In economics, it is generally accepted that the free market only establishes the right price of a good if there are no externalities. Hence, if producing a good is cheap but has large negative external effects (eg pollution, human harm), the market will price it lower than would be optimal for the society at large, because they are paying the price of the externality (eg by cleanup costs, reduced hapiness/lifespan).
The main ways to 'internalize' these externalities so the free market can do its job are (1) explicitly internalizing the externality, eg making employers responsible for workplace accidents, making mining companies etc pay cleanup costs), or (2) taxing the factor causing the externality so the price is about right. The latter option has the drawback of somehow determining the right value of the externality. A Cap-and-trade system does this by creating artificial scarcity, but the amount to cap is difficult to establish and ultimately a political decision.
What I am trying to say is that cap-and-trade is not some sort of socialist contraption. Rather, it is one of the most natural ways of dealing with a negative externality in a free market system.
Ignoring the externality is a fuck-the-others (in this case, fuck-the-children) mentality that has nothing to do with the ideal free market or (broad and/or long-term) prosperity
I lived in guilders all my life, and the first couple years in Eurotime I could only "imagine" a price by converting back to guilders and thinking whether the price sounded right. Now, I can only "imagine" a guilders price by converting it to euros
I've lived in the UK and US for 1.5 and.5 years, respectively, and I started thinking natively in most units pretty quickly, esp. inches and miles, and of course pints in the UK. Some units are more difficult, either because they have an offset as well as a scale difference (fahrenheit) or because they just don't make any sense (a 22 fluid ounces drink?? gimme a pint, damnit!)
I think the UK is busy converting mostly to metric system, so maybe some UKians can chime in with their experience?
Interestingly enough, raw speed can buy you some of the same advantages. Go fast enough and high enough, and the defenses just won't have enough time to react, even if you're lit up like a billboard.
1) you can pay 2) you are willing to pay 3) nobody is offering a better price
In an ideal capitalist world, (a) there would be more companies producing the same good, and (b) anybody would be free to go to Vienna, buy the furniture, put it on a truck, drive to Bratislava, and undersell the local supplier and still make a decent profit.
In your case, your government presumably stopped people driving to/from Vienna and redistributing the goods. Nowadays, IP rights are stopping someone from doing this by granting exclusive distributing rights and trademark protection. Government granted monopolies disrupt the free market, and there is no point in pretending this isn't true and this isn't what is causing the price difference.
For a no-brand shirt, the price in Europe has gone down immensely due to free trade. I'm fairly confident that the price difference between EU and india on shirts can be explained by transportation cost and especially the high cost of retailing (expensive shop rent, high wages, high sales+income taxes). For brand name shirts, (if I'm not mistaken) trademark rights can limit the sale of the shirt by other companies, again granting the monopoly that allows the company to circumvent the free market (although there's a market for "cool brand name shirts" on which there is competition between the various brands even if within a brand there is no competition, just as there is competition between different movies/cd's even if there is no competition for a given title).
The obligatory car analogy to your haggling example: if you go the Egypt and need a taxi, if there are multiple taxies waiting for customers you can get a good price by threatening to go to another taxi, so you will arrive at a 'fair price' that allows the taxi to make a decent living without getting ridiculous margins. If on the other hand you need to get somewhere in a hurry and there is only one taxi, you will end up paying the price he charges, if you are able and willing.
Moral of the story: don't get caught in a situation where there is only one taxi and you really need to get somewhere. It is left as an exercise for the reader to translate the moral back to free trade and IP:-)
The problem is that "free trade" should mean that the price in market A cannot be more than the price in market B plus costs for transportation to and sale in market A. Any person or company should be free to fly to india, buy 5000 copies of the latest DVD, fly back, and sell those DVD's for any price he or she likes. That *is* free trade.
Companies, especially if they sell a non-commodity (ie there is no competitor with the exact same product; compare bricks to dvds), love segmenting markets so they can maximize their profit. Offering student discounts is a prime example of this: students have less expandable income, so the optimal price for them (ie the intersection of supply and demand curves) is lower than for non-students [ignoring the 'hook 'em while they're young' argument]. Market segmentation is always good for the company selling goods, and can be bad for the consumer on the wrong end of the segmentation.
