sheepleherd

I'm not an expert but I believe the industry gets paid a chunk for "radio play" in general (and things like radio play) on a per station/location basis, and then that chunk gets divided up not on the basis of what was actually played, but on the basis of how popular it is. Not saying it works, but that type of scheme sort of works for the hits, and much less well for obscure music, but obscure music probably does not get played too much.

but anyway, something like that is how they'd get paid for music they don't own.

These arrangements were worked out back when "radio" was "disrupting" the live music and recorded music industries, and people were trying to "monetize" the "eardrums"

the math is amazing.

Convolution integral, Laplace transform, Z transform, frequency domain, impulse response, step response, digital filters... it's all amazing.

So, you think that hiring smart people is a good idea, and you think that people who do well on IQ tests are smart, and you think that people who are not smart do poorly on IQ tests, but you are adding that there are some additional smart people who don't do well on IQ tests, and you are rightfully concerned because you consider yourself to be one of them, and you think there are laws that put the burden of uncovering these people on private employers? I'm not sure that's true, but anyway, just wanted to clarify.

Out of curiosity, this is a serious question: are you a programmer and if so does dyslexia cause you problems coding? lots of library functions can have confusingly similar names and spellings for me, and I don't have any reading problems.

sorry if I offended you, I was making a point in debate-style, I wasn't attacking you.

I also sense that you are not a native speaker of English: so, just mentioning, what you wrote comes across in English as very "there is only one way, the way I am saying". It sounds like you didn't mean it that way, so sorry it triggered, when I saw that debate blip on my radar screen, I decided to shoot it down :)

you sound like a libertarian invoking libertarian principles which I don't agree with so I don't see the "obviousness" of it that you see.

Even if Blizzard hired Howard Roark himself as their architect, seems to me I should be able to make alterations to the design of my own building in which I wish to park a Howard Roark designed car, no matter how angry it makes Howard, Eugene, and Blizzard.

And a court may rule in my favor even if you seem to think I should take your word on it, from your perspective of the zany libertariangasm you guys get from thinking about the ownership of ideas and not having anybody tell you what you can't do so long as you get to tell other people what they can't do.

nice try, Nathan.

Intellectual Ventures charges money for licensing, nothing free about it. I'm not saying they should be free, just saying they aren't.

he quotes Frost, but I don't see why he thinks "remaining a programmer" is "the road less taken". In most hierarchical promotion systems, one is chosen to lead many... leadership is always the road less taken, even if it is the road most desired.

um, no?

they raided his house because of child pornography.

that he had a Tor node and that fact got him off the hook is the part that needs more analysis. How do we know he doesn't operate the node for the very purpose of watching kiddy porn go by? Shouldn't everybody interested in child pornography operate their own exit node just for this purpose? Keep the kiddy porn collection in RAM for viewing whenever, then give the police the in-RAM-kiddy-porn-deleter password...

I understand that ghkbrew (and MANY other people here, not picking on you) subscribe to the idea that there should be untraceable currency, perfect privacy delivery mechanisms, etc.

But there are other people who live in the same democratic country that like the idea that somebody who bombthreats can be found.

I understand the issues on both sides, and I don't mind there is a spectrum of beliefs and a discussion. But it's so annoying when people write posts slanted like yours that they don't acknowledge the obvious "other side".

I read/heard something that David Mamet said, that he learned from the study of Jewish law (but it would apply everywhere) that in order for you to have the basis to discuss an argument with the other side, you need to be able to state the other side's argument in a way that the other side would not disagree with, then you get to make your point.

I thought that was a nice idea.

per capita, NYC has the smallest carbon footprint in the country.

increasing the population density of existing cities is the most responsible thing we could do, and beyond that, yes, more cities.

It is sad (to me) that your comment has kicked off such spirited reply discussion, and it's all of limited value in evaluating the point made by the Economist article.

It's just not true that cash on a balance sheet is idle. Corporate cash sits in bank accounts, and banks use balances to leverage their business. It feeds the banking system, and gets redeployed as debt rather than as equity.

