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Very small company I worked for designed a unique safety valve for divers. NATO military was very interested. Norwegian military bought four (4) valves and shipped them to the US. They never ordered any more, but are using plenty somehow... |
I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Red Hat makes its money through 'subscriptions' (licenses which include support, upgrades, etc.), training, and services ([source]( and its customer base is made up almost entirely of corporations.
Their products aren't free; it would be illegal for any corporation to use them without following Red Hat's allowable use structure. Corporations usually do not take this risk given the relatively open nature of corporate information, which more easily leads to them being caught and prosecuted. A vendor is also much more likely to go after a corporation or other group entity for violating copyright because there's a higher ROI due to the greater scope of the infringement in question. |
Making a mix tape for friends has never been deemed fair use. [17 USC 106]( and [Fair Use: 17 USC 107]( have existed in copyright law in the US since 1976, and was part of common law before. Our first federal copyright laws date all the way back to 1790 and are borrowed from earlier copyright laws from england from years before that. None of them describe what you claim as fair use. |
They could (and do) trademark the most recognizable aspects of their works.
Rival animators couldn't start including Mickey Mouse (outside of satire/teaching). Rival game developers couldn't make their hero Mario. Rival software developers couldn't use the Apple or Microsoft logo.
Seven years or seventy years, they're both arbitrary. I'm not going to pretend that an incredibly short copyright term wouldn't hurt your darling media companies. I just don't think it would hurt them as much as you do.
However it's also going to affect media production companies you don't like in a very positive way. When every major record label can't bankroll themselves by selling (literally) the same most popular tracks year after year, they're going to have to bring on more new artists and develop that talent. The money they make would then be tied to the music they make, not the advertising they do.
A seven year copyright would take care of the abandonware problem. That's a problem that copyright holders eternally pretend is an entirely new problem when it's existed for decades. The only recourse left to the commons is to break the law to reclaim abandonware. That's not reasonable nor even in the spirit of the concept of copyright.
The legality of converting my old favorite content to modern formats (DVD to MP4, Console Game to Emulator) would no longer land somewhere between spuriously legal to almost definitely illegal.
Further, an expired copyright wouldn't mean that these companies would be losing all the money they'd otherwise make after their copyright had run out. There's a major convenience factor in modern media distribution that consumers would continue to pay for long after copyright has run out. Content streaming services make money more on social enhancements and convenience than they do with the basic DRM they include.
Finally, if we're talking about a serious political effort to modify copyright terms, I'm going to push this one the most because of what it forces these content owners to acknowledge and address:
Abandonware
Being resold licenses to experience the same title on new media
Robbing the commons
Stagnating originality / Reliance on established (even dead) talent
Underpaying talent / Overpaying marketing
I'd never expect us to actually reach a 7 year copyright term, but I think we should keep taking decades away from copyright length until the media industries have sufficiently addressed these grievances. If they never did address them, then eventually we'd reach a term short enough that they take care of themselves.
Edit: |
Dude, idk all the details of how exactly everyone would make money, but if the government passes something like this, the industry will adapt to the changes.
Dude, you know what? Let's illegalize walking . I mean, I don't know how people will adapt to that, but I'm sure they will adapt and everything will be rainbows and sunshine!
>Scribes lost their jobs because they weren't needed anymore.
Right, because the machines did their entire jobs . Do we have machines creating digital content right now? They assist, but in no industry have they taken over; humans ultimately do the work to design, implement, build or record, and produce the content.
>One thing they could do to fund TV shows is they could set up some way for people to donate money if they want to help fund it. Or they could sell merchandise.
Do you really think people would donate or purchase merchandise totaling a sum of $13m? Even if they did, no content creator would ever take a risk like Game of Thrones - they need the advertising money to give them a guaranteed bottom line, and then they hope that success will provide them further advertising revenue and that they can increase that revenue through merchandise. Ultimately, it is advertising that lets them create a show like that; without advertising (as would be the result of your idea), the show would never make its investment back. |
You're not alone in believing this. It's a fairly reasonable assumption to make, too, if you know a little about antibiotic resistance. But most people don't think about it long enough to realize the critical difference.
An antibiotic (or antiviral) drug is like a germ-poison. If you give a person the drug, the drug kills the germs. This gives the germs the exposure they would need to develop a resistance to the drug. The more times we use the drug, the more chances a resistant strain shows up. So the best thing to do is to use them only when absolutely necessary, and let healthy people's immune systems fight off the germs the rest of the time.
At first glance, it seems like a vaccine would be similar-- won't giving it to a bunch of people give the virus more chances to adapt? But a vaccine is a fundamentally different thing than a drug. Consider the following two cases:
Person gets vaccine, then is exposed to flu.
Unvaccinated person is exposed to flu.
What happens in these two cases? In both cases, your immune system generates antibodies for the flu strain, and fights it off. Whether you get the shot or not, the flu will be given a chance to mutate enough to avoid the antibodies. Because the same thing happens either way, there is no additional risk of resistance created by vaccinating everybody under the sun. The same antibodies will be created whether they had the shot or not.
But importantly, if you get the shot and get your antibodies early, you will kill the flu off faster when exposed, avoid being sick, and avoid the two or three weeks where you're basically a flu factory spreading it around. |
I think you're right. And one day, many, if not most of them will really, really wish they had not documented every night of drunken bad choices in their adolescence.
I remember reading some |
They were just trying to scare you so that you'd be more like them.
Nobody fucking cares about your real name. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Your real name is out there already, on mailing lists, on dozens of varied registration databases. Not that long ago, everyone's first and last name, as well as phone number and address, were published and given out to everyone else for free every year.
I do feel the same sort of repulsion to giving out my identity, but I understand it's meaningless. Celebrities post under their "real" names every day (even celebrities who have changed their names, you still know who they are).
The only difference for most of us is that when we leave comments, instead of saying things like, "fuck you op faggot", we'd say, "you don't know what you're talking about", with no real difference, because nobody cares. The main difference is that you'll put a bit more effort to not look like a complete idiot.
I mean, just think about it. How many asshole trolls do you know by a screen name that if you knew their real name would make absolutely no difference to you! |
You don't know what you're talking about.
Oh wait this isn't my real name...
FUK U FAGGIT ASS UR DUMBEST PERSIN ON TEH INTARWEBTUBEBLAAGS.
There we go.
Do you understand that there is a reason that identity theft is at an all-time high? People have too much information about themselves readily available. Period. Since I figured out the password to your e-mail was hunter2, I was able to get into your utilities' accounts and then I reset your passwords to dropbox with all your nice personal documents and facebook friends. So now when you get a call from Chase about that credit card that was opened under your name and instantly maxxed out from iTunes purchases, just tell 'em to shove it. They love that. Seriously. Do it.
Also, I can think of a few people online in the past that if I had known their real names, I'd have found out where they lived and burned their houses down. I might have kicked their dog too. |
What is NotScripts?
I use NoScript , which is recommended by the [EFF's 2009 piece on tracking]( together with the following 5 steps:
>- Pick a good cookie policy for your browser, like "only keep cookies until I close my browser", or manual approval of all cookies.
>- Disable Flash Cookies and all the other kinds of "super cookies". You can test for these here.
>- Use the Firefox extensions RequestPolicy and NoScript
>- Use the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out plugin.
>- As always, it doesn't hurt to use Tor via TorButton to hide your IP address and other browser characteristics when you want maximal browser privacy.
There's a [2012 EFF privacy piece]( that recommends AdBlock Plus, choosing privacy friendly cookie settings, turning off referrers, and installing HTTPS Everywhere:
>In less than 10 minutes, you can drastically improve your privacy online and protect yourself against unwanted and invisible tracking.
In case you're worried that NoScript is only for the tech savvy, I installed NoScript for a family member who didn't even know how to install an add-on, and she loves it. The interface is very simple, and allows you to override everything with one click if NoScript is causing problems with a page. It could be that its user friendliness has improved considerably since 2009. (Caveat: that friendliness may partly be due to default whitelisting of sites like, umm, FB, so adjust the whitelist to suit your tastes.)
HTTPS Everywhere is similarly easy, but it does slow down browsing (at least on a slow connection). NoScript generally speeds things up. |
The point isn't exploration for personal gain, The allure is being part of something bigger than yourself.
Doing something new and amazing, taking an actual step toward the future. One day, unless we destroy ourselves first, there will be a comfortable population on the red planet.
Most sane people know that the first trips are going to be insanely dangerous, and living conditions are going to be harsh and uncomfortable, but it's not about one individuals comfort or safety.
I personally ascribe to Louis CKs philosophy that 99% of people are pointless, they could die and in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't matter. This is an opportunity commit your brief tick of time toward something of consequence. An asteroid could, at any time, and wipe life from the earth. If we were a wise species, we would want to send people to the nearest suitable planet, set up a sustainable population and a secure genetic library. |
I don't really care what your sexual orientation is and I don't care to play a guessing game to figure it out. My point is the same no matter what you are.
Women certainly do need protection. You only have to look through a history book to see how women have been sexually oppressed by men for thousands of years. Today we have become an enlightened society so our laws have changed to reflect that, but on Mars there will be no law and no police force. It will be the wild west. There will often be no consequence for certain actions.
Without the support of a civilization, there is a real possibility the Mars colonizers could revert to a mini-tribal state ruled by aggression. Whenever the strong oppresses the weak, it is women who lose the most ground. You only need to look at the current state of affairs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, and India. Women are paid less, have fewer rights, get raped in higher frequencies, have less recourse, and are often blamed for the crimes committed against them.
Don't think that sending educated people with degrees will maintain order. Some of the worst tyrants have held degrees and had excellent educations.
Sex is something that we all have a different opinion on. Some of us are sexually liberal, others are not. We aren't always interested in having sex and it's difficult to say who we'll find sexually appealing. Sex on space missions is always going to be a problem. Jealousy brings out the worst in even the best people. It will be awkward when relationships form and breakup within a small colony. What happens when your ex starts having sex with your crewmate? Are you going to get jealous? What happens when Sally has sex with all your crewmates but not you? Why did she deny you? What happens if two married couples are sent and one spouse dies? Does the surviving spouse become envious because you still have your mate? What happens when there are 4 men and 1 lesbian woman? Will the woman feel pressured to give into their sexual advances? What happens when the woman refuses?
Allowing sex on the mission is fraught with problems. Not allowing sex is also fraught with problems. There is no clear solution other than possibly eliminating the desire for sex. I think that's where the castration topic was brought up.
You also cannot presume your sexual needs will be met by your crewmates. Going into a mission expecting the women (or men) to be sexually available to you puts an unreasonable expectation on them. |
In theory all but the older generations of SSD come with NAND flash based encryption, I think most are AES-128bit and some are now using 256bit but that's pretty overkill for general users on the barebones hardware level, to break a truecrypt mount from the hardware level I can only assume would take some ridiculous time and effort, nothing you'd get from your average cracker.