Free trade *should* limit the ability of companies to segment markets based on geography just as anti-discrimination practices *should* limit their ability to segment based on race, gender, religion etc, which are also good proxies of income (eg http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/005647.html; blacks earn (median) 30k, hispanics 34k, whites 49k and asians 58k). Just imagine having separate prices for black people and white people!
By granting companies the sole right to distribute something and enforce that right using the courts, international treaties, customs, and DRM, we are allowing them to operate as if free trade does not apply to them.
Resistance during war-time occupation is a different ball game from civil disobedience (although see Gandhi). The purpose of resistance (including hiding jews and other persons) is not to force the Nazi regime to change, it is to kick them out and limit their effectiveness.
[although, *IF* a lot of people (esp. Germans) would have stood up and openly challenged the Nazi regime, for example by refusing to serve in the army and by refusing to co-operate in the Jew laws, things might have ended differently...]
You hear this argument on slashdot a lot: Post A) I disagree with copyright and therefore I download; not out of personal profit but as an act of protest Post B) You should not break the law: obey it and meanwhile try to change it through political process
A essentially calls for civil disobedience, which is a relatively ethical way to change laws and society when poltical process is exhausted or futile. A burglar stealing my TV, however, is not a political protester trying to change property law, he is just a criminal stealing my shit. The essential difference between a crime and an act of civil disobedience is not breaking the law, however, but the manner in which this is done.
The Dutch sociologist Kees Schuyt formulated a number of rules for something to classify as ethical disobedience (rather than eg anarchist revolt or petty crime). Gandhi formulated a similar set of rules for his non-violent protest.
Let's have a look at Schuyt's rules:
1) The act is illegal; 2) The act is conscionable; it appeals to your conscience and that of your fellow citizens; 3) There is a link between the criticized law and the chosen illegal act; 4) The act is thought out and not impulsive; 5) The act occurs in public; 6) You co-operate with arrest and prosecution; 7) You accept that you might be punished; 8) You used legal means of protest before; 9) You are non-violent and remain non-violent; 10) The rights of your fellow citizens are respected as well as possible;
Especially important is 5-7, and possibly 7 and 10. The idea behind these rules is that civil disobedience means breaking a law in order to show other people that the law is bad, and accepting possible consequences. You sacrifice yourself for the higher cause.
Downloading songs from behind tor or other means of hiding yourself disqualifies your action from civil disobedience. If you want to make a political statement, buy a CD which you strongly believe should be out of copyright, upload it to your personal homepage, and write an open letter to the RIAA stating what you did and why. Get all the people who agree with you to do the same. If RIAA sues you, don't settle and escalate to the highest court you can afford. If enough people do this, your fellow citizens will react, and so will politicians.
If you are not prepared to do that: by all means download everyhing you want (information wants to be free, right?!), but please don't act all ethical. If you stand behind your actions, do them in public. If you just want to get free music, raid the pirate bay while they're there but don't brag about it.
I'm not completely free to ignore it if as soon as I engage in the behaviour that the GPL covers I have to abide by it.
You're free to ignore the GPL as long as you don't do anything restricted by copyright law, ie distribution, creating a derived work etc.
You can *use* the copy you bought in any way you like, as you have not entered in a contract with the developers. However, to *copy* something you need permission because of copyright law (not because of the GPL per se), and the easiest way to get this permission is to enter in the GPL contract, which gives you this permission in return for certain considerations.
There's an offer, which you are free to accept or refuse, and there are fair considerations for both sides, so this is clean contract law matter.
If copyright is abolished, you have no need whatsoever to enter into the contract, so it is copyright law, not the GPL, that is forcing you to do stuff.
Second that; and the north-east has a number of cities spaced 100-200 miles apart, too much for driving comfortably (esp given traffic) and too little for flying sensibly (esp. given security measures and hassle). This is a perfect market for high speed trains. Oklahoma city to Houston or LAX-NYC will not be replaced anytime soon.
DC does not need to support commuter rail (or "beltway" and other city-infrastructure interstates, for that matter!), this should be left to the states or cities they are in. DC should be involved in interstate infrastructure, including rail where it makes sense.