And if there are economic opportunities waiting for equity, that just means it's cheaper to invest in which should attract more investment capital, even if it doesn't come from corporate balance sheets or banks: there are plenty of rich people and rich institutions looking for places to invest their cash (see below). You simply can't draw conclusions as you have done the way you are doing it.

But the Economist is making a good case for what they are saying. So let me try to translate it into terms that the average HNer can understand: what you all call "unicorns" (what you all strive to create) represent successful business models that are actually terrifically bad for competition, and therefore terrifically bad for the economy. We should not be rooting for them to succeed.

Bill Gates did not create the personal computer revolution, he didn't really foster it, he simply monopolized it, and inasmuch as he did, it was bad for the economy. Compare what happened in software to what happened in hardware: actual competition has wrung all the profits out of "IBM compatibles": that was a good thing for consumers and the economy.

That mantle has now passed to Apple (after Apple basically failed during the period of Microsoft hegemony). Again super premium prices supported by proprietary means. Do consumers benefit from Apple's closed ecosystem? No, not from the closed part. We benefit from Apple's positive feature contributions, but that doesn't mean we should be willingly allowing Apple to capture so much of the consumer surplus (the "good stuff" about a product, measured in dollars) using what are known to be anti-competitive tactics. Why should Apple own "network effects" of standards for music or software distribution?

[trigger warning, sexual assault metaphor] Now before all the Apple fanboys and libertarians join forces and start submitting replies to me about how morally right it is that Apple be allowed to economically rape consumers, consider simpler cases.

The Uber business is simple to grok. So is Ebay's, so is Paypal's, so is Facebook's, so is Twitter's. These businesses are based on what we used to call "protocols", stop worshipping the founders as if they did something more amazing than right place/right time. SMS is a protocol. So is HTTP. When companies don't "own" them in the sense of owning the customer, customers benefit. When companies are allowed to "own" them in the sense of owning customers, customers do not benefit anyhwere near as much as we all can.

Think back to caveman times: the first guy to invent the bow and arrow did something really cool. And he benefited from it, tremendously, by catching a lot more deer and eating better. Wasn't that enough? would it have been better if nobody could copy him without paying him a tribute?

Apple's profits from the app store, Amazon's ownership of one-click shopping (whether due to the patent or not) should be compared to Twitter's ownership of short message broadcasts: tweeting will no doubt be ruined as something fun/useful if Twitter successfully figures out a way to monetize, and Twitter itself will be ruined if they don't. But that dichotomy is a false one based on the idea that Twitter should own short message broadcast: it's a simple useful protocol, the value in it is the value people put into their tweets, not that somebody thought of it. Thank god nobody owned HTTP, so could you all stop rooting for somebody owning short message broadcast? Fuck unicorns, they suck. Sure, Twitter thought of it first. So what? It wasn't much to think of. Same with Paypal. Sure they put in a lot of work, after thinking of a fairly basic idea. Did they make something great? Do you use Paypal routinely to exchange small amounts of money? No, you don't, because Paypal sucks and has always sucked because the goal of Paypal was to monopolize a business rather than create a useful payment system.

Thinking is something humans do, and we could just as easily say that if you don't want people copying your idea, keep it to yourself. If you don't want me humming Happy Birthday, don't teach it to me. But plenty of humans will think of neat things and teach it to others because that's what we do. billg was just the greedy one of the two, compared to the creativity of paula, just as Jobs was the greedy one of the two compared to the openness and creativity of Woz.

The notion that patent monopolies (to use one example of monopoly) encourage investment is true; however, it's completely unproven no matter how widely it is believed, that they encourage "the right" amount of investment, or even a desirable amount of investment. I'll tell you this: everybody I know who is a smart PhD post-doc researcher gets paid peanuts to try to figure out how to cure cancer, so how come we've set up a system where Wall Street douchebags get rich from pharmaceuticals without even coming up with a cure?

I'm not an "anti capitalist" left wing kook, I'm actually completely opposed to left wing nonsense. In addition to being an engineer, I'm an MBA. I love capitalism, but I love the type that the Economist is proposing, the capitalism of competition. My dry cleaner works his ass off and makes only accounting profit, not economic (unfair) profit, because my dry cleaner competes. Brin and Page as starving students would have been happy to make $10 million from inventing Google, or $100 million, so why should we reward them with scads of billions?

