Good CEOs learn how to listen to the people who are generally right, and learn how to disregard people who are generally wrong. The fact is, one person can only do a few things, can process a relatively finite amount of information, and carry in their heads a finite set of facts. In a business, these shift constantly, so the CEO isn't in the position to learn themselves all they need to know.
So what they do is learn who to listen to, and how to make decisions based on *their* knowledge and data.
So in the end, even if you have a *Vonderful* CEO, it really isn't the CEO who is good, but the team which the CEO represents. And yet we routinely reward CEOs as if they were personally responsible for the decisions made in companies, and for the performance of these companies.
The fact is nobody can contribute, on their own, value to a company that is worth ~95 dollars per minute (the average compensation for an S&P 500 CEO).
It reminds me of the calculation we laughed about during the dot-com bubble that if Bill Gates paused to pick up $20,000 dollars on his way into work, and gave it to Microsoft at the desk on his way to the office, that Microsoft would LOSE money on the effort (based on his total compensation from Microsoft / the huge number of hours worked). The idea is that the math put Bill Gates time as being worth upwards of 50,000 dollars for the few seconds required to pick up and drop off something found in the parking lot.
None of this is true. We do not pay CEOs these sums because it is rational to do so. We pay them because largely they decide what they should be paid, and they reward others with huge dollars to agree that they should be so paid.
Good CEO's contribute to a company when they can guide the company, and they can resist sucking their company dry just to pad their own accounts, or to feed their egos, or to pursue their own fantasies.
I obviously have a relatively low opinion of CEOs and the credit we give them, despite being one myself a few times in my career (though never one so successful, so maybe I am just jealous? Nah, that can't be it!).
The music was written by Patty and Mildred J. Hill. The song was "Good Morning to All" and was first published in 1893, in "Song Stories for the Kindergarten".
Very rapidly, other words were applied by many others, as the tune was very catchy. One of the most popular (but far from singular) variations was the "Happy Birthday" words we are all familiar with. The "Happy Birthday" words were published several times with the tune in the following years (in 1918, 1924, and 1933, all without copyright notices).
In 1935 "Happy Birthday to You" was published with a copyright attributed to Preston Ware Orem. This version is identical to those published in 1918, 1924, and 1933 with the exception of the split note for the extra symbol in "Happy Birthday" vs "Good Morning", and the added copyright.
Most likely, the 1935 copyright is invalid, for the Hill sisters had copyrighted "Good Morning to all" in 1909, and that copyright was still in effect.
There have been lawsuits over the song through the years. But getting into them here would be tedious at best.
I don't think the penalties are too great though. Otherwise, Warner Music Group wouldn't be so bold as to claim copyright on the Happy Birthday song, which brings in an estimated 2 million a year on average, largely from licensing to film, TV, and radio due to its central cultural use in almost any birthday setting.
... This is exactly the product I need so I can listen to A Prairie Home Companion (PHC).
Garrison Keillor for whatever reason won't podcast his show. I like the show, but rarely am in front of a radio for the particular 2 hours that it is aired (Saturday early evening, Sunday afternoon). My car radio has no pause button (grrrr) no mechanism to record programs (grrrr) and no mechanism to skip commercials (grrrr) which has made the radio in my car (in my opinion) useful only in its ability to play content I provided it via its audio jack.
But this lets me listen to the handful of shows that refuse to distribute their content in the manor that I require.
Will they lose money as a result? No, at least not as far as my use is concerned. Today, without this product, I listen to none of their content. I contribute nothing to PHC because I can't listen to it. I do contribute to podcasts that I listen to the most.
So now they have a chance for my ear, and for my buck. Before they had nothing. This is a win/win.
Sadly, I doubt those resisting the forces of physics and common sense will see it this way, and will seek their own obscurity with every tool provided by the law.
Just put in the bill that a PERSON (individual or corporate) can be prosecuted under this bill unless it can be proven (by the prosecutor using actual evidence and facts) that the PERSON made 40,000 dollars a year or more in NET PROFIT from the traffic generated by said infringement.
Bottom line? If you post something on YouTube, you are not making any money from it. It isn't commercial. If you have a webpage and you host a link to some content, this isn't necessarily commercial. The fact that *some* money might be involved through ads on a minor amount of traffic, this doesn't make it commercial.
