We compete with China just fine. And speaking of competition, do you really expect me to believe that academic or business competition is great and good, but athletic competition is evil somehow?? Competition is competition, if you want to keep up it's going to take work and it's not always going to be pleasant. Not everything about education needs to be about protecting self-esteem. Probably an unpopular view on/. when it comes to PE but there it is.
For what it's worth I went to one of the top public magnet high schools in the nation and we had PE through junior year, plus numerous intramural sports, plus a full raft of varsity teams. It obviously has not impacted the academic success there. There's even a bumper sticker that says "I came for the sports.":-)
2. Atkins is a good crash diet for adults to drop weight quickly--when combined with exercise. Without increased exercise it is just a recipe for circulatory problems later in life. It's probably not a good idea for kids. Better to let their health be controlled by exercise and balanced dietary moderation...and medical advice if needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now China holds U.S. instruments in the amount of about $1 trillion. This is about 1/9th of the "public debt", which currently stands at about $9 trillion. But that is a NET number, not gross. Every day some number of bonds are being paid off, and some number of new bonds are being issued. The $9 trillion merely represents the long-term aggregate of the difference between those two numbers.
The total trading volume of U.S. public bonds, all types, is just under $1 trillion PER DAY. In other words the Chinese hold about one day's worth of trading volume. That is still significant, but it's not anywhere near the huge danger that people portray it as.
That's the goal of the activism. You probably have a feeling about Apple and their environmental policies now. It has entered your mind as an aspect of what Apple, as a company, does. You might even feel sympathetic toward them--they're trying to do good, and got unfairly trashed for it. Whereas before you probably did not hold much of an opinion about Apple's environmental policies at all. See the change?
Greenpeace, and other edge activists, will happily sell out their own image to generate change. They don't care if you hate their guts and think they are a bunch of immature idiots. What they want is for your thinking about Apple--and other computer companies--to include environmental policy. Mission accomplished, I'd say.
And I should add that this type of "edge" tactic way, way predates environmentalists. Think KKK. Think John Brown. Think Al Qaida. Redefine the edge and you will probably shift the middle too.
Greenpeace used it well here but it's not like they invented the tactic. They're not even really on the edge of their own issue anymore... Earth First and ELF are beyond them.
There are quite a few limits on what contracts can do, regardless of what they say. For instance NDAs are only valid for information that can be considered secret. The name of Google, and the fact that you interviewed there, does not meet that qualification. So whether it's there in writing or not doesn't matter. You can just ignore any language you know to be unenforceable.
Of course this still requires one to be knowledgable and to read the contract.
First of all the posting of this document is a huge, huge, huge win for Greenpeace. I think it's hard to overemphasize the extent to which this is a victory.
To understand why, you have to understand the role of edge activism. It's not to have a reasoned debate or to propose sober, moderate solutions. The goal is instead to move the center of the discussion in your direction, by stretching the edge of the issue. This means that a whole lot of things that are off the table for centrist organizations--like the Sierra Club--might be great tactics for Greenpeace. This includes exaggeration, hyperbole, heck even making stuff up. The goal is get your target to respond and clarify--thus simultaneously conferring importance to the subject, importance to you, and providing evidence of change.
In this case Greenpeace has prompted Apple into moving from no-show to professed industry leadership. Basically they have succeeded in forcing/convincing Apple to create a whole new set of criteria they have to live up to. And by virtue of such high-profile communication, Apple is telling the industry and world that this issue is very important.
This makes it even easier for moderate groups to do their work too. In comparison to the edge guys they look like saints, so they are able to garner more trust (they're the good cop, Greenpeace is the bad cop).They also have a new story to tell that illustrates how important environmental efforts are. And they now have a new set of benchmarks they can hold industries to--and best of all the benchmarks are self-imposed by Apple.
They tend to think of things in terms of problems to be solved, which is exactly the wrong way to consider issues of emotion, psychology, love, etc. The whole framing of the question--as a challenge to be overcome--is wrong.
Rather, the proper way to handle the issue is to study how people handle emotional issues now, and make sure the mission design allows for it. For instance crew members could be cross-trained, so that if a conflict develops the roles can be shuffled to reduce personal contact between two members. Or, the ship could be configurable, so that a person can "pick up" their tasking and take it into another room. Or choose to sleep and eat "downstairs" instead of "upstairs."
These are not new issues and if they haven't been "solved" yet, they won't be solved. Period. It's a question of management--how do people manage their emotional swings. Because the issue is way bigger than just sex and death. Over longer periods of time people tend to experience larger emotional movements, so you will also have issues of depression, elation, anger, jealousy, etc.
But it's not like these are new problems. Look in any sizable organization and you will find people managing these sorts of issues every day. Find the ones who make it work and study what they do. Or better yet, study who they are and try to find more for your mission.
This reads more like a geek fantasy or satire than actual insight. I honestly had to reread a couple times to make sure it wasn't a reference to Dr. Strangelove. Assuming it's not...