Actually, I have a related question: I am developing server code that runs analyses and reports these as a website. How can I license my code to prevent another party from taking my code, running it on their webserver with modifications without releasing the modifications? since they don't distribute, they aren't required to release the source. Is there a 'server GPL' that has some sort of clause that requires all *users* of the program (ie clients connecting to the server) from getting access to the source code, without extra conditions (ie no contractually binding click-through agreement that they won't actually use their right to get and modify the source)?
A good general can fight a hundred battles and win them all
A great general can win a war without fighting a single battle
(or something like that, with apologies to the Master:-))
Guerillas all over the world are winning from large armies by retreating and refusing to fight a large battle. If you don't use google and badmouth google to your less tech-savvy friends, they will feel the pain.
However, the canals were still being dug in the 17th century. By the start of the 17th C, the Wallen and the Singel were dug, the Singel was the city wall.
In the 17th C, as the city greatly expanded in the Golden Age, more room was needed and the typical semicircular canals (Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Prinsengracht) and the Jordaan (Bloemgracht, Elandsgracht etc.) were dug between the sea (IJ) and the river (Amstel) on the New (Western) side.
Later, this expansion was finished on the Old (eastern) side, with the New Herengracht, New Keizersgracht etc. After that, population increase stagnated and the new area wasn't in great demand, so it was used as a garden (hence the "Plantation" streetnames) and later the Artis zoo and Hortus Botanicus were built there.
And to do something in return I'll give you my attempt at translating the interesting parts of the article (which is quite interesting). Note that the net effect on the content industry is still negative, and the net gain for Dutch prosperity is positive, this might be because quite a bit of the losses are outside the country. It can also be seen as a proof of the failure of the normal free market model to give an optimal allocation of resources in the case of near-zero marginal costs.
----
File sharing has positive net effect on economy
The economyic effects of file sharing on Dutch prosperity on long and short term are positive. Consumers obtain access to a wide range of cultural products due to file sharing. On the other hand it is likely that there is a decrease of turnover in the sales.
This was shown by a joint study of TNO, SEO Economic Research, and the Institute for Information Rights (IViR) into the economic and social consequences of file sharing for music, films, and games ordered by the Ministries of Education & Culture, Economic Affairs, and Justice. This analysis is conducted based on a study of statistics and recent scientific literatur, interviews with frequent downloaders, a representative survey of the Dutch population and a number of informative workshops with the [media] sector.
Estimates of the volume of global unauthorised downloading are widely divergent. The global count is at least several billion files per year, a substantial part of the international Internet traffic. Around 4.7 million Dutch Internet users of 15 years and older have downloaded something without authorisation in the past year. Citizens view downloading and sharing of music, films, and games as socially accepted, but know little of the technique and regulation involved.
[...] Net prosperity gain
For the music industry the downloaded recordings cannot be translated 1-on-1 into lost sales. Many downloading consumers would not have bought the same amount of music [that they downloaded] against current prices if downloaded would not be possible. Additionally, there are people who download music in order to get to know it and buy it if they like it.
Although there are also positive effects of downloading music on sales, a negative effect on the turnover of the involved sectors is likely. This is especially the case for music because downloading music has become the most normal. There is a differentiated effect based on the artist: well-known artist are most impacted negatively, while relatively unknown artists can even profit when file sharing increases their reknown. For society at large the lost turnover of the [media] sector is opposed to the gains by the large group of downloaders that would otherwise not have made a purchase. The net effect on prosperity is substantial.
Rise of new business models
The music and film industry are faced by the challenge of matching their supply with the changed consumer demand. New business models are on the rise. The music industry is moving to use new sources of revenue (concerts, merchanise, sponsoring). There is a place for music recordings, but in the future it will probably become impossible to run a company on music recordings alone. Within the movie industry the markets of cinema and DVD sales are still growing. DVD rentals are down strongly. In the longer term this might change as faster internet becomes available. Here also new business models are important. The gaming industry is growing in spurts, especially console games and their combination of hardware and software. Especially here file sharing is less prevalent than in e.g. PC games, where turnover is stagnating. A platform bound official game has so many advantages that it is not inconceivable that this branch will be able to aboid file sharing to a larger degree than the music industry.