If you are going to define something to be a criminal act, it must be unambiguously criminal in nature. Defining a web page as actually making significant money on infringing content might make the bar, but just hosting links on a site with ads should not.
It doesn't bother me in the slightest that this bar would make it nearly impossible to prosecute anyone. The fact is that criminal acts require proof of actual harm or damage. And the fact is that in the U.S. you should be innocent until proven (with facts and evidence) guilty. You want a lower standard? Then it should be handled as a civil issue.
Well, if they were asking for cash in the mail, yes. If receiving cash in numerous other ways, then no. One of my favorite stories is the one about my favorite Chinese Food restaurant in College Station TX. Loved it, but I always wondered why they didn't have more business.
Until they were shut down, because it turns out their primary business wasn't food, it was money laundering.
Bitcoin by design isn't as likely to be a good money laundering tool given its transaction tracking in the P2P. Much better to open a restaurant.
Data requires studies. Even if you were a heavy user of the Silk Road products, that wouldn't be useful data. You would need their books to determine how much product they were moving. By the nature of their product, I'd guess their data would be hard to come by.
So how does one talk about or estimate their impact? Well, by using the same logic Mike described. And I'd guess Mike is likely to be right. The assertion that someone might be able to work out a bulk deal is likely false. That is because Silk Road would never be able to tell a real opportunity from a sting. Most likely bulk deals would be handled they way bulk deals are handled today, with cash and face to face.
I will respectfully disagree, within the context of World Politics.
In the U.S. we have the Republicans who are the party of the Far Right, and we have the Democrats who are a "Leaning to the Right" party.
Proof:
Democrats run from any position that can be labeled "socialist"
Democrats run away from any position that can be labeled "business unfriendly"
Democrats brag about Welfare reforms they put in place that were in fact designed by Republicans
Democrats brag about their military achievements (those occurring under their watch).
Obama has been even more diligent at prosecuting whistle blowers than Bush, to high Democratic praise
Democrats were just as slow to warm to the Arab Spring as the Republicans
Democrats are seeking to lock down the Internet just as much or more than the Republicans
Lately, I have found it surprising that Democrats can pursue the polices they have been pushing lately, and maintain any support from anyone even slightly supportive of what we call "Leftist" ideals. (You know, them dumb things like human rights, the environment, peace, the welfare of our children, single mothers, minority rights, equality, fairness, protecting the people from corporate interests, etc.)
This court has had a run of truly horrible rulings. Corporations as persons get unlimited speech in political campaigns?
Now willful blindness is the same as knowledge? Doesn't this mean that all patent infringement is subject to triple damages? Because even if you do a patent search that comes up empty, shouldn't you have known anyway?
And what about any company now selling a smart phone? They all know they are infringing on patents... There are too many, and nobody has them all. Doesn't this immediately bankrupt all smart phone companies?
Funny you should say this. Only 21 million bitcoins are possible. The math to find bitcoins gets harder over time, so fewer and fewer will be "found".
So bitcoins are very much like virtual gold. There are only so many of them, and the P2P network tracks their existence and ownership.
No real resource on the earth is any different. We ascribe value to gold, there is only so much gold, and the more we use it for money, the more it is valued (independent of its actual pragmatic value). Here bitcoins are valued as people accept them and use them. They don't have pragmatic value (like gold), but this doesn't effect the lion share of the value of gold which does not derive from its pragmatic value.
What does Bitcoin allow? Well, lots of stuff. You cannot track transactions through third parties, so money can be sent to groups the government doesn't like. Sure, money can be laundered, or looking at it another way, it is itself pre-laundered. But really, you want to earn interest, so you want your money in an account to earn interest, so for large scale laundering, I don't think bitcoin does much.
But bitcoin allows unlimited transfers via email to anyone in the world. That makes Internet gambling easier, porn easier, funding wikileaks easier, funding terrorists easier.
Of course, it also makes buying and selling over craig's list easier, or with any other online merchant. Makes consulting easier. Basically, it cuts out Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Paypal, etc. out of the transaction costs.