We're not Moties--there is no physical necessity for sexual intercourse the way there is for vitamin D. There are strong emotional and psychological urges, yes. But these are closely tied to issues of upbringing and culture, so to try to ignore those contexts would be counterproductive. Sex can't be separated from love and lust and we shouldn't try. Instead the solution should be to provide outlets that are appropriate and workable within the cultural and interpersonal context of the team.
See, here's your problem right here. You're under the mistaken idea that price and cost are more than vaguelly related. You might want to try framing price in terms of perceived value instead. To some people being able to buy one song at a time from their couch has higher perceived value than buying a CD at Target. Thus a higher price is supported.
This framing has the added benefit of allowing for different perceptions and opinions without value judgments. So you might have a different perception of value, and that's fine. You can go to Target and pay less for the CD, and everyone's happy. Yay for the free market.
"We've upped our bitrates and prices--now up yours!"
The word "jaunt" predates Bester by a long shot. Bester didn't coin the word--he's just being clever with an existing one. Might be time to expand your canon beyond sci-fi.
Perhaps he can provide faster nudity.
I use my personal phone only occasionally for business and even I have all the important numbers saved--which means I have to look at the screen anyway because you can't "touch scroll". The really important ones have voice dial commands assigned to them so I don't have to dial at all.
The need to "touch dial" is way over-rated. I don't know anyone who keeps all their important phone numbers in their head and dials them manually while they're driving. Everyone just goes to contacts or recent calls, and the iPhone is designed to make that process as easy as possible. That was one of the big points of Jobs' presentation--the way people use phones has changed. Finding saved numbers is now the norm; actually dialing digits is the outlier.
Maybe if you were strictly constrained to regard physical complexity only, you might be right. But that doesn't make much sense because the whole point of intelligence is that the genes get to punt by delegating adaption to a real-time system. If you take into account the adaptions created by that system--our languages, cultures, and technologies--clearly we are more complex than chimps. We are impressed when they use sticks to fish for termites--but most of us know they do this because we watched it on our color televisions in our climate-controlled dwellings.
The whole point of evolution is that it describes how complexity can arise from simplicity without the need for supernatural direction. If we pretend that that actually doesn't happen, for the political sake of saying that man is not the "pinnacle", then what the heck are we studying? When behavior is taken into account it is an accurate statement that man is the most complex organism on the planet today. We are so evolutionarily successful that one of our biggest concerns is the rate at which we out-compete other species for resources.
Products like the iPod don't die, they fade away. What you'll see in the next few years is the strange combination of iPod sales that are flat or growing, but steadily falling marketshare as the market grows, and more and companies put out products that are "good enough" to steal a few sales. In the aggregate, over time, the crowd will overwhelm any one company's share.
A semi-relevant example I can think of off the top of my head is the IBM PC. IBM always made great PCs, but in the end they lost the lead of the market to the "other" category. Today the largest single PC manufacturer in the world by marketshare is Dell, but even they have under 25% share. Expect the same thing to happen to Apple in the category of portable digital music players. They see the writing on the wall, which is why they are aggressively moving into a new market with the iPhone.
I didn't say "lockin", you did. I said popularity, which is not the same thing, and I would argue is dependent on things like marketing, licensing, and consumer confusion. Maybe you think I'm trying to make a point about Apple's "lockin?" Well I'm not. My point is that success sometimes has more to do with marketing than engineering, and I think BetaMax makes that point fairly well.
MP3 is simply the most popular format, to the point that the generic term for things like iPods and Zunes is "MP3 player." If you want a better point of comparison, how about Ogg vs. MP3. Ogg is losing (lost, I would say), because outside of the geeks no one knows what it is.
See, I happen to think that is the wrong question. I wonder how many people know that their player plays AAC without having to look it up. The Slashdot crowd is generally more tech-savvy than the average person, and even here there have been a number of comments from people believing that AAC is propietary.
Either way WMA is going down though.
Dammit.
Every digital music device can play it, and it's already a more well-known and common standard than AAC.
I know AAC is technically superior to MP3, but so was Betamax. Popularity beats technology a lot of the time, especially when the technical advantage is not exactly glaringly obvious.
Either way WMA is going down thought. As it should.
I've never heard of the "everybody knows" legal standards of evidence or applicability. Must be that new Law 2.0 I keep hearing about.
This is not on the thread topic but I have to call this. People always have biases, but reporting can be objective--for example, "I let go of a hammer and it fell to the ground." There is nothing biased about that; it is an objective report of what happened.
Obviously the little snark in the summary does not fit anyone's definition of objective, but to jump from that to a blanket denial of objective reporting is not supported. Things are not so binary. If we can identify and acknowledge bias then we can compensate for it--either by providing "equal time" to differing view points or (better) sticking to reporting straight facts and clearly separating any analysis or opinion. The poster failed at that, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
But how do you get them to do it? That is the hardest part. If they're not dedicated, I doubt they will be doing their best. BTW I mean (and meant) "dedicated" in the emotional sense, not the tasking sense.