TFA says it's running a full ubuntu install, so I'm sure you can get evolution and a pdf viewer running
Another use case would be uploading pictures etc to a shared drive via USB and SD slot
If you can create a nice looking charger/docking station, this would be great in the living room as a browser, picture station, and remote control for a mythtv installation; the price seems to be about the same as those fancy remote controls that they sell and being able to browse in the living room without interrupting the TV can be a plus. I'm sure there are very nice web interfaces to control a myth tv install, otherwise they can be made...
I live in Amsterdam; I have a car to drive to family etc. outside town, but I would never think about driving anywhere within the city except for Ikea etc. A 7/7 8-22 supermarket is 20 meters away from my front door, my work is 20 minutes by bicycle or tram, depending on weather. There are hundreds of restaurants within a 30 minute walk, and I've never been put on a waiting list. Sure, sometimes one is full, but never all of them.
If I get home, it is quiet and it is our space. Noise from outside is minimal thanks to modern isolation, certainly not more than in the countryside (cows, roosters etc make a lot more noise, and cars going 100 km/h make a lot more noise than cars going 30.
Good shows and concerts have to be booked in advance, but guess what: the countryside doesn't have any shows or concerts.
I love the city, it's just a shame that the US made so many dubious design choices in a lot of theirs, although parking is usually a lot easier:-)
It's not about the medium, it's about the business model.
Online ad revenue might just cut it for a few very large media, such as the ny times. However, chances are the NY Times are not going to investigate a scandal in your local politics, whether you live in Phoenix, AZ, or somewhere out of the USA.
Local reporting seems to be degrading to reprinting AP/Reuters, with if you are lucky one more or less investigative news medium, be it local TV or a newspaper. That is not enough, you need multiple sources of information to counteract bias and corruption.
Any polity of say over a couple million people deserves quality news. If the internet / online ad revenues can only deliver it for polities of 300M then something is going to go wrong. TV
The editor in chief of one of the large Dutch newspapers (de Volkskrant) told me recently that this is actually shifting: as the demographics are changing (ie newspaper readers are becoming older) they are less interesting for advertisers and more able/willing to pay subscription fees. The ratio is now >50% subscription fees.
This is a quality newspaper, I can imagine that more popular/tabloid newspapers are more dependent on advertising, and the new free dailies obviously are, but I was surprised by the fact that it isn't the case for paid-for quality newspapers in the Netherlands.
Notwithstanding, the problem of free news sources freeriding on the work of the paid-for sources will have to be solved one way or another, as I have little doubt that print newspapers will only decline the coming decades and (exceptions excepted) blogs will not become professional investigative journalists overnight.
Since our democracy depends on independent, critical, and well-researched news, this is an important question for the coming time.
I am sorry, I would if I could; but unfortunately I AM Employed.
That was my problem too. I loved elite and UIM back in the days, and it sounds like a great setting for a MMO. However, I would likely play onely a couple evenings per month, and it seems that light play is incompatible with both the game mechanics and the subscription scheme (ie you pay per time period, not per hour or something of use)
Uhm... Wasn't the reason people hate linux that they have to google around for fixes for things that should work out of the box, and wasn't the great part of Windows that every end user can just use the computer without having to tweak it...?
I know quite a lot of scientists who use Finite State Automata for tasks and use custom libraries for that. If Perl 6 can provide an easier and efficient way of doing that it might even have a future:-)
"No German can be extradited to another country. The law can create a different arrangement for extraditions to the EU or an international court, as long as fair trial [rule of law] is guaranteed."
[not a german native speaker, apologies for any mistakes]
Slashdot Mirror
In economics, it is generally accepted that the free market only establishes the right price of a good if there are no externalities. Hence, if producing a good is cheap but has large negative external effects (eg pollution, human harm), the market will price it lower than would be optimal for the society at large, because they are paying the price of the externality (eg by cleanup costs, reduced hapiness/lifespan).