I think the vast majority of people that run the encryption separately use Bitlocker or FileVault but I can only assume since I haven't seen benchmarks that there's a performance loss with OS based encryption on SSDs, just not sure how severe it is in comparison to hard drives, I used to have an oldish 40gb WD hard drive I had encrypted and that ran like absolute shit, granted it was a SCSI drive but I digress. |
I think people are more excited about the prospect of manufacturing returning to the US and being able to support it by buying an American made product. Time will tell if American phone production will live up to the standards and quality set by Asian countries that currently manufacture them. |
Never mind the conspiracy nuts who are scared of big brother (really you idiots, you think the government needs your wifi to know where you are? It's so much easier then that)
I want to see this as a method of making my home more intelligent. Sit down on the couch, my tv turns on. Lights turn on and off as I enter and leave rooms. Hell the shower could turn on when I enter the bathroom, but only the first time I do so In the day.
I know i could set it up to do that now (my tv does in fact turn on when i sit on my couch) but this is all with a single device. Exponentially more streamline and if manufactured for it affordable. |
Its the same bullshit we get from corporate america about why Pepco.. the worst Power Utilities company on the east coast... pays less in taxes than the average middle class citizen.
"We use all the rules and regulations of tax code to apply best practices" |
the "greatest country every". was almost identical to nazi germany, eugenics programs and all. literally the only thing that stopped you from becoming them was the nazi's. had they chosen muslim back then to blame instead of jews, you'd have been right in it. (note im not saying this due to current world issues, back in the 30's large jewish families did control most of the political power, much like large corporations seem to hold it today)
despite that the average american was still on the line due to
A. not really caring about it.
B. it not being anywhere close to home
and the big one,
C. it was only 20 something years prior that WWI ended, many voters had sons coming into military age and weren't keen on having them conscripted into the life that they had to suffer through.
really... if japan hadn't attacked you, you surely would have fucked it all up at somepoint, found an ethnic group to blame and blindly invaded them.... OH WAIT, you did that 60 years later anyways... |
The issue in question from the case was a company knowingly and actively changing their IP to get around a IP ban from a website. The specific case is ruling that the user was circumventing a "technological barrier" and "intentionally accessing a computer without authorization" by changing their IP.
I doubt this is going to carry much weight anywhere as it was a State District court and probably will be appealed.
Note: I am not a lawyer.
EDIT: The defendant was sent a Cease and Desist order and ignored it as well. So its not just accessing data, it was knowingly scrapping large quantities of data after being directly told not to, and circumventing the restriction via IP change and proxies. |
Essentially correct. The value of the VPN is to protect your credentials and traffic from local capture and manipulation (someone in the coffee shoppe, etc), but from tunnel egress to the server the traffic is without the VPN tunnel protection and easily monitored. There is speculation that the NSA and others monitor at these egress points in addition to the server (for popular services). |
The SSC had seen the stretch of three presidencies, from Reagan, its inceptive advocate, to Bush Sr. to the less-enthusiastic Clinton. Plus the Congress that emerged from the ‘93 election had a very large contingent of freshman, many of whom shared a hip sense of fiscal austerity. The super collider, in contrast to majestic projects like the space shuttle missions or the contemporary International Space Station, couldn’t readily offer any consequences of its science. You can see images from a space station, see a rocket propel from the Earth. You cannot see a beam of protons collide, nor the particles which that collision reveals. Schwitters recalls this period, saying that the SSC became a “really great program that was unexplainable to the politician or common person. It made it easy to jettison.” |
I that the resonance people feel with articles like these really stems from a fundamental dissatisfaction with the level of science funding the U.S. government provides. Big projects, especially big projects focusing on "pure science", are often seen as totems representing SCIENCE! by people with a great affection for the advancement of knowledge, who often feel a kneejerk need to protect them as a result.
The problem is that when costs balloon on a project like this, the funding more often than not doesn't come from some government Money bin or department like the military (which one may think is spending too much already in comparison). Instead, it comes from gobbling up funds which would otherwise be used on different science projects. Would I love if funding were increased overall so all these projects could get off the ground and be underway while a large projects ballooning costs are also funded? Yes. But when that's not politically feasible to raise overall funding don't play pretend - hard decisions need to be made, and sometimes that means continuing with the large project, but not always. One could ask why these large projects are serially underestimated in terms of cost as well, but that’s another can of worms.
A great example of a ballooning project would be the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA. Do I think it's a great project from a scientific perspective? Sure. Do I think its opponents had valid grounds to kill it? Yes. I'm not sure how many of the telescope’s champions would remain so single mindedly in support of it if they were read NASA's budget documents and saw that the agency was keeping the it alive in spite of spiraling costs (from 1 billion to 8.8 billion dollars) in a time of tightening budgets by purposely diminishing the amount that went to manned space exploration and killing robotic missions to explore the solar system (which, in my humble opinion, should be more of a focus). Continuing to fund the telescope in the face of massive cost overruns may well have been the right decision, but it was a decision that needed to be made in the knowledge that other future or existing programs would receive less funding or be killed. NASA made the decision aware of this, but I’m not sure how many of the project’s lay support knew this.
The Long and short of it is while increasing science funding is very much a good thing, keeping massive projects with ballooning costs alive WITHOUT a commensurate increase in scientific funding is often a double edged sword. |
Im mixing a few terms because I was writing fast and for a non-technical audience
Basically, in a nutshell a coupling is a generic interaction between two or more particles via some underlying field. Physicists often use the term "coupling" to describe an interaction between two particles (or systems, or whatever) via a specific mechanism. An electron that undergoes a transition to a lower energy and emits a photon that then stimulates another electron is "coupling" the two electrons via the electromagnetic interaction (with a photon as the carrier). When two electron/positrons collide they can "couple" via a number of different interactions to other particles (for example, complete annihilation creates a pair of photons, each of which splits in a virtual particle pair that interacts with each other, producing complex coupling pathways). There are many potential paths that an interaction can take, which are determined by the "amplitude" of that particular interaction (which can be calculated from the feynman diagrams).It is called "coupling" because the likelyhood of that interaction or potential outcome is determined by "coupling constants" in the [gauge field]( that describes the interaction. In laymans terms, there is an arbitrary "field" that permeates all space, and the likelihood of two particles interacting via that field or an individual interacting with the field directly is determined by the coupling constants. When two particles interact with the field you can construct a particular type of integral called a path integral, that takes into account all "steps" in the interaction, and the coupling constants at each step, which gives you the probability that this interaction will occur.
Resonance in this case means the exact energy at which a particular interaction will most likely occur. For instance, the creation of the Z boson will not happen unless the energy of the colliding particles is at a specific threshold. So when you analyze your collider data, you will see a spike of events around the region of the mass of the Z boson, corresponding to its formation. It is a similar concept to resonances in atomic transitions. There are many paths than an electron can take to jump up to higher energy levels, and all of them have a likelyhood to occur, but if you shine a light at the exact frequency of a specific transition, that particular transition is the most likely to occur and you see it as a "peak" or resonance in the spectroscopic data. Particle physicists take the analogy from spectroscopy because, at least mathematically, it is a very similar phenomenon when it comes to physics involved.
So when I used the term "dark matter coupling resonance", I am refering to a specific coupling between regular matter and dark matter (via a hypothetical interaction), that has increased likelihood at 100Gev (a hypothetical energy level). The interaction could hypotheticaly happen via a number of different fields that "couple" or "connect" the particles involved.
SO, |
Couple of important points
High energy physics experiments have a useful lifetime of several years at most, diminishing returns on research once you have basically exhausted the energy range it was designed for. Old accelerators can be repurposed for special experiments and new research in related fields (like the stanford accelerator being used for material studies), but they no longer are useful for breaking new fundamental high energy physics.
In high energy physics, there are only large experiments like this (large, expensive collaborations), if you are a graduate student or researcher in the field, you really only have one opportunity per decade to do your thesis work and make a name for yourself if you plan on staying in academia. The SCSC was supposed to be the HEP experiment for the decade, with the fermilab tevatron being built in the 80's and the LHC planned for the next century, this was supposed to be the lifework for hundreds of scientists and students that was pulled out from under their feet.
The loss of the SCSC left many unemployed and incredibly smart people. Some of these found positions on other experiments and stayed in academia, a lot of them went into industry, an entire academic generation (in that field) was essentially, lost. The field was gutted for almost a decade, until work on the LHC started and new experiments were being planned.
Many of those that left academia went into finance. The crop of jobless physicist being hired by finance firms and hedge funds was the basis of the "quant", these are the people that ended up designing and working on the financial models that eventually lead to the financial collapse of 2008. |
throw away for reasons i can't say. I used to work for Google as a temp, The employees are dicks to temps, including management that wasn't yours. like we are small dogs in a fenced yard in a trailer park owned by a total bitch of an old hag. People where nice till they found out you where a temp. When i first got on the campus i had no idea where i was going, some people would help others just see my name badge an give me a dirty look. Temps used to get some of the perks normal employees did, but soon after i started it got taken away. at one point we where told we could not bother normal employees at risk we could be fired if they complained. then they told us we could not go on campus at certain hours, then just just shuffled us off to a new building a few blocks away and where told we could not go on campus at all or be terminated.
My position was a temp to hire, i was excited when i first got it, but soon i found out that they are pretentious douchebags who thought there shit was gold. when i got offered a full on position i declined, as i was already in the works for another company. I'm now verry happy with a smaller commute. |
International Business-student here, and I would like to make some things clear: There are 100's of other (giant, international) companies that are actually scumbags too. LLC-type businesses all around the world are ''assholes'' if we were to rate them according to societal standards.
Why? Because they're LLC's ( Limited Liablility Compan(y/ies)). This ''Limited Liability''-part is there for a reason, and it's an important one; it simply means they're different entities for the law. Their founders and stockholders, even their board of directors, are not personally liable for what their LLC does. These LLC's are a different kind of ''citizens'', with their own rights, laws and punishments for violating the laws.
This means that they focus entirely on making profits. And they all have their own ways of doing so. People often say that certain companies are ''green'' or ''friendly''. Why do these companies do this while other companies choose to utilize child labor? Because of the extra profits that the ''good reputation'' will bring them, while ''child-labouring'' companies take the bad reputation they get for the lower costs and, in this way, higher profits they will gather by it. It's all one big trade-off between different factors.
I can write a 500-page essay about this subject but the core concept is; the Board of Directors of multinationals (which are almost always LLC's) have nothing to lose (except for their job, temporarily) if the company goes bankrupt for whatever reason. Stockholders of these LLC's only have the value of their stocks to lose. What the companies want is money; profit-maximization. Some companies do this by using cheap resources (which leads to a cost-leadership strategy to maximize profits), others do this by gaining the favour of the public through a ''friendly/green reputation''. Google for example wants to have a playful image. They want and need people to like them in order to make more profits.