On the balance, the advantages of bitcoin mostly favor reasonable and legal transactions, the every day kind of thing we used to do with cash anyway. Only now we can use cash on the Internet. You always could buy sex or drugs with cash, and you can buy sex and drugs maybe with bitcoins. Nothing morally changes just because you might be able to send money over the Internet.
All of this assumes that transactions cannot be tracked, which again, I don't understand.
Bit coins are currently selling between 8 dollars to 9 dollars a bit coin on one of the bigger bit coin exchanges MtGox.com Here is the history: https://mtgox.com/trade/history
The main advantage to BitCoin is that virtual money can be exchanged without any central party controlling the exchange.
This is a truly disruptive approach to money, because there are mathematically a limited number of coins, their production is driven by solving math problems, and transactions are documented via public key / private key signatures.
I remain a bit fuzzy when it comes to how the transaction history on particular coins or parts of coins which are shared over a p2p network cannot be used to track transactions by individuals... But I don't understand everything about how these coins are managed.
It remains that bitcoins are an ingenious melding of the idea of making currency out of a scarce resource and the need to allow digital transactions.
There was no ban on programmable calculators when I was in calculus in 1979 and 1980. So I wrote a routine for my programmable TI calculator that would estimate the area under the curve of an arbitrary function. I used this to test numerically my integrals as I went along.
Was this cheating? Well.... not technically as there were no rules (at the time) broken, but you can't do this today (in most calculus classes).
At the same time, learning how to efficiently check one's work as one goes along was a skill I still use today.
Many here will not be old enough to have watched TI lose so many markets due to their closed systems. The TI 99/4A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A) was a great little device, only TI refused to allow third parties to write code for it.
It died.
TI also had a good horse in the race against the IBM-PC, but again closed system ideas killed that market for TI as well.
TI makes too much money from IP licensing. They just can't imagine the idea of making a product that customers can get behind and make successful.
I have never heard of Reel Grrls before, but because of Comcast I have. And because of their stand, I will donate to them. I can't be alone, and I am sure they will actually come out ahead by taking a stand.
Pout? Don't be stupid. Just because you refuse funding from a proven slime ball doesn't mean you are pouting.
One reason I like reddit .... You can always edit your response! It seems no matter how hard I try, I often post with a glaring grammatical error that I kin only see once I have posted....
Besides, I would sometimes like to add clarifications latter, or delete something I wrote because I misread the previous poster, etc.... All of this adds to the conversation, so I am not sure why we cannot edit our own posts after submission (speaking from a conversational not technical perspective....)
"$142 billion in new economic activity globally by 2013 while adding nearly 500,000 high tech jobs..."
As we are talking about the developing world, we should consider the ratio of money to generated job. The BSA is promoting the idea that you *need* 142 billion to add 500K jobs. 142 billion divided by 500 thousand is roughly 284,000 dollars per job. In the developing world, a job can be created for far less money.
"In 1998 Opportunity International, the global organization [David Bussau] gave birth to, provided loans totalling close to A$50 million to people in 28 countries, thereby creating over 165,000 jobs and benefiting three quarters of a million people." http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0KZH/is_2_12/ai_30216719/
Here in this example, 50 million produced 165K jobs, i.e. each job required 303 dollars to create.
Using BSA's own techniques to estimate job creation, only doing so from a developing country's perspective, the elimination of piracy would create 500 thousand high tech jobs in the developed world by eliminating 469 million jobs!!
So all we have to do is convince the developing world to let us eliminate half a billion jobs in the name of economic growth? That for every thousand jobs we kill in their country, we can create one job for a high tech worker in ours?
What a deal! I can imagine why the developing world hasn't already signed right up!
Thorium power does not produce the heavy radio active isotopes (thus no good for producing weapons) but also the radio active waste is "only" radioactive for hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years.
Thorium power plants can be used to "burn" existing nuclear fuel (converting it into energy and less radioactive waste).
Thorium power plants cannot melt down because you have to actually put energy into sustaining the reaction. Pull the plug and everything stops. Much safer than what we are seeing in Japan.
Thorium power plants would produce much less waste. There is more energy to be had in the Thorium process.
There are 100s of times as much Thorium fuel than uranium.
Con:
Thorium power plants have to be developed. They do not actually exist as a commercial technology today.