The main ways to 'internalize' these externalities so the free market can do its job are (1) explicitly internalizing the externality, eg making employers responsible for workplace accidents, making mining companies etc pay cleanup costs), or (2) taxing the factor causing the externality so the price is about right. The latter option has the drawback of somehow determining the right value of the externality. A Cap-and-trade system does this by creating artificial scarcity, but the amount to cap is difficult to establish and ultimately a political decision.
What I am trying to say is that cap-and-trade is not some sort of socialist contraption. Rather, it is one of the most natural ways of dealing with a negative externality in a free market system.
Ignoring the externality is a fuck-the-others (in this case, fuck-the-children) mentality that has nothing to do with the ideal free market or (broad and/or long-term) prosperity
I don't buy it
I lived in guilders all my life, and the first couple years in Eurotime I could only "imagine" a price by converting back to guilders and thinking whether the price sounded right. Now, I can only "imagine" a guilders price by converting it to euros
I've lived in the UK and US for 1.5 and .5 years, respectively, and I started thinking natively in most units pretty quickly, esp. inches and miles, and of course pints in the UK. Some units are more difficult, either because they have an offset as well as a scale difference (fahrenheit) or because they just don't make any sense (a 22 fluid ounces drink?? gimme a pint, damnit!)
I think the UK is busy converting mostly to metric system, so maybe some UKians can chime in with their experience?
Interestingly enough, raw speed can buy you some of the same advantages. Go fast enough and high enough, and the defenses just won't have enough time to react, even if you're lit up like a billboard.
Modern ICBM's work by the same principle :-)
You are forgetting one condition:
1) you can pay
2) you are willing to pay
3) nobody is offering a better price
In an ideal capitalist world, (a) there would be more companies producing the same good, and (b) anybody would be free to go to Vienna, buy the furniture, put it on a truck, drive to Bratislava, and undersell the local supplier and still make a decent profit.
In your case, your government presumably stopped people driving to/from Vienna and redistributing the goods. Nowadays, IP rights are stopping someone from doing this by granting exclusive distributing rights and trademark protection. Government granted monopolies disrupt the free market, and there is no point in pretending this isn't true and this isn't what is causing the price difference.
For a no-brand shirt, the price in Europe has gone down immensely due to free trade. I'm fairly confident that the price difference between EU and india on shirts can be explained by transportation cost and especially the high cost of retailing (expensive shop rent, high wages, high sales+income taxes). For brand name shirts, (if I'm not mistaken) trademark rights can limit the sale of the shirt by other companies, again granting the monopoly that allows the company to circumvent the free market (although there's a market for "cool brand name shirts" on which there is competition between the various brands even if within a brand there is no competition, just as there is competition between different movies/cd's even if there is no competition for a given title).
The obligatory car analogy to your haggling example: if you go the Egypt and need a taxi, if there are multiple taxies waiting for customers you can get a good price by threatening to go to another taxi, so you will arrive at a 'fair price' that allows the taxi to make a decent living without getting ridiculous margins. If on the other hand you need to get somewhere in a hurry and there is only one taxi, you will end up paying the price he charges, if you are able and willing.
Moral of the story: don't get caught in a situation where there is only one taxi and you really need to get somewhere. It is left as an exercise for the reader to translate the moral back to free trade and IP :-)
The problem is that "free trade" should mean that the price in market A cannot be more than the price in market B plus costs for transportation to and sale in market A. Any person or company should be free to fly to india, buy 5000 copies of the latest DVD, fly back, and sell those DVD's for any price he or she likes. That *is* free trade.
Companies, especially if they sell a non-commodity (ie there is no competitor with the exact same product; compare bricks to dvds), love segmenting markets so they can maximize their profit. Offering student discounts is a prime example of this: students have less expandable income, so the optimal price for them (ie the intersection of supply and demand curves) is lower than for non-students [ignoring the 'hook 'em while they're young' argument]. Market segmentation is always good for the company selling goods, and can be bad for the consumer on the wrong end of the segmentation.
Free trade *should* limit the ability of companies to segment markets based on geography just as anti-discrimination practices *should* limit their ability to segment based on race, gender, religion etc, which are also good proxies of income (eg http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/005647.html; blacks earn (median) 30k, hispanics 34k, whites 49k and asians 58k). Just imagine having separate prices for black people and white people!
