I would love to vote for a candidate that would restrain spending, hold corporation's feet to the fire, and restore our civil liberties. No such candidate exists. Why vote when there's no one worth voting for?
If that's what you believe, and you think many other people believe that too, why not run yourself? Anyone can become a candidate in the U.S. system. Almost every candidate and political leader we have today started their life doing something other than politics. What better way to counter apathy?
One of the nonprofits for whom I work received a Gates grant that included funding for a new Web site. There was nothing in the grant process that stipulated Windows so we hired a company to build the site in Drupal running on Linux.
The Xbox at least took significant market share from Sony, and is rumored to be approaching profitability. The Zune failed to grab any iPod share but we see now that MP3 players were only a passing, transitional market.
But Windows Mobile, in its various incarnations, has been a major player in handheld computing since before any of its current competitors. They should have had such a head start that they'd be uncatchable, just like in desktop computing. Instead, they are getting their butt kicked by upstarts like Google and Apple, and their biggest customer (HP) just bought its own mobile OS in Palm. Microsoft is getting their butt kicked so bad in mobile that they have TWO start-from-scratch efforts, Kin and Windows 7. This after Ballmer basically laughed at the iPhone when it came out.
Mobile computing has the potential to dwarf the PC market that Microsoft has dominated. Huge sections of the planet are jumping straight from mobile phones to mobile computing, skipping the desktop PC and MP3 market phases altogether. Just look at Apple--after only three years they now make more money from phones than they do from computers.
If you ensure that no one obtains any copy of the software from you without first signing this contract, then you can in effect reinvent copyright within contract law.
This is probably impossible. The consequences for unauthorized copying are far more draconian today than what you propose, and yet it's done all the time. It's easy to get free copies of pretty much any software.
One difference is that you wouldn't be able to successfully sue any third parties other than the recipient, even if the third parties continued to make further copies.
Exactly. All it would take is one person who gets the product from someone other than you, and they could redistribute to their heart's content since they did not sign your contract. You'd be stuck trying to track down the original contract violation; meanwhile you're getting killed in the marketplace by your own product.
Without copyright, they could distribute it in any way they chose...in a shiny box on the shelf right next to your shiny box, but with a far lower price since they don't have any development costs to pay down. They could run twice as many ads as you do on TV. They could show up at trade shows and put their booth right next to yours. Etc.
Google drives down public streets to photograph people's houses. I'm all for privacy protection, but what Google does is what any stranger has been able to do for about a hundred years: take a picture of the street. The alternative is to give police the power to accost anyone with a camera on a public street. Personally I would prefer a world in which I have freedom to take pictures in public places.
Which would have given others with less money more of a chance to work on this, without feeling it would be fruitless to compete against the big pockets and risk being sued into oblivion.
No patent has been granted yet. So what has kept them from working on it for the last 15 years?
What kept them from starting 16 years ago and beating Venter to the punch?
Re:Better than either IMO
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure I'd say that Lost was a better show than Twin Peaks. But I found the end of Lost more satisfying, and I think that is because the Lost writers were able to tell the ending they wanted in the way they wanted.
Lost, at least thematically, was mapped out from the beginning. If you watch the pilot, the thematic elements of the finale are right there. The story and ending in the last 3 seasons were mapped out in much more detail when the writers were able to negotiate a set end date for the show. You can watch any episode from the first 5 seasons for free on Hulu and I'm finding it interesting to go back and do that.
It's my understanding that this is precisely what happened to Lost.
If you haven't actually been watching the show I have a hard time understanding why you're commenting on it. For example, I watched several episodes of Babylon 5 in its first season and thought it was laughably bad and cliched trashy sci-fi. Based on that, I have to admit I'm surprised to see posters today citing it as a good show. But I have to admit I didn't watch it, so what do I know.
Ah yes, the clear rationality of Star Trek
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Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
Sorry, I'm an Atheist and the ending for me was like watching the crew of the enterprise meeting Santa Claus at the North Pole.
What if the crew of the Enterprise met Abraham Lincoln in space? Oh yes, a powerful but mysterious alien being reincarnated him and other historical figures to learn about good and evil. Yes yes, perfectly rational. Because, you see, it's in space.:-)
The story ended when Jack's eye closed
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Lost Ends
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The shots of the fuselage camp on the beach were simply nice reminders from the producers and/or ABC of where the story began. In nerd-speak, they're not "canon." The story of Lost ended when Jack's eye closed.