Of course there are organizations that can be considered ''Good''. [The Fairtrade foundation]( for example, exists to give farmers in developing countries a fair price for the goods they're selling. Fairtrade, however, is not an LLC. If it was, it wouldn't want to be fair to poor farmers for the sake of those farmers, but for the sake of profits .
A lot of people in America, for example, use AT&T or Verizon as internet provider. Comparing their internet speeds to Dutch speeds ( here internet speed in Steam-peak and Speedtest-rate, pretty average for the Netherlands) and then comparing their costs to ours (pretty much the same, will provide sources later), one can see that the prices they charge may seem normal at first, but could, and should, actually be a lot lower when you compare them to standards somewhere else.
The most well-known example is, of course, Apple. Since Steve Jobs passed away (and before that), he and his company have been praised as if they were heaven-sent. However, Apple utilizes inhumane labor in China ( where people kill themselves in camps working for Apple every day And don't think Apple only handles their contractors in China that way. No, the Apple engineers designing the products have to go through rows and rows of security when going to work in Silicon Valley every day will leak.
So don't let Google's desired reputation with their audience fool you. What they are interested in are profits. And to maximize those they will fool you with the image and reputation they desire to have, while treating their employees totally differently . |
I've posted about my living experience in SF in other threads before, but to answer your question:
I currently live in a 325 sq. ft. studio in the heart of downtown SF. My rent WENT DOWN from $1,442/month to $1,365/month. I am in below market rate housing, so this is actually on the cheaper end.
At market rate, the average studio goes for about $1,800-$2,000/month, depending on the area. 1 BRs are generally the most expensive properties in the city, [check this shit out](
Your best bet at finding affordable housing in SF is to find a place on Craigslist where the tenants have lived there long enough to have rent control, but this is extremely competitive. I've been to a few open houses where I was competing against 30 other people for a room that was slightly larger than a walk in closet. The Sunset district is a little less competitive, and slightly more affordable. A couple of my friends just lucked out and a got a 3 BR for $3,500/month.
My girlfriend lives in the nicer part of SoMA. She pays just under $1,000/month, but is sharing a room. Many people in SF also rent out their living room, so that's another way to cheapen your rent, but seriously, it's absolutely ridiculous that people have to sacrifice their communal living space in order to make rent affordable.
I've been living here for just over a year, and will be moving to LA, where I'll be renting a 1 BR apartment that is over 2x bigger than my current studio, for the same monthly rent.
Is it worth it? Depends. If you're deadset on the tech industry, the Silicon Valley is where it's at, although startup scenes have spread to many other large cities across the US. As a 23 year old who moved up here straight out of college with very little experience, I do not find it worth it. While I currently make $40k/year, I've had to make too many sacrifices (i.e. got rid of my car because a parking spot cost $275/month) to live in an extremely small space and save very little money each month. SF is a wonderful city, it really is, it's just difficult to justify paying so much for basic living expenses. And it's only getting worse. |
I think anywhere has its good and bad points, putting aside the nice perks what attracts me to work for Google would be the smart minds I have always found working in a environment where bright people are focused to the same goals helps me raise my own game. Sadly I don't think Google think this way, there is definitely a stigma attached to their hiring process that is off putting.
Don't get me wrong I would jump at the chance to see what Google is about and do some great work there but the whole process of hiring from what I have read about just puts me off. I know I am good at what I do, I have old mangers calling me to go present at their new software gigs on performance testing, I live and breathe testing and general geeky software design, I often find bugs with my eyes closed! How ever the high bar interview and this general thing where everyone needs serious coding skills just doesn't work for me, its sad, as I am convinced I could make a contribution but hey-ho that is life! |
Isn't the law based on what is reasonable to the common person? It's not reasonable to read all that crap for every website, game update, and/or new software. It's not like a deed or anything of monumental future life consequence. I just wanna store some sh^t. |
I don't really feel it's right to complain about my Internet speeds.. I'm able to almost instantly stream any song, show or movie at the click of a button. It really wasn't that long ago where I would have to wait an eternity just to load a 5 minute flash animation. Sure, it sometimes lags if everyone in the house (6 of us) are all connected on our computers, phones, tablets and consoles but I still feel lucky to live in a time (and country) where I have such an incredible connection to the world.
The problem with Abbott's plan isn't the effect it has on me, but how it affects us as a nation. Shouldn't we be trying to at least keep up with the rest of the world when it comes to one of the most important technologies of our time? Australians have always been some of the greatest innovators, we produce so many leaders in nearly every field of expertise - our medical research immediately springs to my mind. (Bonus:
It's a real shame to think that Australia is going to be left behind by the rest of the world at such am important time for the Internet! Nearly any business or company, especially ones wanting to trade across the globe, needs to be offering competitive online services if it wants to survive in to the fairly close future. I'm no expert, but booming australian businesses must be great for our economy! Investing in our Internet infrastructure, to me, is one of the best ways to invest in our future as a great nation of creators, visionaries, innovators and leaders on the world stage. |
We had a NBN plan going with labour that would give us an amazing network infrastructure with FTTP, with gigabit speeds but instead the opposition won (tony abbott im sure you've heard of him) thinks that its basically not the future, and getting 25mbps is great for 2016 and forward with his superior FTTN /s. I'm sorry if i didn't explain this well but |
I liked everything about that episode. Although I think it was brutally truthful and not that funny. It makes me think of the Facebook acquisition of Occulus, the google acquisition of Nest, and all the redditors who are "so close" to being the next big thing. |
meh priceline is pretty scammy. I know the whole point of the secret deal shit they do, but they said "get a 5 star hotel for $xx.xx" and i did it. The hotel was a piece of shit and they charged for wi-fi, parking, and pretty much everything else. Priceline just hides under the "all sales are final" bullshit. |
The point here is that the man in question is already a quadriplegic. He was given 20 years to live, and is currently 30 years old and suffering from a form of Muscular Dystrophy. At this juncture, his decision will likely yield a large amount of information for the medical community and may help to advance various technologies even if the subject does not survive the procedure.
Simply the possible understandings that can be gleaned from the individual's mental state and overall reactions will help us to better understand how the human brain works. As well as the further difficulties we may have in future attempts such as hormone compatibility, neural reconnections, and hundreds of other specifics of which our understanding is currently limited. |
It's a social utility thing at a minimum. Rural areas are absolutely necessary for the function of society and many of those are far, far out from normal Telco lines. Well, 20-30 miles isn't utterly abnormal on the flat and in the mountains there are other considerations.
Anyway, we (USA) subsidize the crap out of telcos to ensure ubiquity and reliability of communication. We don't do that for happiness and sunshine, but because it's a massively important social evolution. The same can be said for the internet, but we're having difficulty there. Interconnectivity improves social dialogue, commerce, security, etc across the board. As an individual everyone bitches about every penny they have to shed, and telcos have been raping our pocketbooks for decades so I understand the reaction...but if there's one thing that's not causing your rates to go up it's the little bit of expansion that's required at the edges of communities with existing lines.
So, there's a degree of responsibility we're all stuck with for each other. There are days where we easily hit the limits of those responsibilities but abandoning them completely isn't a good idea. On the rare occasion someone is being a complete asshat they're not likely to get approval for installation of new transmission lines, i.e. living in a cave in the middle of the desert. Then again, it'll damn sure spur development along the trail leading to that cave and that's one of the points. |
I don't understand how this is a violation of "net neutrality." You might say it is anticompetitive or unfair to services that don't get offered for free -- but net neutrality is about treating all traffic the same as it transits over your network. This is not about network management, this is a payment scheme.
Put differently: it's not that the services on Internet.org are delivered faster vis a vis the services that aren't (as I understand it), it's just that you get some services for free while you have to pay for others. If you signed up for a data plan, (I assume) all websites would be treated differently.
Put differently, yet again: Net neutrality is commonly used as a rallying cry when ISPs offer you "Internet access" but then don't give you equivalent access to all services -- i.e., they prioritize or throttle some services. Internet.org doesn't purport to be full "Internet access." It is a free program that gives access to a limited set of sites.
Again, I'm not saying the program is perfect, or even good. But it's not a net neutrality violation. People use that term to describe any behavior they don't like by ISPs or online services. |
That'd be my guess -- never bothered to look into [this]( before, but it looks very much as if it'd be fairly simple to write a script that would take your phone number, tack on your carrier's mail-to-txt domain, and then send mail to your phone that way. Kicking myself for not googling that first, because I really only signed up for this to give my girlfriend, who lives overseas, a way to send me free texts. |
I have about 2000 contacts from 1996-2006 that are not in any contact book. I have a further 3000 contacts from 2006 onwards in my contact list, where I could pretty much name each person and tell you how I know them. I have an additional 5000 contacts I added from my work ldap server, so I had them locally, knew who was calling me, and could call anyone without looking up their number. There was about 500 people of overlap with ones I already had, so my gmail has about 7500 people in it now, and could have if > 9000 if I added my older contacts. I'm not that far away from 10,000, as it stands.
I've also noted that at this size contact list the Android contacts app tanks, but that is a post for another time. |
It's fine to imitate competitors; it leads to more innovation and stiffer competition. It's morally wrong to imitate a competitor and claim their idea as your own innovation. It's then incomprehensible and hypocritical to then go further by making it a point in your presentation to call these same competitors 'copycats'. |
Actually, it depends on how saturated the node is. Neighborhood nodes have a max bandwidth capacity per Docsis spec. that coincides with the available downstream channel. A particular system might split the downstream in a node between 2 separate frequencies for Docsis 2.0.
The problem is, if you are in a high population neighborhood, the node is probably being maxed out on the Docsis 2 channels (usually at the peak hours of 6-10) even more so now with the prevalence of streaming media. Purchasing a Docsis 3 modem doesn't change your plan, but it changes the downstream channel(s) you're on that are currently unsaturated. |
Mainly because you're being an ass.
No, I'm actually not being the ass, you're being the ass here. I asked a question, and you started on the offense... getting worse and worse after each comment.
>You ask an antagonizing question
I asked for a source on something that another redditor said. How the hell is that an antagonizing question. I simply wanted more information on something I didn't know about.
>about information that is well known.
Well known to you, and plenty of other people. But not to me. And guess what, you can probably find a shit load of Americans that have no idea that Google bought Motorola in the first place! Every single person can not possibly follow every single piece of news in the entire world. Do you know all the latest news on the Sony Vita? No? Neither do I. But that doesn't make either of us any less intelligent because we don't know some random piece of information.
>Then when I provide evidence that Google did indeed state that, you start arguing that it was speculation.
No, that's not how it went down at all actually. Let me break this down with numbers so you can follow it easier.