By granting companies the sole right to distribute something and enforce that right using the courts, international treaties, customs, and DRM, we are allowing them to operate as if free trade does not apply to them.
but whenever you get a few members in the EU parliament that listen to the people, well, a revolution is sure to happen.
Hehe :-)
EP =/= congress, quite far from it. I would aim at the Assemblee Nationale and the Bundestag, and maybe the British Parliament, but the EP...
Good job for Godwinning the discussion! :-)
Resistance during war-time occupation is a different ball game from civil disobedience (although see Gandhi). The purpose of resistance (including hiding jews and other persons) is not to force the Nazi regime to change, it is to kick them out and limit their effectiveness.
[although, *IF* a lot of people (esp. Germans) would have stood up and openly challenged the Nazi regime, for example by refusing to serve in the army and by refusing to co-operate in the Jew laws, things might have ended differently...]
You hear this argument on slashdot a lot:
Post A) I disagree with copyright and therefore I download; not out of personal profit but as an act of protest
Post B) You should not break the law: obey it and meanwhile try to change it through political process
A essentially calls for civil disobedience, which is a relatively ethical way to change laws and society when poltical process is exhausted or futile. A burglar stealing my TV, however, is not a political protester trying to change property law, he is just a criminal stealing my shit. The essential difference between a crime and an act of civil disobedience is not breaking the law, however, but the manner in which this is done.
The Dutch sociologist Kees Schuyt formulated a number of rules for something to classify as ethical disobedience (rather than eg anarchist revolt or petty crime). Gandhi formulated a similar set of rules for his non-violent protest.
Let's have a look at Schuyt's rules:
1) The act is illegal;
2) The act is conscionable; it appeals to your conscience and that of your fellow citizens;
3) There is a link between the criticized law and the chosen illegal act;
4) The act is thought out and not impulsive;
5) The act occurs in public;
6) You co-operate with arrest and prosecution;
7) You accept that you might be punished;
8) You used legal means of protest before;
9) You are non-violent and remain non-violent;
10) The rights of your fellow citizens are respected as well as possible;
Especially important is 5-7, and possibly 7 and 10. The idea behind these rules is that civil disobedience means breaking a law in order to show other people that the law is bad, and accepting possible consequences. You sacrifice yourself for the higher cause.
Downloading songs from behind tor or other means of hiding yourself disqualifies your action from civil disobedience. If you want to make a political statement, buy a CD which you strongly believe should be out of copyright, upload it to your personal homepage, and write an open letter to the RIAA stating what you did and why. Get all the people who agree with you to do the same. If RIAA sues you, don't settle and escalate to the highest court you can afford. If enough people do this, your fellow citizens will react, and so will politicians.
If you are not prepared to do that: by all means download everyhing you want (information wants to be free, right?!), but please don't act all ethical. If you stand behind your actions, do them in public. If you just want to get free music, raid the pirate bay while they're there but don't brag about it.
I'm not completely free to ignore it if as soon as I engage in the behaviour that the GPL covers I have to abide by it.
You're free to ignore the GPL as long as you don't do anything restricted by copyright law, ie distribution, creating a derived work etc.
You can *use* the copy you bought in any way you like, as you have not entered in a contract with the developers. However, to *copy* something you need permission because of copyright law (not because of the GPL per se), and the easiest way to get this permission is to enter in the GPL contract, which gives you this permission in return for certain considerations.
There's an offer, which you are free to accept or refuse, and there are fair considerations for both sides, so this is clean contract law matter.
If copyright is abolished, you have no need whatsoever to enter into the contract, so it is copyright law, not the GPL, that is forcing you to do stuff.
Second that; and the north-east has a number of cities spaced 100-200 miles apart, too much for driving comfortably (esp given traffic) and too little for flying sensibly (esp. given security measures and hassle). This is a perfect market for high speed trains. Oklahoma city to Houston or LAX-NYC will not be replaced anytime soon.
DC does not need to support commuter rail (or "beltway" and other city-infrastructure interstates, for that matter!), this should be left to the states or cities they are in. DC should be involved in interstate infrastructure, including rail where it makes sense.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Unfortunately, free speech has a price, and we as a society are rediscovering time and again what that price is...