Okay, by "stupid", I mean something that doesn't rise to the level of truly evil, but which offends someone or some group that is able to come smashing down on your head.
It remains a matter of perspective whether the actual thing he did is inherently and truly "stupid" or just viewed that way by some people.
On the post: Sony CEO: We Were Hacked By Freetards Who Just Want Everything Free
Re: Re: Re: Re: Freetards? I must disagree
So what they do is learn who to listen to, and how to make decisions based on *their* knowledge and data.
So in the end, even if you have a *Vonderful* CEO, it really isn't the CEO who is good, but the team which the CEO represents. And yet we routinely reward CEOs as if they were personally responsible for the decisions made in companies, and for the performance of these companies.
The fact is nobody can contribute, on their own, value to a company that is worth ~95 dollars per minute (the average compensation for an S&P 500 CEO).
It reminds me of the calculation we laughed about during the dot-com bubble that if Bill Gates paused to pick up $20,000 dollars on his way into work, and gave it to Microsoft at the desk on his way to the office, that Microsoft would LOSE money on the effort (based on his total compensation from Microsoft / the huge number of hours worked). The idea is that the math put Bill Gates time as being worth upwards of 50,000 dollars for the few seconds required to pick up and drop off something found in the parking lot.
None of this is true. We do not pay CEOs these sums because it is rational to do so. We pay them because largely they decide what they should be paid, and they reward others with huge dollars to agree that they should be so paid.
Good CEO's contribute to a company when they can guide the company, and they can resist sucking their company dry just to pad their own accounts, or to feed their egos, or to pursue their own fantasies.
I obviously have a relatively low opinion of CEOs and the credit we give them, despite being one myself a few times in my career (though never one so successful, so maybe I am just jealous? Nah, that can't be it!).
On the post: Is Copyright Needed To Stop Plagiarism?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The music was written by Patty and Mildred J. Hill. The song was "Good Morning to All" and was first published in 1893, in "Song Stories for the Kindergarten".
Very rapidly, other words were applied by many others, as the tune was very catchy. One of the most popular (but far from singular) variations was the "Happy Birthday" words we are all familiar with. The "Happy Birthday" words were published several times with the tune in the following years (in 1918, 1924, and 1933, all without copyright notices).
In 1935 "Happy Birthday to You" was published with a copyright attributed to Preston Ware Orem. This version is identical to those published in 1918, 1924, and 1933 with the exception of the split note for the extra symbol in "Happy Birthday" vs "Good Morning", and the added copyright.
Most likely, the 1935 copyright is invalid, for the Hill sisters had copyrighted "Good Morning to all" in 1909, and that copyright was still in effect.
There have been lawsuits over the song through the years. But getting into them here would be tedious at best.
Hope this helps!
On the post: Is Copyright Needed To Stop Plagiarism?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
On the post: Michael Robertson Tempts Copyright Fate Yet Again With DAR.fm
Okay, skipping the fact that this cannot stand...
Garrison Keillor for whatever reason won't podcast his show. I like the show, but rarely am in front of a radio for the particular 2 hours that it is aired (Saturday early evening, Sunday afternoon). My car radio has no pause button (grrrr) no mechanism to record programs (grrrr) and no mechanism to skip commercials (grrrr) which has made the radio in my car (in my opinion) useful only in its ability to play content I provided it via its audio jack.
But this lets me listen to the handful of shows that refuse to distribute their content in the manor that I require.
Will they lose money as a result? No, at least not as far as my use is concerned. Today, without this product, I listen to none of their content. I contribute nothing to PHC because I can't listen to it. I do contribute to podcasts that I listen to the most.
So now they have a chance for my ear, and for my buck. Before they had nothing. This is a win/win.
Sadly, I doubt those resisting the forces of physics and common sense will see it this way, and will seek their own obscurity with every tool provided by the law.
On the post: People Realizing New Anti-Streaming Criminal Copyright Bill Could Mean Jail Time For Lip Synchers
Re:
Just put in the bill that a PERSON (individual or corporate) can be prosecuted under this bill unless it can be proven (by the prosecutor using actual evidence and facts) that the PERSON made 40,000 dollars a year or more in NET PROFIT from the traffic generated by said infringement.