I asked for a source on something
You provided a source while getting defensive about it
I told you there was no reason to get defensive about it, since I was just asking for more information
You replied stating that I must not have read any news on it at all, because every single article mentioned that patents was their goal
I stated that the piece that I read on the day of this announcement made that speculation, but there was not a confirmed statement from google
You claimed that every single article on the subject provided a link to Larry Page's blog, and that they all mentioned it was about the parents
I told you what article I read, which indeed as I said before... was just speculating and had no links of proof
You found that article, thus proving my point that the article I read was simply speculating... but apparently failed to read it and claimed it wasn't speculation
So no. I didn't argue it was speculation after you gave me proof. I argued that the article I read weeks ago made that speculation before it was well known... and that was the only information I had on the subject until now.
> In other words, you KNEW the answer to the question but wanted to ask anyway. Instead of saying I wonder if that speculation got confirmed I'll check the news, you ask a stupid retarded question.
No, I didn't know this at all. Why? Because of the other speculation I heard that day from other sources. The ones I mentioned already about the cable boxes and/or fibre networks that Moto owned. When I was on Reddit, and this story broke into the news EVERYTHING was speculation. There was NO blog post from Larry Page yet. And that is where I left that topic. I did not revisit it until now when someone mentioned one of those things I had previously known as speculation, and was interested to see if it was actually proven as Google's motive.
A simple fucking link to the proof would have sufficed. But instead you were a fucking douche the whole time. |
You're completely ignoring what I'm saying:
No zero tolerance policy (mince words if you want, that's what "enforcing absolutely" means) has ever worked. Period. If you create a situation where the courts are clogged with people contesting 1-4mph violations, judges are going to get sick of it and start dismissing cases out of hand. I've seen it happen in traffic court when the city cops get a wild hair up their ass and decide to start issuing parking tickets for frivolous/nonexistent violations. Judges aren't there to protect revenue streams. And that's not to mention the fact that, out of necessity, the tickets are going to be served by mail, which means they can be ignored. Currently most people ticketed by mail choose to pay (although it's essentially a charitable donation), but if tickets are being handed out left and right for violations that basically amount to a rounding error, you better believe the word is going to get out that you have to be served personally in order to be legally compelled to pay.
Raising the speed limit to 100mph is a terrible and unsafe idea. Modern German cars can handle 100+mph because they've had the Autobahn since Hitler was in power and making sure they're safe at that sort of speed is a necessary design criterion. Some, maybe most of the cars that are sold today can do 100mph, but a great number can't, and most of the cars on the road aren't brand new. If you've seen how crazily people drive when they're trying to get around someone doing 65mph in a 75 zone (a 10mph discrepancy), it should be immediately and painfully obvious why it's insane to propose that people can "just do 80mph if they want" as cars going 20mph faster are whipping by them (that's being generous and assuming that the people who only want to do 65mph decide to increase their speed to 80mph).
You're also ignoring the fact that a large portion of interstate traffic consists of trucks, and many trucks simply do not go faster than 70, especially if they're on even the slightest grade. These kinds of speed discrepancies might be fine on the German Autobahns, which were included them as a design consideration, and have basically been a feature of Germany since the widespread adoption of the automobile, but American interstates weren't designed for it, cars in the American market aren't designed for it, and American drivers simply don't know how to operate safely at that speed.
You're essentially putting motorists in a position where they're going to be driving down a two lane highway with vehicles going a wide range of different speeds constantly passing one another and trying to jerk back into the
right lane so that the person wanting to pass them doesn't ride up their bumper. It's complete idiocy, you can't possibly think that's a good idea. This completely ignores the fact that even if everyone could go 100mph, you will see a significant increase in the number of accidents and the will have a higher rate of fatality. I live near a 90-mile stretch of interstate with a 75mph speed limit and we routinely see multi-vehicle accidents with multiple (5+) fatalities. I shudder to think what the death toll would be like if it were raised to 100mph. It's just not safe.
You're looking at a 30-45% decrease in fuel economy between 75mph and 100mph (although it's probably more than 50% when you account for the fact that they're not going to be able to maintain a constant speed). Not to mention increased wear and tear on engine, tires, and almost every other moving part. It basically puts them in the position of either going slow and being a hazard to others or having to pay more if they want to travel on freeways. You're talking about saving 40 minutes on a 200 mile journey (assuming you're not delayed by the erratic flow of traffic/inevitable constant accidents). Those kinds of cost increases just aren't worth it with gas at $3+/gal all over the country.
Speed limits are not decided arbitrarily. The most common standard is the 85th percentile speed, the speed 85% of drivers travel at or below. This is based on the assumption that most drivers are reasonable and prudent, do not want to have an accident, and want to reach their destination in the shortest time possible. In many applications, the actual speed limit is set at 8-12mph below the 85th percentile speed. You're talking about raising interstate highway speed limits from 60-75mph to 100mph. In essence, you're proposing to guarantee to put motorists in an environment they do not feel safe in. |
Interesting read. I work on the academic side of comms modernization, and I have a few things to add:
1) A big problem not mentioned in the article problem is how rapidly the technology has been advancing in the past 15 years - not only in terms of hardware capabilities, but there have been at least three massive paradigm shifts recently in how we think about radio systems. In the early 80's they were starting to move towards heavily integrated DSP systems and away from discrete component systems. In the 90's we saw the rise of System On Chip miniaturization; but in the past 8 years or so even SoC platforms have been abandoned in favor of FPGA/GPP hybrids which implement the baseband processing completely in software. To make matters worse, during this time we have also the state of the art for digital links go from discrete carrier FDM to CDMA and now to OFDM with MIMO (apologies for the alphabet soup). The problem is that each new architecture and technology advancement brings with it some "must have" feature that the military wants, meaning JTRS systems, in many cases, have been re-designed from the ground up probably a half dozen times by now.
2) The ever increasing distance between academic and industry R&D in the field has hurt as well. While reading some of the things in the article, I found myself thinking "I have/could implement that pretty easily..." There are two major issues here. The first one simply being that most of the people who are deciding these military standards are 40-50 year old engineers who have been somewhat out of the loop for a good decade. These people a) do not like being corrected, and b) generally are less current on the state of the art and, as such, will default to what they know well. The second issue is the conflict of interest between University research - which aims to advance the state of the art, and industry research - which aims to sell products. Quite frankly, many of the companies supplying radio technology to the military have a vested interest in keeping the technology discussion revolving around the products and IP they have already developed. To further complicate things, it is nearly impossible for new players to enter the game due to the hassle of dealing with confidential material. Finally, from my own observations, it seems to me that industry labs no longer care for the sort of fundamental research done at the University level (mostly because they can't exclusively patent it), and instead focus most of their efforts on making iterative "value-added" updates to their current technology portfolio. Both times I have worked on industry sponsored projects, I was essentially given engineering assignments (implement this algorithm on this FPGA platform...) rather than being allowed to do research (which algorithm performs optimally on this FPGA...). |
No -- what the jailbreak does is work itself into the startup processes somewhere and, when activated, prevents the kernel from not running unsigned code. The jailbroken iOS is still iOS, but you can think of it as having an extra daemon on start-up (that's not what is actually done most of the time, but it's analogous). You cannot, at present, use an entirely different OS on iPhones after the 3GS, nor latest models of the iPod Touch, nor any model of iPad (IIRC), without physically modifying the device and somehow having your own firmware run at the first point of the boot chain. (No one's even looked into that method yet, to my knowledge, because software jailbreaks are still effective and no one seems to want to run anything other than iOS on an iDevice). The reason mostly has to do with the fact that the hardware in the device will verify a cryptographic signature embedded with the software, and the only entity capable of signing such software is Apple. (And circumventing this might once have counted as a DMCA violation, if you consider the signature verification a copyright protection -- but a special exception was created for this a year or two back simply because it was the only way to have any kind of software interoperability on the phone without Apple's explicit approval). |
You stopped indicating a desire for civilized discussion when you indicated a desire to restrict information to what you morally approved of.
Where did I do this? I didn't. Restrict information to what I morally approve of? What the fuck are you talking about. I know where your argument goes, and its moronic. Information I create is my information, and you have no right to it.
>Saying that the MPAA/RIAA has the capability to "break" peer 2 peer communication is something I would definitely require a source to believe.
Reading comprehension retard. I did not directly say they had the capability to break P2P communication, rather I implied they had the capability to do so only in so far as they could break (or change the fundamental structure of) the internet with legislation and enforcement — which they will do if they can. Its funny — I assume that you thought I mean't break it through some reverse hacking or similar, I can't speculate as to their abilities there, but legislatively, it would be very easy to break the internet simply by setting up national firewalls screening all content into and out of the country (which the government has the right to do based on the enforcement of basic customs and import/export law). Other options are targeting general purpose computing, and/or forcing all packets to be encrypted and digitally signed in order to establish a chain of custody and liability. These are beyond the basic initial legal options we've seen, like SOPA, which was a measured response which would make piracy more difficult, but not absolutely destroy the internet as we know it (though it would have had some consequences).
>Honestly I don't think you have an interest in understanding the situation objectively.
I think you're the kettle calling the teapot black. They certainly have made things harder — not for you, but for others. If its harder for some people, and the same for everyone else, then by composition it is harder overall.
>The study above as well as my experience shows me that.
The study is premature and incomplete as I stated in my original post, which you clearly did not read, and had no interest in responding to previously, or now. Your own experience is subjective and likely the experience of a technology savvy individual, not an average user, and therefore not a representative measure which can be used to draw conclusions.
>You want to believe the entertainment industry has more power than the people.
No, I don't — but since you mention it, I believe they currently do. I don't want anything, except for our society to not fall apart, so don't put words in my mouth. I did not suggest that they do until just now. If you would like an example, however, Egypt, Syria, Iran, North Korea, have all shown that when existing regimes want to clamp down, it is impossible to accomplish structural change often despite overwhelming popular will. Yesterday many State AG's signed a deal to settle foreclosure charges against massive banks for using MERS, which harms millions upon millions of Americans. Whether or not Big Content will decide to go that route, whether or the Government will join them, and whether or not that will be enough to overwhelm the current minority will of people who believe criminal infringement to be defensible, is up for debate. You're right, time will tell. |
If any of you actually read the letters of support on the link, you'll find that Microsoft, IBM, Intel, etc are all focused on cyber security. At least to them, this isn't about you or me and our interests on the internet; it's the security of critical data and the future of the US's national security. Put simply, from their perspective, this isn't about your local hacker trying to deface a website for shiggles, this is about countering the Chinese government (and all of the other nations actively engaged in cyber attacks). They cared about SOPA because it would hurt them and cost them money, they don't care about the claimed problems with the CISPA because they care more about their security and IP than about shielding you from the MPAA . As to why Google doesn't publicly support it, see the top post. If they are really clever they can use CISPA to get all of you to move to Google+ and get more data about you. |
It's actually more likely that the software won't be able to recognize the machine hand seeing it only has 3 fingers. Even if it does, it is likely that both machines would go PAPER because PAPER beats ROCK. They wouldn't freak out because once the software determines that the opposition is using ROCK it will activate PAPER. It is unlikely that it will continue to scan for addition movement. #JustSaying |
iOS is, after all, a substantially tweaked version of OS X. They could retain their model of selling the OS with the hardware, retaining control of both.