[posting to correct misclick on moderation]
Yeah those moments are what you do it for... that and tenure :-)
Actually, I have a related question: I am developing server code that runs analyses and reports these as a website. How can I license my code to prevent another party from taking my code, running it on their webserver with modifications without releasing the modifications? since they don't distribute, they aren't required to release the source. Is there a 'server GPL' that has some sort of clause that requires all *users* of the program (ie clients connecting to the server) from getting access to the source code, without extra conditions (ie no contractually binding click-through agreement that they won't actually use their right to get and modify the source)?
Thanks!
Sun Tzu says:
A good general can fight a hundred battles and win them all
A great general can win a war without fighting a single battle
(or something like that, with apologies to the Master :-))
Guerillas all over the world are winning from large armies by retreating and refusing to fight a large battle. If you don't use google and badmouth google to your less tech-savvy friends, they will feel the pain.
laptop + public transport
ie doing something about your email backlog while on the plane or in a train (for the Americans :-))
I agree with the fact that slaves were not used
However, the canals were still being dug in the 17th century. By the start of the 17th C, the Wallen and the Singel were dug, the Singel was the city wall.
In the 17th C, as the city greatly expanded in the Golden Age, more room was needed and the typical semicircular canals (Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Prinsengracht) and the Jordaan (Bloemgracht, Elandsgracht etc.) were dug between the sea (IJ) and the river (Amstel) on the New (Western) side.
Later, this expansion was finished on the Old (eastern) side, with the New Herengracht, New Keizersgracht etc. After that, population increase stagnated and the new area wasn't in great demand, so it was used as a garden (hence the "Plantation" streetnames) and later the Artis zoo and Hortus Botanicus were built there.
Have a look at the dated map paintings on http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschiedenis_van_Amsterdam
And to do something in return I'll give you my attempt at translating the interesting parts of the article (which is quite interesting). Note that the net effect on the content industry is still negative, and the net gain for Dutch prosperity is positive, this might be because quite a bit of the losses are outside the country. It can also be seen as a proof of the failure of the normal free market model to give an optimal allocation of resources in the case of near-zero marginal costs.
----
File sharing has positive net effect on economy
The economyic effects of file sharing on Dutch prosperity on long and short term are positive. Consumers obtain access to a wide range of cultural products due to file sharing. On the other hand it is likely that there is a decrease of turnover in the sales.
This was shown by a joint study of TNO, SEO Economic Research, and the Institute for Information Rights (IViR) into the economic and social consequences of file sharing for music, films, and games ordered by the Ministries of Education & Culture, Economic Affairs, and Justice. This analysis is conducted based on a study of statistics and recent scientific literatur, interviews with frequent downloaders, a representative survey of the Dutch population and a number of informative workshops with the [media] sector.
Estimates of the volume of global unauthorised downloading are widely divergent. The global count is at least several billion files per year, a substantial part of the international Internet traffic. Around 4.7 million Dutch Internet users of 15 years and older have downloaded something without authorisation in the past year. Citizens view downloading and sharing of music, films, and games as socially accepted, but know little of the technique and regulation involved.
[...]
Net prosperity gain
For the music industry the downloaded recordings cannot be translated 1-on-1 into lost sales. Many downloading consumers would not have bought the same amount of music [that they downloaded] against current prices if downloaded would not be possible. Additionally, there are people who download music in order to get to know it and buy it if they like it.
Although there are also positive effects of downloading music on sales, a negative effect on the turnover of the involved sectors is likely. This is especially the case for music because downloading music has become the most normal. There is a differentiated effect based on the artist: well-known artist are most impacted negatively, while relatively unknown artists can even profit when file sharing increases their reknown. For society at large the lost turnover of the [media] sector is opposed to the gains by the large group of downloaders that would otherwise not have made a purchase. The net effect on prosperity is substantial.