Bottom line? If you post something on YouTube, you are not making any money from it. It isn't commercial. If you have a webpage and you host a link to some content, this isn't necessarily commercial. The fact that *some* money might be involved through ads on a minor amount of traffic, this doesn't make it commercial.
If you are going to define something to be a criminal act, it must be unambiguously criminal in nature. Defining a web page as actually making significant money on infringing content might make the bar, but just hosting links on a site with ads should not.
It doesn't bother me in the slightest that this bar would make it nearly impossible to prosecute anyone. The fact is that criminal acts require proof of actual harm or damage. And the fact is that in the U.S. you should be innocent until proven (with facts and evidence) guilty. You want a lower standard? Then it should be handled as a civil issue.
On the post: Senator Schumer Says Bitcoin Is Money Laundering
Re: Re: Re:
Until they were shut down, because it turns out their primary business wasn't food, it was money laundering.
Bitcoin by design isn't as likely to be a good money laundering tool given its transaction tracking in the P2P. Much better to open a restaurant.
On the post: Senator Schumer Says Bitcoin Is Money Laundering
Re: Re: Re:
So how does one talk about or estimate their impact? Well, by using the same logic Mike described. And I'd guess Mike is likely to be right. The assertion that someone might be able to work out a bulk deal is likely false. That is because Silk Road would never be able to tell a real opportunity from a sting. Most likely bulk deals would be handled they way bulk deals are handled today, with cash and face to face.
On the post: Senator Schumer Says Bitcoin Is Money Laundering
Re: Re: Re: Re: lol
In the U.S. we have the Republicans who are the party of the Far Right, and we have the Democrats who are a "Leaning to the Right" party.
Proof:
Democrats run from any position that can be labeled "socialist"
Democrats run away from any position that can be labeled "business unfriendly"
Democrats brag about Welfare reforms they put in place that were in fact designed by Republicans
Democrats brag about their military achievements (those occurring under their watch).
Obama has been even more diligent at prosecuting whistle blowers than Bush, to high Democratic praise
Democrats were just as slow to warm to the Arab Spring as the Republicans
Democrats are seeking to lock down the Internet just as much or more than the Republicans
Lately, I have found it surprising that Democrats can pursue the polices they have been pushing lately, and maintain any support from anyone even slightly supportive of what we call "Leftist" ideals. (You know, them dumb things like human rights, the environment, peace, the welfare of our children, single mothers, minority rights, equality, fairness, protecting the people from corporate interests, etc.)
On the post: Supreme Court Says It's Still Inducement Even If You Proactively Took Steps To Make Sure You Weren't Infringing
Be Afraid, be VERY Afraid....
Now willful blindness is the same as knowledge? Doesn't this mean that all patent infringement is subject to triple damages? Because even if you do a patent search that comes up empty, shouldn't you have known anyway?
And what about any company now selling a smart phone? They all know they are infringing on patents... There are too many, and nobody has them all. Doesn't this immediately bankrupt all smart phone companies?
On the post: DailyDirt: In Money We Trust
Re: Now we just have to stop
So bitcoins are very much like virtual gold. There are only so many of them, and the P2P network tracks their existence and ownership.
No real resource on the earth is any different. We ascribe value to gold, there is only so much gold, and the more we use it for money, the more it is valued (independent of its actual pragmatic value). Here bitcoins are valued as people accept them and use them. They don't have pragmatic value (like gold), but this doesn't effect the lion share of the value of gold which does not derive from its pragmatic value.
On the post: DailyDirt: In Money We Trust
Re: Re: Bit Coin's value
But bitcoin allows unlimited transfers via email to anyone in the world. That makes Internet gambling easier, porn easier, funding wikileaks easier, funding terrorists easier.
Of course, it also makes buying and selling over craig's list easier, or with any other online merchant. Makes consulting easier. Basically, it cuts out Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Paypal, etc. out of the transaction costs.
On the balance, the advantages of bitcoin mostly favor reasonable and legal transactions, the every day kind of thing we used to do with cash anyway. Only now we can use cash on the Internet. You always could buy sex or drugs with cash, and you can buy sex and drugs maybe with bitcoins. Nothing morally changes just because you might be able to send money over the Internet.