The best explanation I read was that it's the final remains of the 815 crash after all the Losties died. It's the mystery that other people brought to the island in the future will wonder about, like we wondered about the hatch, the statue, Henry Gale's balloon, and so on.
If you watched the show from the beginning you'll remember that in the story, most of the fuselage camp washed away from an unusually high tide a few weeks after the crash. So it won't be around for future island inhabitants to wonder about.
it does nothing for the viewers who were sold for 5 seasons on the concept of the mysterious island with shitloads of secrets which give rise to even more questions that would eventually be answered.
I never got that expectation from the show. From the first episode it was clearly structured as a character-driven story...the story of these people, what happened to them, and where they came from. The mysteries were things that happened to them, and we participated through their eyes. We almost never step outside their perspective. In fact I can only think of one time in 6 seasons--at the beginning of this season, when they show the island underwater in the first "flash sideways."
I watched both the X-Files and Twin Peaks when they were originally broadcast (what can I say, I'm a sucker for mysterious shows). I think Lost ended much better than either of those.
The X-Files was hamstrung by its desire to remain on the air indefinitely. Thus the mysteries got more and more ridiculous, convoluted, and unexplainable. In the end it went off the air with a whimper, and produced one ok movie and one absolutely terrible movie. I think Lost did it better by setting an end point and structuring 3 seasons to get there. Besides, the "mythology" of the X-Files was really a tail that started wagging the dog...the show was originally conceived to be episodic, and the mythology sort of grew out of fan reaction. Lost was always intended to be one continuous interconnected story.
Twin Peaks was also intended to be one continuous story, but it was canceled and thus had to wrap up rather abruptly. They did the best they could (I actually love the last scene), but again--I found Lost more satisfying because the storyline was structured over multiple seasons toward an intended ending.
IMO a lot of the complaints online are from people who are simply facing a mismatch between their desires and the product. Some people love sci-fi and are pissed the story ended on a metaphysical/supernatural note. Other people are unhappy that some mysteries were left unsolved...Silmarillion readers, if you get my drift.
Another possibility is only shipping a third of what you have produced, holding the rest in a warehouse and telling everyone you've 'sold out'.
I don't know if you've ever managed a retail business. I have and I can think of absolutely no advantage to doing that. It is always in a business's best interest to sell their inventory through as quickly as possible. No store in the world purposely sells less than they can.
You might think "well they might do it to build buzz." But the point of buzz is simply to sell more product. If there is already enough demand for all the product, you don't need buzz. You just sell the product. Buzz is what is needed to create demand. You don't sacrifice actual demand to create buzz.
Cash flow is king in retail. One dollar today is better than two dollars next week, because you can use the dollar today to buy more inventory to sell next week. That is why stores put poorly-selling things on sale...to create buzz to drive up demand. But not many stores will lower the price on products that they are already selling through. Why would they? It's just throwing money away for no reason.
The same principle applies to holding back inventory that otherwise would sell through. A huge part of being successful at retail is reducing the time between receiving the product from the manufacturer, and selling it to a customer. If you can do it even a little faster than your competitor, you will beat them.
You're talking about systems (mainframes vs. laptops) but the comment was referring to chips. Granted it was an exaggeration, but to answer your question--build a mainframe around a modern laptop chip and it could indeed do the things you're talking about.
There are sooooo many ways this information could be used against you, both now and in the future that I could type for hours without even scratching the surface.
Read the article, please. The request is in the welcome package for new students, not the application. Thus, "signals" in the application process are not an issue. The only people getting the request are those who already know that they have been accepted.
I live in rural Texas. What you have here is a buncha people who are independent and are tired of government encroaching on civil liberty and forcing "help" on us.
There's some irony in the fact that you're posting this on the Internet.
If you look at a list of the 10 most valuable companies in the world by capital valuation, 3 of them produce almost no tangible goods whatsoever (Microsoft, Google, and JP Morgan Chase). Others, like Apple or Berkshire Hathaway, are only partially tied to tangible goods.
The idea that economic value is driven solely--or even largely--by the material input is becoming less and less true. Does a Mercedes C-class sedan use substantially more materials or gas than Ford Fusion? Did Avatar take substantially more raw materials or energy to produce than Iron Man? Why is a bare acre of ground in Manhattan worth so much more than a bare acre of ground in Saskatchewan?
That would true if deadbolts always required a key from the inside. But they don't--the deadbolt on my front door has a lever on the inside. A key is only needed on the outside. Many deadbolts are like this.