The issue is that iOS is artificially stripped of the general operating system capacities that it has innately - i.e. it's not interested in what the user wants to run, it's only interested in running very specific blocks of signed code.
That's the problem. Not Apple's (perhaps wise) policy of control of both software and hardware, but their odd obsession - limited to iOS - that they should decide what code you're allowed to run.
The worst part is they did such a good job that now people are willing to contemplate eliminating the greatest tool of the last thousand years - the generalized computer - to have it replaced by one where remote entities approve or disapprove of the code allowed to run. |
I don't think it's a fair to compare Windows Tablets from when Klauschadman was in middle school to iPads today. If I had to guess, I would say the tablet he used was pre-iPad.
My middle school also had convertible tablet PCs and we just used them like regular laptops, it was a pretty big waste of money, but they worked as a laptop I guess. Now my former High School bought 2,000 macbooks and a few hundred iPads when we had more than enough laptops when there were only 1,500 of them. To top it all off, the people who convinced the board to buy the laptops were all teachers who arbritraily raised the price of all PCs by $300-$400 so that it looked like Macs were cheaper than PCs.
It's also worth mentioning that this makes the program a one laptop per child program, but in a rich upper class county, everyone already owns a computer, so what's the point in this? Nobody knows. |
Oh I know. But I'm not Slavic; people will know I'm naming him after someone... and if they don't, my son certainly will. I'm an energy geek (see name), and work in nuclear power, so I really want to give his middle name to be Rankine after the Rankine cycle (which governs steam-based power plants). Rankine is just too weird, though, so I'm thinking maybe naming him after the Brayton cycle instead since that's a more normal name. It governs jet engines and gas turbines, which is cool but not quite as applicable.
My daughter is going to be after Marie Curie (again, I work in nuke). Haven't decided on a middle name yet, but it will also have meaning without being so ridiculous that she'll get made fun of. |
They do. but we owe steve jobs alot too, he is still a cunt.
Michael jackson was a musical genius, but a fucking weirdo at the very LEAST. |
Disclaimer: I have no connection with this company. I just heard about them after reading this article:
The idea has stuck in my head, and today I decided to look them up and donate. In doing so, it occurred to me that this company's commitment to open-source technology and global responsibility really appeals to some of Reddit's core values. So, I'm posting it here in the hopes that my judgment was correct, and that we can get a lot of people excited about this. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we, as a community, could have an instrumental role in the development of a technology that has the potential to have a real and measurable global benefit?
I just donated $50. Right now they're only looking to raise $10,000, and have raised less than 1/10th of that. We could easily fund this. |
screw you Pearson! you charge 3/4 of the price for your ebooks which are only accessible through your website with an account, after paying for said ebook you can't print it out, highlight and save passages, and your document search is shit. Taking down your competition with a DMCA for presenting information that has nothing to do with your copyrighted material for free are unfair business practices.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day companies who use this tactic gets slapped with a class action lawsuit. |
My iPhone 5 is probably my last iPhone, for a few reasons.
On Verizon, you can't do simultaneous voice and 4G data. As far as I know, the iPhone 5 is the only 4G phone on VZW that has this limitation.
The FCC mandated that VZW cannot limit tethering apps or, apparently, charge extra for tethering on limited data plans. Except the Apple store won't authorize tethering apps, and the iOS tether function still gets you charged $20 a month by VZW. I blame both Verizon and Apple on this one.
Still no ability to create widgets on home screen so you can do something simple like enable/disable BT or wifi. UI design has always been an Apple strength, but they're getting their asses kicked on things like this.
Maps. I know, everybody bitches about them and some of it isn't fair. What really gets me is that I've submitted 30-40 updates to Maps, mostly 3-4 weeks ago. Nothing has been fixed yet. I would accept some crowdsourcing to get the maps corrected, but they're telling us to report problems and then nothing happens to fix the problem. Why am I submitting corrections again? |
Some will never leave the Apple ecosystem(too much invested appstore/itunes)... Everyone else will float in between platforms. As app parity continues growing between platforms people will take it on a case by case basis. WinPhone8 has alot of app parity missing to make up ground for. we will see in time microsoft has long money.
The market is realizing hey this 4+ inch phones aren't so bad and once you have that screen real estate that your using for media, games and web the downsides aren't enough to go back in most cases. |
That statement is equivalent to saying that science can't call genocide bad. Its technically correct, but completely useless. Science is a way to observe the world, it doesn't get to make judgements about what is right or wrong, but it does get to provide evidence that 'x' appears to lead to 'y'. Pure observation is useless to most people without a way to interpret it and translate it into things like good or bad instead of prefacing every statement with "Well, OBJECTIVELY the universe doesn't give a shit, so shooting yourself isn't BAD" |
Its technically correct, but completely useless.
It's not completely useless. It is fundamental to maintaining science's lack of bias. Once people start assigning values to science you get shit like killing people with big Carbon footprints, being justified by carbon footprints are bad.
People are beholden to their own beliefs, science just says what the world is, it is not a statement on what should exist, that can only come from without.
>Science is a way to observe the world, it doesn't get to make judgements about what is right or wrong, but it does get to provide evidence that 'x' appears to lead to 'y'.
Yes, exactly, and that's all it should be, and I will not have people twisting science to support them.
>Pure observation is useless to most people without a way to interpret it and translate it into things like good or bad instead of prefacing every statement with "Well, OBJECTIVELY the universe doesn't give a shit, so shooting yourself isn't BAD"
Indeed it isn't.
> |
Yes, that's a hypothetical that can't be really answered.
You can spin it the other way around: Bigger consumers of music tend to pirate it as well.
Casual consumers - don't.
Some people pirate because they want to not pay for stuff - there's little you can go for or against these guys.
Most people, though, steal music because it's the 21st century and technology has evolved faster than the business module could. When you offer a better solution that will make pirating a hassle, people will actually pay money for it.
Take gaming. I used to pirate 95% of my games as a kid and teenager, I didn't have a steady income and games cost a small fortune because of local monopoles and draconian import taxes.
Internet shopping pretty much solved my console gaming needs.
As for PC, Steam came by and revolutionized the entire business.
Now, as a customer, I don't need to hassle with CD keys (or key breakers) I have the games ready to download from quick servers whenever I want them, no cracks, no missing patches no hidden viruses.
I think I pirated maybe 4 games in the last 5 years and ended up buying all of them.
I still pirate music, and I think we're a dying breed because most people don't want their collection to sit on their hard drives anymore.
When I'll find a service that will offer me what I need I'll gladly toss aside most of my torrents.
Until then I'll keep on going to concerts whenever I can and buy the occasional decorative CD every now and then. |
This is where the industry is moving. Decent quality recording equipment is getting cheaper and cheaper every year. Large, expensive studios with 5 workers and insane rental costs aren't required to make a decent sounding album, so why cling to a record company? Distribution is easier than ever with the internet at hand. |
So you clearly have no idea how the music industry actually works. For one, you are lumping an entire group of musicians with what one could call "the 1%". For every Niki Minaj or Justin Beiber there are probably dozens if not hundreds of musicians hardly scraping a living together through their music.
Second, a musician will not make even 5% of the profits from the sale of the "license" that you buy. This is because of how the industry sets up their contracts. When a musician is signed, they are given an advance by the record company to record their album. This is to cover any living expenses incurred along with any recording fees (pay the engineer, studio, mixing, etc.) In almost all of the standard contracts, the record label sets up clauses on how they will recoup this money from the artist. Usually, its done by withholding royalties until the advance is paid back (though they are moving more towards a "50-50" system where 50% of royalties are paid to the artist, 50% to the company). The problem comes in when you breakdown how a royalty is paid out.
Let's say that an artist was lucky enough to negotiate for a 35% royalty on their contract (it's usually much much much less, but the math is easy with this number). A label then charges the artist for the packaging and shipping fees (yes, even on an iTunes purchase) at around 15-20%. Lets take the low number and say we now have 25% left for the artist. But then there are the fees paid to their business manager (usually between 3-5%), their agent (again, 3-5%) and their producer (depends on how the production contract was negotiated, but usually around 2%). That leaves us with a total of 13% left for the artist. Now, lets assume they were lucky enough to get the 50-50 deal. That means the record company is getting 6.5% leaving the artist with 6.5%. Wait though! Most bands are going to be between 3-5 people (for our example we will assume 3). That leaves each artist with between 1-2% depending on how the band has negotiated payment (usually the writer of the song will receive more than, say, the drummer). And what's 2% of a CD sale (assuming an average price of $20)... $.40. That's right. You paid $20 for a CD and the artist got a wonderful .40.
Now, that's still a pretty good chunk of money, but only if you sell a ton of CD's. To earn the "standard" middle class wage of $50,000 a year, you have to sell 12,500 CDs in a year. Considering under 5 million albums were sold in 2010 ([source]( you would have to be a really popular musician to make the "limo, mansion, private jet" salary you are talking about.
P.S. don't forget, most music is sold digitally these days, meaning that an artist is making about $.04 on their iTunes album if it is sold at the highest price of $1.99 (not including the iTunes fee). That means they would need to sell 1,250,000 records to earn that $50,000 base. |
Just to clarify, it is NEVER ideal for a musician to master their own work. Mixing is probably what you are thinking of, because yes much of that depends on the quality of the performance and is done with artist direction, but mastering is the final technical preparation for playback on a variety of sound systems and is not really part of the artists purview, unless they're going for a niche sound. For example, the speakers alone for proper mastering can cost over $10 000 and should be listened to in a sound treated and properly sized/designed studio environment. |
If you provide a service that offers unlimited access to music at a fair rate, you will end the vast majority of pirating. I used to steal music constantly until I got hooked on Spotify (just one of several good ones). I was never outright trying to steal it, I just wanted access to music digitally and at a price point that wasn't gouging the shit out of me. Since I've done the cloud thing though I've stopped bootlegging completely.
Now if only Netflix stopped sucking and production companies would negotiate reasonable streaming rates with them I could stop bootlegging TV shows and movies as well. I might not speak for everyone, but I fully believe that's the root of the problem for most people. |
I get what you are saying. I, too, think that musicians represent themselves best live. But what iscream is trying to say is that there is a major degree of artistry that goes on in the studio. I'll raise his Coltrane example w/ 'Pet Sounds'. Brian Wilson spent months in the studio while the Beach Boys were on the road creating his masterpiece.