It's not hard to aggregate one small group of people in the entire world who LOVE hamsters and will build out the ultimate hamster Web page, or at least a good hamster resource. In fact due to targeted advertising there is sometimes a monetary reward for such focused effort.
It's considerably harder (for me anyway) to imagine that everyone who ever looks at any Web page about hamsters will bother clicking in and adding or editing tags. Most Web surfers are just passive.
In addition the good tags will only drown out the bad for the most popular subjects. For niche assets where there might only be a few tag edits in total, it only takes a few bad tags to pollute the usefulness. The long tail suffers the most.
Due to legacy regulation held over from analog telephony/cable days.
Cable ISPs do not, thanks to a recent decision by the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That is the whole basis of this fight right now. The telephony guys want Congress to strip their offerings of common carrier status so they can compete with the cable guys. But that would also strip all the protections we've come to take for granted about the Internet, like not blocking Web sites based on political speech, etc.
All the existing regulatory structure will be completely useless if that happens, because it's all based on statutory authority. A new law from Congress overrides existing laws and existing regulatory power. If the new law says that ISPs are not common carrier, then they are essentially private networks and are free to limit their traffic however they see fit--and the FCC would have nothing to say about it. When it comes to threats from Congress, FCC assurances are not worth the paper they're printed on.
It is a real danger and just because it's "hard to imagine" doesn't mean we should ignore it.
But there are three ways to get that.
1) A search service that indexes all of Romario's goals.
2) A manually built asset that aggregates all of Romario's goals.
3) A standard system of semantic tags that self-identifies all Romario goal assets.
#1 is Google. As you point out now it relies primarily on keywords but you oversell the problem in two ways. First of all most video hosting sites already provide author and/or community tagging--thus providing a way for keywords to be assigned. Second, you're comparing a future semantic Web against the Google of today.
#2 can be provided by commercial video companies now ("1,000 Great Man U Goals," etc). It's also possible that a fan site could do the manual labor to find, upload, and keyword the videos.
#3 is the "semantic Web" approach, wherein all content providers follow a standard for self-identifying their content in a computer-parsable way.
The thing that distinguishes 1 and 2 from 3 is the scope of work required. #1 and #2 rely on a small team of dedicated people to accomplish the task. #3 relies on a very broad group of people of varying levels of dedication.
If you're talking practically about the solution, none of those approaches are going to to get to 100%. As others have pointed out there is a real human semantic problem in identifying which goals of Romario to count, how far back to look, etc.
But the key is that #1 and #2 are approaches of a scope that we know can work. #3 seems unlikely to get the buy-in and effort required.
It's not like they are profiting from playing the songs. They're funded with public money already, so the payments for these royalties are going straight from our tax dollars to the music labels. Congress should just exempt them from royalty payments altogether via legislation--problem solved. In fact that would be a net win for taxpayers, since we'd get the same public service at a lower cost.
GP assumes what it claims.
The base reason for doing this is to conserve and rearrange our use of the airwave spectrum--analog TV is a very inefficient use of bandwidth. Once the conversion to DTV over the air is done, the freed spectrum will be redistributed via FCC auctions. The revenue from these auctions and licensing fees is likely to offset the cost of the TV tuner handout, probably several times over. Yes, we'll still be paying for it, but the cost will be distributed into the fees for new services, funding economic growth as they pass through the businesses providing the services. Overall this project is going to have a huge net positive effect on economic growth, more than offsetting the administrative cost of distributing the coupons.
Also a number of studies have shown that the federal government is in fact very efficient at delivering some services. The IRS is very efficient. Medicare operates with far lower administrative cost than any private insurance company. The Postal Service is far more efficient at bulk mail service than private shipping companies. Etc.
[rant]I'm sick to death of the over-hyped meme that the government is always inefficient. It's a marketing campaign by those who seek to supplant government services and profit off the greater inefficiencies. In fact for a private contractor to the government the incentive is to be as inefficient as they can get away with, because it increases their profit margins. Salaried and budgeted government workers do not have that option.[/rant]
1. Your brain is connected to something--that something is the rest of your body. There are numerous studies that show a direct correlation between physical activity and health of the brain, not to mention psychological well-being.
/. when it comes to PE but there it is.
:-)
The specter of "competition with China" is like begging us to please think of the children--a meaningless appeal to emotion. We compete with China just fine. And speaking of competition, do you really expect me to believe that academic or business competition is great and good, but athletic competition is evil somehow?? Competition is competition, if you want to keep up it's going to take work and it's not always going to be pleasant. Not everything about education needs to be about protecting self-esteem. Probably an unpopular view on
For what it's worth I went to one of the top public magnet high schools in the nation and we had PE through junior year, plus numerous intramural sports, plus a full raft of varsity teams. It obviously has not impacted the academic success there. There's even a bumper sticker that says "I came for the sports."
2. Atkins is a good crash diet for adults to drop weight quickly--when combined with exercise. Without increased exercise it is just a recipe for circulatory problems later in life. It's probably not a good idea for kids. Better to let their health be controlled by exercise and balanced dietary moderation...and medical advice if needed.