The purpose of a deadbolt is to make the door harder to kick in. That's why it's a long thick bolt, as opposed to the little catch that the doorknob controls.
What you're asking for is not an audit, it's more like a criminal investigation or maybe a snipe hunt.
The company I work for has its financial statements audited by an outside firm every year. At no point does that firm ask for or review 5 years worth of communications so they can see why we made the decisions we did. Strategic decision-making is management, not financials. The purpose of an audit is to make sure the numbers add up, not to second-guess management.
You can look at the audited financial reporting of any public company and you won't get access to information like that. Why does Apple prohibit Flash on its phones? Why did Microsoft make a bid for Yahoo? Why did Google buy YouTube? The answers are not in the audited financial statements.
People say "audit the Fed" but the Fed is already audited. What they really mean is "control the Fed" or "scapegoat the Fed" IMO.
Anyone who trades stocks is a trader--brokers are traders (since they execute trades) and so are speculators. What we're really talking about are speculators--people who buy and sell stocks, but who don't care about the underlying asset, only its price movements.
Let's say I want to sell my Apple stock today. You might want to buy Apple stock next month.
I can sell it to a speculator today. You can buy it from a speculator next month. Without speculators, neither of us could have completed the transaction in the timeframe we wanted; I would have had to wait for you to be ready to buy.
Speculators make a market liquid. They are what enable people like your broker to complete transactions whenever you ask him to--he's always able to find a buyer or seller due to speculators.
Think of a stop-loss order. Let's say you hold Apple but have a stop-loss at $200 so you don't lose the money you've made over the past year. If Apple starts dropping precipitously (if Steve Jobs dies, say), your broker is going to have to execute that stop-loss. If the only players in the market are people interested in the underlying business, who would buy your Apple shares? They're probably all trying to sell for the same reason you are.
A stop-loss only works if a buyer can be found. In this case you might be glad for short-selling speculators. They would buy your Apple shares in a heartbeat. You minimize your paper loss, and they get a chance to make money on a short sale. Everyone gets what they want.
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I would love to vote for a candidate that would restrain spending, hold corporation's feet to the fire, and restore our civil liberties. No such candidate exists. Why vote when there's no one worth voting for?
If that's what you believe, and you think many other people believe that too, why not run yourself? Anyone can become a candidate in the U.S. system. Almost every candidate and political leader we have today started their life doing something other than politics. What better way to counter apathy?
One of the nonprofits for whom I work received a Gates grant that included funding for a new Web site. There was nothing in the grant process that stipulated Windows so we hired a company to build the site in Drupal running on Linux.
The Xbox at least took significant market share from Sony, and is rumored to be approaching profitability. The Zune failed to grab any iPod share but we see now that MP3 players were only a passing, transitional market.
But Windows Mobile, in its various incarnations, has been a major player in handheld computing since before any of its current competitors. They should have had such a head start that they'd be uncatchable, just like in desktop computing. Instead, they are getting their butt kicked by upstarts like Google and Apple, and their biggest customer (HP) just bought its own mobile OS in Palm. Microsoft is getting their butt kicked so bad in mobile that they have TWO start-from-scratch efforts, Kin and Windows 7. This after Ballmer basically laughed at the iPhone when it came out.
Mobile computing has the potential to dwarf the PC market that Microsoft has dominated. Huge sections of the planet are jumping straight from mobile phones to mobile computing, skipping the desktop PC and MP3 market phases altogether. Just look at Apple--after only three years they now make more money from phones than they do from computers.
If you ensure that no one obtains any copy of the software from you without first signing this contract, then you can in effect reinvent copyright within contract law.
This is probably impossible. The consequences for unauthorized copying are far more draconian today than what you propose, and yet it's done all the time. It's easy to get free copies of pretty much any software.
One difference is that you wouldn't be able to successfully sue any third parties other than the recipient, even if the third parties continued to make further copies.
Exactly. All it would take is one person who gets the product from someone other than you, and they could redistribute to their heart's content since they did not sign your contract. You'd be stuck trying to track down the original contract violation; meanwhile you're getting killed in the marketplace by your own product.
Without copyright, they could distribute it in any way they chose...in a shiny box on the shelf right next to your shiny box, but with a far lower price since they don't have any development costs to pay down. They could run twice as many ads as you do on TV. They could show up at trade shows and put their booth right next to yours. Etc.
Google drives down public streets to photograph people's houses. I'm all for privacy protection, but what Google does is what any stranger has been able to do for about a hundred years: take a picture of the street. The alternative is to give police the power to accost anyone with a camera on a public street. Personally I would prefer a world in which I have freedom to take pictures in public places.