Is it easier or harder for a modern Brian Wilson to make 'Pet Sounds'? I think we all agree it is much more difficult. Access to studios cost money, which independent artists do not have. |
oh right, i hadn't even considered the pay-what-you-want model; i was really more just thinking of the ability to sell your own music through your own website; sort of the same idea as only buying CDs and merchandise at shows.
you make a god point that exposure still has to occur somehow and people still have to be convinced to pay for something they can get for free elsewhere. but the few bands i have so far been able to support using this model have all been bands that i learned about through something viral (e.g. red fang's amazing videos) or on independent radio ([kexp4lyfe]( that i then sought out. i grew up purchasing massive amounts of music, so i have no problem shelling out $5-10 for the privilege of supporting independent artists. |
Wrong. With android (android being a Linux kernel based OS) being so big, malware will be produced for Linux.
Linux, like any Unix system does some inherent advantages (the same ones MaxOSX has, as a result of it being a Unix system based on BSD), is that users are run with restricted privilege by default, NEVER with root or admin privilege. However, vulnerabilities do exist in the code that allow for un-authorized access.
Also, beyond just exploits, social engineering exists. Not to mention if you can compromise one of the major software repositories and infect a common program with a vulnerable version. |
First of all, Apple does let the system decide when and how to escalate privileges which means that unlike Linux it is in fact vulnerable to drive by attacks. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the userland is managed differently by OSX and Linux.
Your argument that "you could infect a repository" is asinine. Possible yes, likely to go unnoticed? Not a chance. You can socially manipulate users into installing malware, and this will never change. It is however extremely unlikely for open-source software because of the repositories. Without any good reason for people to download software from untrusted sources, the likelihood of this kind of social engineering attack is reduced to negligible.
Android is a steaming pile of java dogshit patched onto Linux. To think that some malware will be able to populate across Android and into real distribution is retarded. |
Another article got posted about this yesterday. They didn't create a 3D microchip, they just built a proof of concept for a method of moving data vertically between chip layers based on a magnetic ratchet. |
Techdirts article is the |
Excellent post, except perhaps the ending should have been: |
The thing about Detroit was that people moved there because Ford/GM/Chrysler/Oldsmobile/etc. were there. It's otherwise not the kind of place where people want to live (snowy, land-locked, etc.) Car plants also encouraged poor and uneducated people (particularly African Americans who were tired of the South's bullshit) to move their in hopes of opportunity, which created the virulent racism we still see today within the metro region.
San Francisco is one of the prettiest and most livable cities in the United States. It draws highly educated workers and is supported by two of the finest universities in the world (S.F. is the most requested office for transfer placement at my relatively large consulting firm). When the world catches up to the valley in terms of coding prowess, the smart kids will have already moved on to something else, partly because the smartest people from all over the world WANT to be there.
Even if they don't move on beyond coding, Detroit lost because they were making shitty cars that no one wanted. Workers, mad at poor labor relations, would regularly leave tools inside the dash boards of cars increase the costs faced by their employer. Their response to the oil crisis was [this]( They could have thrived if they tried harder.
American carmakers had TREMENDOUS good will and they squandered it because they were content and because thy did not have the best management (look how quickly Iacocca turned around Chrysler with good management techniques [and how quickly a lauded insider like DeLorean failed]). Silicon Valley does not rely on that kind goodwill, they rely on pushing good product. No one cares that Spotify is Swedish/British. They just care that it works. Silicon Valley knows this, they don't rest on their laurels like Detroit did. Silicon Valley will continue to be a center of industry as long as people still want to live there, just as Portland has seen a resurgence in importance (Jive, Wieden + Kennedy, the new google office there, etc.) because smart, talented people WANT to live there. Very few wanted to live in Detroit beyond the fact that it was a place where jobs were.
Lets also not forget that, apart from a few rough years, the American auto industry is doing pretty well, with billions in annual profit. Detroit the city is crumbling because of poor urban planning (it's a mess of sprawl) and deeper problems like racial segregation in neighborhoods and drug violence. The Bay Area does not have these problems (at least not as acutely), so even if tech were to pack up and leave, we wouldn't see a situation as bad as we see in Detroit. |
I understand why people hate carriers, as I too have had my fair share of trouble with them; as far as unlocking goes I can't really say it was an issue. I was selling an Iphone 4S and wanted to unlock it for better profit about six months ago - aside from sitting on the phone with customer service for a bit, there was little to no hassle about it. I plan on unlocking my Nokia Lumia in May and I am pretty sure that once again - there will be little to no hassle.
How many of you are actually attempting to unlock your phones and how many of you are just bitching because you'd like to? If you travel - ATT will generally unlock your phone for whatever your desired period is, regardless of your contract.
Look at it like this - you are all bitching because it is your phone and you should be able to unlock it whenever you want! Yea that is absolutely right if you buy the phone outright, however if you sign a two year contract and expect and immediate and permanent factory unlock - it is somewhat of a ridiculous train of thought. You generally get 400-500 dollars off on the top tier cell phones and ATT essentially gives you that deal as you are going to be subscribed for the next 24 mo's. IF they were to unlock it right away, you could just stop paying and utilize another service. While many of you wouldn't do this - it would be a lot easier for people to do as they could just use their phone on another network and ignore ATT. |
This is the stupidest thing I've read today, and I browsed /r/SRS today.
The primary script in Japanese is Hiragana, which is a syllabary, like you said. Obviously in hiragana, it's no harder to invent a new word than in english. But you're right, most words include kanji. So lets look at kanji.
Each kanji has both 1 or more readings (sounds) and 1 or more meanings. When constructing a new word, one can simply select a unique set of kanji with appropriate meanings, and add some hiragana to add to the sound of the word as necessary.
Oh, and regarding your verbage about the wiki list of japanese inventions as being nothing but "Film, animation, literature, martial arts, and philosophy": you're fucking blind. Heard of the CD player? TFT displays? The Quartz watch? Flash memory? Pocket Calculators? SLR cameras? Blu-ray? Fucking ANDROIDS? (The robot kind). |
OP here. Last night I realized this can't work (and not even because of the problem in this article
The reason cement manufacture emits a lot of CO2 is because they start with calcium carbonate CaCO3, heat it until it reduces to CaO and CO2. The CaO is kept as quicklime, the CO2 goes into the atmosphere. The proposed CO2 capture technique produces CaCO3, which, in order to make quicklime, must also be heated to reduce it, re-emitting the CO2. The way they supposedly sequestered the CO2 was to sneak the un-reduced CaCO3 into the real quicklime as a tolerable impurity. |
A lot of times they switch to an [Arduino]( control board. If they are reffering to something like this, the slim profile can make it fit in a lot of locations without interfering much. Relays are big blocks that would take up a lot of the surface area needed to put things on shelves and such. |
Every action a handicapped person can perform on their own makes a huge difference. Able-bodied individuals, such as yourself, do not realize the thousands of little motions it takes to get through a "regular" day. It is exhausting. He may have an aide that helps him, he may be able to do gross motor actions with his arms to get his stuff out. |
Super Mario 64 was terrible
I could try to paraphrase but I'll just point you to [this link]( |
Someone who runs a YouTube network here
As a network or content owner, you have several options when someone uploads videos containing content you own, whether it be audiovisual, just visual or just audio. Those options include taking down the video, monetizing and making money off of it, or ignoring the upload.
The reason networks and content owners have the ability to monetize someone else's video is because A. they own the content in that video and B. by monetizing the video it still allows the person who uploaded it to get views and have people see the video rather than get it taken down, which happens pretty often.
I don't understand why anyone commenting has a problem with this. If you made a video and then someone started making money off it just by copying and speaking over it, would you be okay with that? Probably not.
A good example of this is the NBA. They explicitly say during all live broadcast that you cannot film or redistribute any of its games unless you have consent to do so. So what does that NBA do when someone uploads a dunk on YouTube. They monetize it. And make money off of what they already own.
I hope this doesn't get buried, but yeah that's why Nintendo is doing this, although I do not necessarily agree with them from a business perspective. I'd gladly answer more questions if anyone has any.
EDIT: |
You realize you don't lend yourself any credibility by insulting me, right? I have auto-correct. At any rate, it doesn't nullify any of my points.
Despite how you may feel. The facts are the PSP and the Vita were huge investments. A lot of money and R&D was dumped into both handhelds. Sony wouldn't try integrating the Vita with their home consoles if they were small attempts (which again Sony was largely responding to Nintendo doing that same). I mean these are just facts. You don't call something a rabbit when it quacks and acts like a duck. Again, YOU may feel like they weren't large attempts. Heck, even the guys at Sony could have felt that same sentiment, but the amount of resources pooled for these handhelds strongly indicates that these weren't "small attempts." It may be hard for you to swallow, but you have to remember to deal with it.
I didn't say graphics are not selling or whatever narrative you choose to give me to suit your argument. I said that graphics aren't as big of a factor as they used to be. You should look into diminishing returns. This will most likely be the last generation to sell "graphics" (if you want to phrase it like that). This generation, with the exception being Nintendo, has seen a huge homogenization of consoles. The next gen is going to be near identical, thus my reasoning for saying that graphics aren't as big of a factor anymore.
You point to two genres of games as if they are the end all argument. Those are only two different genres. Nintendo doesn't dabble in the competitive scene. They have made it clear in the past that that wasn't their goal. You're sadly mistaken if you think those are the only ways to make bank in this industry. I mean on top of that your babbling about "realistic games" (which is relative, since the COD franchise is not an accurate poster boy of realism) and online games making big money right now shows how little you know.
First of all, the fps genre (specifically the COD franchise) is largely a huge trend right now. Of course it is going to sell big in the short-term. Second the COD franchise isn't the most profitable like you make it out to be (or the fps genre in general). In fact, New Super Mario Bros. for the DS has sold 30 million units. which is way more than what MW2 and Black Ops 2 combined . Keep in mind that these are the highest selling CoD games for the 360. Again: facts.
Sure Nintendo isn't milking that cash-cow that is the fps genre, but I see it this way: The PS3 and the Xbox are essentially the same console. Their biggest money maker comes from third-parties in which they have to compete with each other in order to get their cut of the pie. Which obviously means that these huge numbers are split between all these fingers in the pie (the third party, the middle man, the console, and the competitor). And once this trend passes then what? They don't exactly have anything else lined up. I mean look at what happened to the Guitar Hero franchise. Meanwhile Nintendo has a vast array of core games that range from rpg, fighting, racing, strategy, turn-base, and so on. On top of that they have a very solid first-party franchise that Sony and Microsoft could only dream of having.