Rise of new business models
The music and film industry are faced by the challenge of matching their supply with the changed consumer demand. New business models are on the rise. The music industry is moving to use new sources of revenue (concerts, merchanise, sponsoring). There is a place for music recordings, but in the future it will probably become impossible to run a company on music recordings alone. Within the movie industry the markets of cinema and DVD sales are still growing. DVD rentals are down strongly. In the longer term this might change as faster internet becomes available. Here also new business models are important. The gaming industry is growing in spurts, especially console games and their combination of hardware and software. Especially here file sharing is less prevalent than in e.g. PC games, where turnover is stagnating. A platform bound official game has so many advantages that it is not inconceivable that this branch will be able to aboid file sharing to a larger degree than the music industry.
TFA says it's running a full ubuntu install, so I'm sure you can get evolution and a pdf viewer running
Another use case would be uploading pictures etc to a shared drive via USB and SD slot
If you can create a nice looking charger/docking station, this would be great in the living room as a browser, picture station, and remote control for a mythtv installation; the price seems to be about the same as those fancy remote controls that they sell and being able to browse in the living room without interrupting the TV can be a plus. I'm sure there are very nice web interfaces to control a myth tv install, otherwise they can be made...
Second that, at least for the old world
I live in Amsterdam; I have a car to drive to family etc. outside town, but I would never think about driving anywhere within the city except for Ikea etc. A 7/7 8-22 supermarket is 20 meters away from my front door, my work is 20 minutes by bicycle or tram, depending on weather. There are hundreds of restaurants within a 30 minute walk, and I've never been put on a waiting list. Sure, sometimes one is full, but never all of them.
If I get home, it is quiet and it is our space. Noise from outside is minimal thanks to modern isolation, certainly not more than in the countryside (cows, roosters etc make a lot more noise, and cars going 100 km/h make a lot more noise than cars going 30.
Good shows and concerts have to be booked in advance, but guess what: the countryside doesn't have any shows or concerts.
I love the city, it's just a shame that the US made so many dubious design choices in a lot of theirs, although parking is usually a lot easier :-)
It's not about the medium, it's about the business model.
Online ad revenue might just cut it for a few very large media, such as the ny times. However, chances are the NY Times are not going to investigate a scandal in your local politics, whether you live in Phoenix, AZ, or somewhere out of the USA.
Local reporting seems to be degrading to reprinting AP/Reuters, with if you are lucky one more or less investigative news medium, be it local TV or a newspaper. That is not enough, you need multiple sources of information to counteract bias and corruption.
Any polity of say over a couple million people deserves quality news. If the internet / online ad revenues can only deliver it for polities of 300M then something is going to go wrong.
TV
The editor in chief of one of the large Dutch newspapers (de Volkskrant) told me recently that this is actually shifting: as the demographics are changing (ie newspaper readers are becoming older) they are less interesting for advertisers and more able/willing to pay subscription fees. The ratio is now >50% subscription fees.
This is a quality newspaper, I can imagine that more popular/tabloid newspapers are more dependent on advertising, and the new free dailies obviously are, but I was surprised by the fact that it isn't the case for paid-for quality newspapers in the Netherlands.
Notwithstanding, the problem of free news sources freeriding on the work of the paid-for sources will have to be solved one way or another, as I have little doubt that print newspapers will only decline the coming decades and (exceptions excepted) blogs will not become professional investigative journalists overnight.
Since our democracy depends on independent, critical, and well-researched news, this is an important question for the coming time.
I am sorry, I would if I could; but unfortunately I AM Employed.
That was my problem too. I loved elite and UIM back in the days, and it sounds like a great setting for a MMO. However, I would likely play onely a couple evenings per month, and it seems that light play is incompatible with both the game mechanics and the subscription scheme (ie you pay per time period, not per hour or something of use)
Uhm... Wasn't the reason people hate linux that they have to google around for fixes for things that should work out of the box, and wasn't the great part of Windows that every end user can just use the computer without having to tweak it...?
Hmm that's interesting.
I know quite a lot of scientists who use Finite State Automata for tasks and use custom libraries for that. If Perl 6 can provide an easier and efficient way of doing that it might even have a future :-)
"No German can be extradited to another country. The law can create a different arrangement for extraditions to the EU or an international court, as long as fair trial [rule of law] is guaranteed."
[not a german native speaker, apologies for any mistakes]