Which would have given others with less money more of a chance to work on this, without feeling it would be fruitless to compete against the big pockets and risk being sued into oblivion.
No patent has been granted yet. So what has kept them from working on it for the last 15 years?
What kept them from starting 16 years ago and beating Venter to the punch?
I'm not sure I'd say that Lost was a better show than Twin Peaks. But I found the end of Lost more satisfying, and I think that is because the Lost writers were able to tell the ending they wanted in the way they wanted.
Lost, at least thematically, was mapped out from the beginning. If you watch the pilot, the thematic elements of the finale are right there. The story and ending in the last 3 seasons were mapped out in much more detail when the writers were able to negotiate a set end date for the show. You can watch any episode from the first 5 seasons for free on Hulu and I'm finding it interesting to go back and do that.
It's my understanding that this is precisely what happened to Lost.
If you haven't actually been watching the show I have a hard time understanding why you're commenting on it. For example, I watched several episodes of Babylon 5 in its first season and thought it was laughably bad and cliched trashy sci-fi. Based on that, I have to admit I'm surprised to see posters today citing it as a good show. But I have to admit I didn't watch it, so what do I know.
Sorry, I'm an Atheist and the ending for me was like watching the crew of the enterprise meeting Santa Claus at the North Pole.
What if the crew of the Enterprise met Abraham Lincoln in space? Oh yes, a powerful but mysterious alien being reincarnated him and other historical figures to learn about good and evil. Yes yes, perfectly rational. Because, you see, it's in space. :-)
I do not believe in an afterlife but I enjoyed the ending of Lost because I thought it was a story well told. I also, for instance, don't believe that a person today could invent and build an immensely powerful and artificially intelligent exoskeleton, but I liked that story too.
The shots of the fuselage camp on the beach were simply nice reminders from the producers and/or ABC of where the story began. In nerd-speak, they're not "canon." The story of Lost ended when Jack's eye closed.
The best explanation I read was that it's the final remains of the 815 crash after all the Losties died. It's the mystery that other people brought to the island in the future will wonder about, like we wondered about the hatch, the statue, Henry Gale's balloon, and so on.
If you watched the show from the beginning you'll remember that in the story, most of the fuselage camp washed away from an unusually high tide a few weeks after the crash. So it won't be around for future island inhabitants to wonder about.
it does nothing for the viewers who were sold for 5 seasons on the concept of the mysterious island with shitloads of secrets which give rise to even more questions that would eventually be answered.
I never got that expectation from the show. From the first episode it was clearly structured as a character-driven story...the story of these people, what happened to them, and where they came from. The mysteries were things that happened to them, and we participated through their eyes. We almost never step outside their perspective. In fact I can only think of one time in 6 seasons--at the beginning of this season, when they show the island underwater in the first "flash sideways."
I watched both the X-Files and Twin Peaks when they were originally broadcast (what can I say, I'm a sucker for mysterious shows). I think Lost ended much better than either of those.
The X-Files was hamstrung by its desire to remain on the air indefinitely. Thus the mysteries got more and more ridiculous, convoluted, and unexplainable. In the end it went off the air with a whimper, and produced one ok movie and one absolutely terrible movie. I think Lost did it better by setting an end point and structuring 3 seasons to get there. Besides, the "mythology" of the X-Files was really a tail that started wagging the dog...the show was originally conceived to be episodic, and the mythology sort of grew out of fan reaction. Lost was always intended to be one continuous interconnected story.
Twin Peaks was also intended to be one continuous story, but it was canceled and thus had to wrap up rather abruptly. They did the best they could (I actually love the last scene), but again--I found Lost more satisfying because the storyline was structured over multiple seasons toward an intended ending.
IMO a lot of the complaints online are from people who are simply facing a mismatch between their desires and the product. Some people love sci-fi and are pissed the story ended on a metaphysical/supernatural note. Other people are unhappy that some mysteries were left unsolved...Silmarillion readers, if you get my drift.
Another possibility is only shipping a third of what you have produced, holding the rest in a warehouse and telling everyone you've 'sold out'.
I don't know if you've ever managed a retail business. I have and I can think of absolutely no advantage to doing that. It is always in a business's best interest to sell their inventory through as quickly as possible. No store in the world purposely sells less than they can.