So, am I advocating stupid European regulation, or worse, redistribution? No, not at all. The answer is simple, and I didn't invent it, it's well known. If Google was broken up into 10 little Googles, Page and Brin could own just as much of all of them as they own of the one, nothing would be taken away from them. However, the little Googles would compete with each other, and their profits would be driven down to ordinary, normal, economically stimulative levels, and not stultifying, smothering, economically oppressive levels that stop the next generation of Page and Brin's from being able to compete with their own ideas.

Same with social networking, Zuckerberg would have been happy with getting modestly rich owning one of a number of competitors, we don't have to have a system that makes him the uberlord of one worldwide, only-game-in-town social network, and consumers would benefit from having a marketplace of facebooks, just like consumers benefited from a marketplace of bows and arrows.

I'm sick of unicorns, I'm sick of libertarians, and BTW, I myself am rich (well inside the 1%), well educated (economics and finance!) and smart, my money came from a slice of a monopoly, but I don't pretend that what happened in my case was either my doing or good for the economy. I'm not giving my money away, I like being rich, I'm just saying to the rest of you, stop rooting for unicorns, don't do this to yourselves. Don't advocate for a bigger slice of the economic pie for yourself, that's dumb: just advocate for competition; everybody benefits from lower prices.

You are not coming close to understanding what I'm saying.

I don't think it's instructive to compare public broadcasting with McDonalds (a for profit company), I'd compare them to Wikipedia. Wikipedia goes to great pains to maintain NPOV, and they give away their information product. I think public broadcasting should be more like Wikipedia; Wikipedia sets a higher standard for operating in the public interest.

again, I am NOT and never was making an argument about federal funding. You are.

I'm talking about the public who is according to public broadcasting the biggest portion of their support.

You are making a strawman argument, I didn't say "the public" meant taxpayers, I was talking about the "the public" in National "public" Radio and the "public" Broadcasting System, and the federally funded Corporation for "public" Broadcasting.

And in any case, your clarification is baloney, you are either being fooled by NPR's accounting sleights of hand, or you are helping to propagandize it. Federal money does in fact flow through public broadcasting's network of "shell" companies such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to local stations to and then to NPR. Here is an article on PBS.org about Congress potentially cutting funding to NPR. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/us-house-votes-to-cut-np... Yes, that was 2011, but the same baloney about NPR not receiving direct federal funding was the story back then too.

In any case, my argument that the works of public broadcasting belong under a creative commons license is referring to the same public that the stations bray about endlessly, "you the listener".

If the public pays for NPR, why doesn't the public own the output? ie, why no Creative Commons licensing? Plenty of stuff on the internet is free; NPR is not free, we ALREADY paid for it.

I would appreciate comments about the Creative Commons aspect of this, not quibbles about line items in the budget.

Don't want to go all academic on you all, but what they taught us in school is: "marketing" entails every aspect of interaction with customers, so if customers hear about your product, that's marketing. If you have a product... that's marketing.

The article means to say "promotion" or "advertising" or "PR" or any of a myriad of "marcomm" activities that have a budget, but if you design a product to meet customer needs and bring it to market, you are marketing your product. If you think marketing has a negative connotation, you're doing it wrong, same as if your product is poorly designed or dangerous or simply ineffectual.

Approach your marketing program from the point of view of "meeting customer needs".

I frankly never believed Jobs's story about "auditing" the typography class.

Back in the day, there was a lot of worry in the computer industry about getting sued for copying "look and feel" of software developed elsewhere. I think Jobs story about being all about fonts was conveniently "remembered" after he visited Xerox PARC and determined that Apple should build on the WYSIWYG work PARC had done.

Jobs was a copier (and perversely concerned with being copied, two personality traits that certainly go together in the Freudian sense) and it fits much better that he would see font choices at PARC and suddenly start talking about this course he mysteriously took with no records being kept of it. In his own words from the Reed.edu article, "But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.” ha ha ha yeah right. Too bad the dog ate his original copies.

Props to Rev. Palladino though, sounds like a cool guy even if Steve never took his class.