All of this assumes that transactions cannot be tracked, which again, I don't understand.
On the post: DailyDirt: In Money We Trust
Bit Coin's value
The main advantage to BitCoin is that virtual money can be exchanged without any central party controlling the exchange.
This is a truly disruptive approach to money, because there are mathematically a limited number of coins, their production is driven by solving math problems, and transactions are documented via public key / private key signatures.
I remain a bit fuzzy when it comes to how the transaction history on particular coins or parts of coins which are shared over a p2p network cannot be used to track transactions by individuals... But I don't understand everything about how these coins are managed.
It remains that bitcoins are an ingenious melding of the idea of making currency out of a scarce resource and the need to allow digital transactions.
On the post: Waiting 100+ Years For Version 2.0
Re: From the You're-Still-Full-Of-Shit-Department
I am well aware of the limits of the law as it is written, but copyright is enforced beyond just that in practice.
On the post: Texas Instruments Learns Nothing, Goes After Hobbyists Again
Re: Re:
Was this cheating? Well.... not technically as there were no rules (at the time) broken, but you can't do this today (in most calculus classes).
At the same time, learning how to efficiently check one's work as one goes along was a skill I still use today.
On the post: Texas Instruments Learns Nothing, Goes After Hobbyists Again
Ah, if they couldn't learn from the 99/4A ....
It died.
TI also had a good horse in the race against the IBM-PC, but again closed system ideas killed that market for TI as well.
TI makes too much money from IP licensing. They just can't imagine the idea of making a product that customers can get behind and make successful.
On the post: Comcast Pulls Its Sponsorship For Reel Grrls Over A Tweet, Learns How Not To Do PR
Re:
Pout? Don't be stupid. Just because you refuse funding from a proven slime ball doesn't mean you are pouting.
On the post: Should Young People Have Their Votes Count More?
Re: Re: Re:
Besides, I would sometimes like to add clarifications latter, or delete something I wrote because I misread the previous poster, etc.... All of this adds to the conversation, so I am not sure why we cannot edit our own posts after submission (speaking from a conversational not technical perspective....)
On the post: BSA 2010 Piracy Report: It's Back And It's Just As Wrong As Before
As we are talking about the developing world, we should consider the ratio of money to generated job. The BSA is promoting the idea that you *need* 142 billion to add 500K jobs. 142 billion divided by 500 thousand is roughly 284,000 dollars per job. In the developing world, a job can be created for far less money.
"In 1998 Opportunity International, the global organization [David Bussau] gave birth to, provided loans totalling close to A$50 million to people in 28 countries, thereby creating over 165,000 jobs and benefiting three quarters of a million people." http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0KZH/is_2_12/ai_30216719/
Here in this example, 50 million produced 165K jobs, i.e. each job required 303 dollars to create.
Using BSA's own techniques to estimate job creation, only doing so from a developing country's perspective, the elimination of piracy would create 500 thousand high tech jobs in the developed world by eliminating 469 million jobs!!
So all we have to do is convince the developing world to let us eliminate half a billion jobs in the name of economic growth? That for every thousand jobs we kill in their country, we can create one job for a high tech worker in ours?
What a deal! I can imagine why the developing world hasn't already signed right up!
On the post: DailyDirt: Placing Bets On Alternative Energy Technologies...
Re: Nuclear Power the cute way
Thorium power does not produce the heavy radio active isotopes (thus no good for producing weapons) but also the radio active waste is "only" radioactive for hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years.
Thorium power plants can be used to "burn" existing nuclear fuel (converting it into energy and less radioactive waste).
Thorium power plants cannot melt down because you have to actually put energy into sustaining the reaction. Pull the plug and everything stops. Much safer than what we are seeing in Japan.
Thorium power plants would produce much less waste. There is more energy to be had in the Thorium process.
There are 100s of times as much Thorium fuel than uranium.
Con:
Thorium power plants have to be developed. They do not actually exist as a commercial technology today.
On the post: Guy Who Didn't Actually Sing Obscene Song To Kids Gets Jail Time & Restraining Order As If He Did
Re: Re: It is the principle of the thing....
It remains a matter of perspective whether the actual thing he did is inherently and truly "stupid" or just viewed that way by some people.
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