Going full circle now ( |
Copyright can be a little different if you can get something declared a collage. But in general, when it comes to IP, if two parties contribute to an IP (say a performance, etc.) then neither owns the IP outright, they both co-own it. This is considered very undesirable because it means neither side can do anything without the other's permission. And if there's money to be made that means neither side can make money without negotiating a money sharing agreement with the other side. It's easy for an IP which falls into this category to become rather useless for both sides, if they both feel they would be giving the other side an advantage if they let them use it.
Anyway, that doesn't matter. and in fact most of what TotalBiscuit says doesn't matter either. Because none of those issues are at play here. This isn't a copyright issue. This is a contract issue.
YouTube has an agreement with you that if you upload a video they might let others view it. They might even give you money for placed ads that others view. Or they might not, at their option.
YouTube also has an agreement with Nintendo that says that for certain videos (defined by content ID) YouTube will ask Nintendo if they wish to block this video from being published or take the ad revenue from the video.
YouTube can do this because of their agreement with you. It's not anything to do with the DMCA or the law. The only way the law would come into play is if you think you have a legal angle to force YouTube to display your uploaded video or to give you the ad revenue. And as far as I know no such angle exists. Your agreement with YouTube never specifies that they must do either of these things, they just can if they want.
Where the law would come into play is if you made a "lets play" video with a Nintendo game and hosted the video on your own site. Then Nintendo would have to make a legal claim to you to take it down or try to strike an agreement directly with you to take revenues. Then you could try to go to court over that. Also note if you want to try this, better warn your ISP ahead of time because Nintendo will likely prefer to try to get your ISP to agree to shut you down instead of actually taking you to court. |
I developed <<instrument>>, you will pay me royalties on any money made from performances of <<instrument>>.
Similarly, you could make the comparison to plays. Typically, any expectations regarding production rights starts from the writer. We paid what is essentially an advance. Now, with ambiguity on the terms of performance royalties (namely nobody ever saying anything about them) on any performances, contract laws would be in our favour, seeing as they are trying to lay claim after the fact, and with no prior expectation. Further, nobody is making any attempts at claiming authorship over the production or narrative, merely putting on a performance and letting the obvious speak for itself, in that they are doing this performance along that narrative, and in that framework. |
This is probably what is going to happen.
However, you need to see this from Nintendo's viewpoint too: there are a few let's players that make a lot of money by playing through an entire video game just with their commentary included over playing a video game. This isn't exactly fair-use... These video games are copyrighted content, after all.
Most let's players do not make much ad revenue at all, but there are some that do. These are what Nintendo is interested in because these people are making sizeable change by inserting a commentary track over their gameplay. How much original work is actually contained within? Do people watch these videos more for the gameplay or the commentary? Few people will watch a let's play with no commentary (that's basically a walkthrough), and few will just listen to commentary with no video. For most people to be interested, they have to be included together.
Should it be fair for someone to use Nintendo's copyrighted content with their own audio track dubbed over it to make a living ? Some might say it's petty jealousy to argue that it's unfair, but really -- is it fair to Nintendo? Probably not. Nintendo is exercising copyright claims now - they want money that's being created from their content. Nintendo could have just started getting YouTube videos pulled instead of monetizing. They could have just expressly forbidden let's plays of their games like Sega, Capcom and Konami.
I personally don't feel that people should be making a lot of money by adding a commentary track over gameplay, but I don't feel like Nintendo should be trying to pull the money away from these people, either. Why can't we make let's plays about the game instead of about the money? I think that's what's really important. |
Man, I love all this babies in this thread! Cry more!
Instead of blocking content for users, which is what companies normally do when it comes to protecting their IP, Nintendo is choosing to advertise and receive income from videos featuring their IP for a certain length of time. Although the length of time is unclear, the main people who will be affected are LP'ers. An ad before and after the videos seems relatively reasonable.
It's funny how the people in here are jumping to conclusions based on their knee jerk reactions. The article treats Nintendo's move like it is blocking all content, and that everyone including their mothers will no longer be able to use Nintendo's IP because of some bullshit reason when that is simply not true. Nothing for the average user is going to change. You can still use your Zelda sound bytes in your shitty videos without the fear of Nintendo's long dick hovering over you. |
Now you're just nit-picking. Companies behave however their corporate leaders tell them to behave. Valve software doesn't do something like this, because they have a marketing team that knows the company's goals. Nintendo also has a marketing team, and that team has very different goals (as evidenced by this, and by the fact that nintendo has been doing similar things for years).
Their management could change leadership of their marketing team, they could do things to prevent actions like this. They did not. Thus the "brain" of the corporation decided on this. |
However, Nintendo's perspective isn't insane. Imagine if you compared someone uploading a gameplay video and made revenue from it with, say, someone who uploaded a recut film (or really, anything that uses footage from something they did not themselves create) and then made a bunch of ad revenue on it. Is it unreasonable from Nintendo's (or the film company's) perspective to say "hey, you didn't really make that content, we did, you just played it and made money off our work!"? I mean, clearly Nintendo cares about making good games (most of the time), and making good games costs money. Why should someone else make money off of a product they created? |
We're left with people who do it to show off a game because they want to share it with others. This is the way Let's Play was done 6-7 years ago when it started, before people ever dreamed of making money off it. I'm not one for nostalgia trips, but people won't stop making quality LPs, they'll just do it because they love to, not to just play the game of the week whether they enjoy it or not.
I really don't mind people making money off it, but it was always a grey area and I would hope they'd have realized that going into it. It's within Nintendo's rights to do it at the very least. They're not even banning channels. It's simply up to the LPer whether they really like the game and genuinely want to share it with others or if suddenly it's not something worth doing. As an example, I know Chuggaaconroy is still going to do Nintendo games in spite of this news, and those are most of what he plays. He clearly loves doing it for its own sake and doesn't see it as just another revenue stream. |
I don't watch WTF Is... because I always feel like I still have more questions about the game. For a series called WTF Is... it didnt really help me. And even when I knew what a game was and just watched one of his videos out of curiosity I was unimpressed and always wondered how he got so popular. For example, his Binding of Isaac video is 12 minutes long, he says it's too gross to play and stops, and I could tell by the comments that people who watch TB exclusively didnt really get it. And it just annoys me personally that whenever anyone makes a thread about a game, there's always a link to the TB video as if he has the definitive opinion.
But I have to say I was really impressed by this video. I've been leaning more on Nintendo's side since they have every right to do this regardless of it being a good decision or not, but the way TB presented everything really ended up working to change my mind. I got more out of his 30 minute video than I have reading 3 reddit threads on the matter. Maybe I just had some bad first impressions of him based on select videos I've watched and his fans thinking his opinion is the only one that matters. |
I acctually think this isn't as bad as most seem to think. One positive effect will be that big youtubers (whos main interest is monetary gain) will make less (or no) Nintedo based videos.
This won't effect smaller youtubers though. Those who are doing the Videos for the fun of it, will keep going. And while the supply will drop, the demand will most likely stay the same, which will lead to an increase in views for smaller Youtubers.
For the viewers it's probably a mixed bag. Ads can be blocked so the annoyance is a minor one. Your favorite youtuber canceling their series is a bigger issue. But ultimatley you might discove someone new, which turns out even better. |
Legal issues of fair use or not, it's still stupid on nintendo's part. Like your example with minecraft, most of the games I buy are games I've seen on LP's and that I enjoy and want to try experiencing the game myself. It literally is free advertising.
The problem is, when you take away the ad revenue from the channels posting it, then you're taking away an incentive to make the videos. And you're also taking money away from them which could be used to buy better materials to make better videos. |
I mean, it passes the tests for fair use which, to be honest, can be pretty easy in some cases (i.e. testing for commentary/parody/review is not hard to pass legally). I dunno why everyone on here is on the fence whether or not LP's are good - that's largely irreverent when it comes to the law and fair use protections. Plus, letting Nintendo do this sets a grim precedent for all other kinds of fair use protections that are already under attack today. |
Let's be honest. With their current gaming systems selling like they are, they're just desperate for the extra cash to stay afloat until they can fix this mess they've created for themselves. As much as they like to think that the system is all about the game and not the power, this day in age people know a lot more about these machines. They know that the Wii U is going to be wildly underpowered when the new Xbox and PS4 come out.
And if you must stick to the "its about the game" slogan, then for god sakes have some good games! Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wii U is still waiting on some of the best Nintendo titles like Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart, etc. And the 3rd party games are extremely lacking. |
Well the short answer is that its not. But that doesn't tell the whole story.
Obviously what they are doing is something they have every legal right to, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. By doing this they remove the motivation for people to post videos, which means instead of getting more revenue from all the videos that are posted, people just wont post videos.
Now that doesn't hurt them directly, because even if the revenue from videos goes down by say 60% (completely made up number) after they take over the rights and don't let the people making the videos earn money, they still earn some money. And as most of us know, some money is better then no money.
However, they are hurting themselves, because the videos that were being made were essentially like free advertising, directly to the people they wanted to advertise too. With less videos, they get less free advertising. In addition, they have lost some goodwill from their fanbase and their consumer base, this will probably hurt them the most in the long run if it becomes an issue that people care passionately about.
I don't have the numbers and am too lazy to do the calculations right now, but in general, the goodwill of your fanbase, and free advertisement of your product are worth far more then the ad revenue from YouTube videos that will likely greatly reduce in number. |
Colonists are a nonstarter. Of course we will need people to go to Stay but in the coming decades of space development we need people who will go to many places and do multiple things. The next 10,000 astronauts will be flexible generalists able to apply their skills repeatedly under changing missions. Even if you retire on Mars as an old sundog, you'll have been to Luna, LEO, L1, Deimos, Phobos, Ceres, some failing SPS relay, maybe Europa if foolish enough.
Politico-technically sending people up then down another gravity well permanently is problematic. MarsOne is an international nonprofit, they will be somewhat relying on govt. financing. This kind of thing is always going to be considered a "suicide mission". One Way To Stay is good eventually but we need immense amounts of infrastructure in place before permanent colonists. Destinations are important and generalists working in orbit and dirtside will build them.
MarsOne's plans are as valid as MarsHome and others but they all assume an economic advantage to being under a gravity well. Gravity wells are something of a hinderance in a data/electricity-centric economy |
When the key patents for 3d printers expires why not send thousands of those and pre-program them to build robots while there, use those first generation bots to gather materials to build another type to further propagate other robot types to facilitate all the jobs. |
not a Libertarian, but allow me to explain:
the internet is based off the idea that people know what is right for them and can decide, without unnecessary government interference, what content is right for them and what they should pay. In academic circles, this concept is referred to as "Classical Liberalism" aka what us modern folk consider "Libertarianism".
a few examples:
A "Socialist" view of the internet would assume that the government has the right to censor things that might hurt people; aka CP, pirated films, Gore, pornography, pirated CP gore pornographer and so forth.
An "authoritarian" view is an expansion of this, which would allow the government to ban any sort of "radical" or "degenerate" content not in line with official rules.