You might think "well they might do it to build buzz." But the point of buzz is simply to sell more product. If there is already enough demand for all the product, you don't need buzz. You just sell the product. Buzz is what is needed to create demand. You don't sacrifice actual demand to create buzz.
Cash flow is king in retail. One dollar today is better than two dollars next week, because you can use the dollar today to buy more inventory to sell next week. That is why stores put poorly-selling things on sale...to create buzz to drive up demand. But not many stores will lower the price on products that they are already selling through. Why would they? It's just throwing money away for no reason.
The same principle applies to holding back inventory that otherwise would sell through. A huge part of being successful at retail is reducing the time between receiving the product from the manufacturer, and selling it to a customer. If you can do it even a little faster than your competitor, you will beat them.
You're talking about systems (mainframes vs. laptops) but the comment was referring to chips. Granted it was an exaggeration, but to answer your question--build a mainframe around a modern laptop chip and it could indeed do the things you're talking about.
There are sooooo many ways this information could be used against you, both now and in the future that I could type for hours without even scratching the surface.
Can you provide just a few examples for us?
Putting it in the orientation packet also gives parents a chance to advise the students NOT to participate.
Read the article, please. The request is in the welcome package for new students, not the application. Thus, "signals" in the application process are not an issue. The only people getting the request are those who already know that they have been accepted.
I live in rural Texas. What you have here is a buncha people who are independent and are tired of government encroaching on civil liberty and forcing "help" on us.
There's some irony in the fact that you're posting this on the Internet.
Rendering a previously visited page from disk is very fast in any modern browser; but no one actually browses that way.
The marketing value of this ad is in how fast the pages load...but in real life they'd never load that fast due to the network. And Google knows it.
And maybe less, because it is so much higher in the gravity well (which speeds clocks up).
I'm not great at math but 6% > 0.
If you look at a list of the 10 most valuable companies in the world by capital valuation, 3 of them produce almost no tangible goods whatsoever (Microsoft, Google, and JP Morgan Chase). Others, like Apple or Berkshire Hathaway, are only partially tied to tangible goods.
The idea that economic value is driven solely--or even largely--by the material input is becoming less and less true. Does a Mercedes C-class sedan use substantially more materials or gas than Ford Fusion? Did Avatar take substantially more raw materials or energy to produce than Iron Man? Why is a bare acre of ground in Manhattan worth so much more than a bare acre of ground in Saskatchewan?
That would true if deadbolts always required a key from the inside. But they don't--the deadbolt on my front door has a lever on the inside. A key is only needed on the outside. Many deadbolts are like this.
The purpose of a deadbolt is to make the door harder to kick in. That's why it's a long thick bolt, as opposed to the little catch that the doorknob controls.
What you're asking for is not an audit, it's more like a criminal investigation or maybe a snipe hunt.
The company I work for has its financial statements audited by an outside firm every year. At no point does that firm ask for or review 5 years worth of communications so they can see why we made the decisions we did. Strategic decision-making is management, not financials. The purpose of an audit is to make sure the numbers add up, not to second-guess management.
You can look at the audited financial reporting of any public company and you won't get access to information like that. Why does Apple prohibit Flash on its phones? Why did Microsoft make a bid for Yahoo? Why did Google buy YouTube? The answers are not in the audited financial statements.
People say "audit the Fed" but the Fed is already audited. What they really mean is "control the Fed" or "scapegoat the Fed" IMO.
Anyone who trades stocks is a trader--brokers are traders (since they execute trades) and so are speculators. What we're really talking about are speculators--people who buy and sell stocks, but who don't care about the underlying asset, only its price movements.
Let's say I want to sell my Apple stock today. You might want to buy Apple stock next month.
I can sell it to a speculator today. You can buy it from a speculator next month. Without speculators, neither of us could have completed the transaction in the timeframe we wanted; I would have had to wait for you to be ready to buy.
Speculators make a market liquid. They are what enable people like your broker to complete transactions whenever you ask him to--he's always able to find a buyer or seller due to speculators.
Think of a stop-loss order. Let's say you hold Apple but have a stop-loss at $200 so you don't lose the money you've made over the past year. If Apple starts dropping precipitously (if Steve Jobs dies, say), your broker is going to have to execute that stop-loss. If the only players in the market are people interested in the underlying business, who would buy your Apple shares? They're probably all trying to sell for the same reason you are.
A stop-loss only works if a buyer can be found. In this case you might be glad for short-selling speculators. They would buy your Apple shares in a heartbeat. You minimize your paper loss, and they get a chance to make money on a short sale. Everyone gets what they want.