A "communist" view states that there is no such thing as "property" and anyone on the net can decompile pictures or code and reupload it (this is somewhat similar to the BSD format, unless I am mistaken)
An "anarchist" view (not Anarchism is NOT the same as Libertarianism) states that those who have the power to control the net should be allowed to control it without any sort of check.
A "corporatist" view (note, do not confuse Corporatism with Libertarianism) states that large corporations, aka Industry Associations (like the MPAA) working with government agencies (like the NSA) should control the distribution of content on the net to ensure that the net is both safe and informative (in theory, at least) |
This post is a little naive. Others have made some decent arguments, but I don't really have the time to flesh a good response out.
This one sentence here in particular:
> This would essentially mean that the company would profit $15K/month
That's not profit. You just got enough money to pay one network engineer, for a $1M investment. You will never make a dime off that investment, and eventually start losing money as salaries go up. Nevermind that senior level guy probably won't have time/want to go out to homes and splice fiber when it breaks, deal with grandma who doesn't know which icon to click, etc.
Such a scenario is far too complicated and impossible to implement, without making the Internet a basically government run piece of infrastructure. Competition will be even less.
You only see as a consumer the "last mile" ISPs - but as an industry that's just a portion of the whole network. In places where there isn't the whole running cables to houses problem, there is very strong competition. Buy bandwidth at a carrier neutral datacenter today - you'll get 20 competing offers, and be paying $.50/Mbps. If you start regulating the cost to consumers, you will see this competition go away and the backbone providers consolidate into 2 or 3 major companies that "compete" a lot like wireless providers do today.
The issue is really all in how our last mile was delivered. I agree it's a major problem, and ideally I'd like to simply see neighborhood/city level local "exchanges" where each house gets a pair of fiber run into - and you can connect to any ISP that feels it's in their best interest to put a PoP there. This would breed competition, but would require the government (or some crony company) to run the physical layer 1 infrastructure to the home. A dubious prospect at best.
I would anticipate the only thing your solution would do is continue to raise the barrier of entry to any competition, while the incumbents simply play the regulatory game to their advantage. Plenty of history supports this argument.
You are also completely ignoring the fact that we got the network we have today because a bunch of nerd kids were able to not worry about giant data bills coming to their house while they played around, goofed off, and learned. If I actually had to pay for my use when I was a kid in terms of phone line minutes (vs. a $25/mo unlimited line) I would have not been able to do the work I do today. Your pricing model would have a chilling effect on future innovation. If I have gige to my home, and I screw up a piece of code - I could easily burn 10,000GB in a single day and now be stuck with a $100 bill. Now I'm a kid, and not paying attention and my parents get a nice $3,000 bill at the end of the month. You think I'm ever allowed on the Internet ever again? And no, the incremental cost of me burning that bandwidth is probably much lower - because the network needs additional capacity as it is. A cost of one GB is essentially free at 2am. Data is not electricity, and should not be billed like it is. Network capacity is the only thing that costs money - it either sits there idle or at 100% - costs the exact same amount either way.
I think the idea is backwards. I want kids running servers off 10ge lines at home, experimenting with the latest and greatest and not worrying about massive internet bills. I don't want the chilling effect metered billing gets you, because the Internet is only just starting in terms of innovation. Imagine the stuff we could do if everyone had unmetered gige to the house? It'd be the only data line anyone would need, and services you can't even imagine would exist within a decade. |
Piggy-backing on the top comment because I don't think anyone will see this otherwise now that the OP is 13 hours old: I believe it was in the 90's when the Ma Bells were forced to break up in to Baby Bells over anti-trust and monopoly concerns, but with the concession that they could become MSOs (multi-service operators) and start offering information services (internet) on top of common carriage services (phone and TV) (and, conversely, all the newly popping up ISPs could now do the same, offer common carriage services in addition to information services, aka, offer phone and TV). This was done to encourage competition where municipalities had granted oligopolies in the past. After the court's ruling two weeks ago, effectively permitting MSOs to discriminate through information services (despite the blatant fact they also offer common carriage on the same infrastructure!), doesn't that mean the MSOs (all the big companies, like Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, etc) should be forced to break up their business units? Their pipes supply both common carriage AND information services (and who is kidding who?, it's all packet based now anyways). Either classify all the MSOs as common carriers because their infrastructure is dual-purpose, or break them up. That's my two cents, and if I were the FCC that's what I'd be championing - you want to discriminate, then play by the actual rules you've lobbied for and drop your common carrier services, which do not permit discrimination. |
rant>
As a computer science major and programmer, I feel the language would just be a the jack of all traits, never being really good at one particular thing. This is just one of the many reasons why we have so many different programming languages. Plus who needs additional features that they will never use? It is like having a comb that dispenses ketchup. Sure you have something that can do two things, but now its bulky and larger because it needs to support the additional feature of dispensing ketchup. Also, it is a bit of a big headed statement to say they are working on a level far beyond Google. A part of my reasoning to saying that is first, no one knows what Google is working on until they release it or throw it out to the open source community, but by this time, they already have something better. So ya you can make your web cam turn on by putting in a command, ya so can a ton of programming languages. Or you can map out a bunch of data from some database somewhere, so can a bunch of other programming languages. |
Shitty design and engineering practices
Shitty design and engineering practices being perpetuated by shitty managers who buy shitty books |
Edit: I'm throwing in a little preface here. Sorry about the wall of text, but I'm passionate about this stuff. I hope you can tell that I'm not trying to be an ass here, I just want to discuss.
Oh, I don't doubt that there's some confirmation bias to it, but that's humanity for you. Unfortunately, it's not all confirmation bias. While there were many complaints about the mandate, they ring hollow to me because it was originally a Republican idea brought forth by the Heritage Foundation back in the late 80s. It was also supported by the Republicans in the early 90s when faced with Hilarycare or whatever you want to call it. To be fair, though, I don't believe that many of the notable elected Republicans today actually disagree with nearly as much as they say they disagree with, I think that a lot of it is just them stonewalling Obama based on the infamous meeting around the time of the start of Obama's first term.
As for the real problem, it's not just with provider costs, there are many problems in the system. The way healthcare is handled in the US is a complete mess and the insurance side of it is absolutely disgusting. The insurance companies are driven by a profit motive and unlike other situations where this is the case, the people that are affected by this drive for money are generally not the actual customers. In our system, insurance is typically offered to employees by their employers. Because of this, the actual business arrangement is between the employer and the insurance company. The employer wants to save money on the plan, the insurance provider wants to maximize profits. In that light, it's easy to see that neither of the two sides are heavily invested in the healthcare that's actually provided in the end. What happened because of this is that the insurance companies provide plans that look good, but are filled with all sorts of fine print that is written to avoid payment of claims.
This isn't conjecture, mind you, I worked for a health insurance company. It wasn't rare to come across a claim that had been denied due to a pre-existing condition that was only discovered when a claim was submitted that was large enough to trigger a search for reasons to deny said claim. These pre-existing conditions were typically complete unrelated to the claim in question, they were just used to say that the insured wasn't actually eligible for coverage, so the claim was denied. Fortunately, this has been removed thanks to Obamacare, but there are still plenty of things wrong with the industry and more change is needed. Hopefully more states will soon follow Vermont and for-profit insurance will die the death that it so desperately deserves. |
No worries, good discussion.
> Oh, I don't doubt that there's some confirmation bias to it, but that's humanity for you. Unfortunately, it's not all confirmation bias. While there were many complaints about the mandate, they ring hollow to me because it was originally a Republican idea brought forth by the Heritage Foundation back in the late 80s. It was also supported by the Republicans in the early 90s when faced with Hilarycare or whatever you want to call it. To be fair, though, I don't believe that many of the notable elected Republicans today actually disagree with nearly as much as they say they disagree with, I think that a lot of it is just them stonewalling Obama based on the infamous meeting around the time of the start of Obama's first term.
See, I feel like you're finding reasons to blame Republicans. Yeah, there was a meeting, of course there was, and if it had been a Rep. President, the Democrats would have wanted to stop anything he was pushing through. They even proposed a stop to the shutdown by removing the mandate. They were willing to negotiate but not about that. We have no reason not to take that at face value.
>As for the real problem, it's not just with provider costs, there are many problems in the system. The way healthcare is handled in the US is a complete mess and the insurance side of it is absolutely disgusting. The insurance companies are driven by a profit motive and unlike other situations where this is the case, the people that are affected by this drive for money are generally not the actual customers. In our system, insurance is typically offered to employees by their employers. Because of this, the actual business arrangement is between the employer and the insurance company. The employer wants to save money on the plan, the insurance provider wants to maximize profits. In that light, it's easy to see that neither of the two sides are heavily invested in the healthcare that's actually provided in the end. What happened because of this is that the insurance companies provide plans that look good, but are filled with all sorts of fine print that is written to avoid payment of claims.
Insurance companies can seem shady, yeah. I will never disagree with that. As a 10-year life/health/annuity expert who is licensed in all 50 states and owned my own agency, though, the reason insurance companies must try to save all they can is because, even though they're usually contracted rates, they have to pay out on legit claims. When the providers' charges are too damn high, they have to pay out, meaning that if we capped charges (like CMS has done for every ICD code for PFFS systems in every single county in the country, already done, don't even need to analyze it), then insurance companies could in theory offer cheaper plans and not cut as many corners. Now, let me say, I don't think that anything we do will lower premiums. That said, we're fixing the fact that the hospitals don't get paid by people without insurance, because the reason they claimed to charge 500 bucks for a box of Kleenex is that some patients don't pay. Now with the ACA, in theory, there won't be as many patients that don't pay, but I HIGHLY doubt that the provider cost will go down. That remains to be seen, but I'd bet money that it doesn't.
Also, even if it's fine print, it technically is disclosed what is covered and what is not, and there are people to help explain each and every plan to people who don't understand. Now, I am certainly not going to sit here and say "well it was given to you in writing" like some banker laughing about the way he charged you late fees, because we all know that's bullshit, but there can't be exclusions without a reason, and if you offer a plan that does have exclusions without a good reason, there's no reason those should meet standards for the ACA, which is why I think the provisions fall short. The ACA is squarely meant to pay providers. Insurance companies will not like it IF everyone keeps it and uses it regularly. They're banking on people not affording it, stopping paying, not being covered an then writing off their losses come tax time. They'd be stupid not to be. Pre-existing condition coverage is awesome, however it's really not always affordable, and before-hand if you were denied for a pre-existing condition, you could appeal all the way to an independent review board on the NCIB and generally get that overturned unless your current claim was a direct result of your pre-existing condition. There were always some stipulations. |
Your ideology only makes sense in a vacuum. Truth is your neighbor letting cars rot, leaves pile up, grass unmowed will lower your property values. Meaning your neighbor as part of society has the ability to whack you in the nose without his fist. Being part of civilization means abrogating certain individual rights. |
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