Ask us about the 27 phone calls and TEN DAY DELAY AS WE REACHED OUT TO FIVE CLINICS to get a mohs surgery scheduled for my son, 23, in the bay area, with diagnosed and biopsied melanoma.
The USA medical system is really fucked up. Finally a Canadian in Vancouver hooked me up with a plastic surgeon while on vacation who agreed to end his vacation early and do the surgery in Campbell, CA ( South San Jose )!
Unemployment and CPI : The most false statistics on the planet. Instead, look at employment population ratio 25-54, and core inflation. That will FREE YOUR MIND.
So many times in my career I have seen a problem that could be handled with two lines of code and a table lookup being handled with 40 lines of code and a switch statement. So the guy writing the 40 lines of codes switch statement would get paid 20 times more money!
IBM system/360 OS had more than 50,000 bugs which could not be fixed because fixing any single bug would introduce two new bugs. I fear that a lot of AI software systems will reach the same crapware state as IBM system/360 very very soon!
I know from personal experience that once you fix a bug introduced by Claude, Claude tries to recreate the bug every time he edits that code again!!
On Our maiden voyage aboard spirit, they dumped us halfway home, in las vegas. No compensation, no meal voucher, no overnight accomodation - they just DUMPED US (along with 30 other connecting passengers).
Spirit seems incapable of holding a flight even 5 mins for connecting passengers delayed via spirit's incompetence!
We saw them slam the door 50FT away to our connecting plane as we got off our plane. We watched in horror - our faces against the airport glass - as our next-leg pilot looked up at us and sat on the tarmac 30ft away doing NOTHING for 20 minutes as Spirit told us "nothing could be done" and "you missed your connecting flight" and "see the agent to get DUMPED AND NOTHING, later".
These non disparagement contracts are typical in silicon valley. Databricks offered me a tiny amount of money and expected me to sign when they fired me on a whim after my stock grant quadrupled in 9 months. There was no warning and no review, just fired. They fired my 2 managers within the year, too, probably because they were fools.
I told them to fuck off. I should have continued with the lawsuit, probably.
But in american courts its "heads i win tails you lose" with labor laws - according to my lawyer wins are in the low single digits for discrimination lawsuits.
Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. It costs tens of millions of dollars to drive around san diego in those vans taking traces of a new cellular system design and discovering improvements so that the standard works everywhere else on earth (San Diego is a worst case that's comparable to Hong Kong.). We wouldn't have CDMA cellular. Or LTE cellular. Recall that CDMA cellular was 3x more efficient in bits/second/Hz than 2G/GSM, so that cell phone providers could literally give you a free phone or PAY YOU to throw away your phone and they would still come out ahead, financially.
No standard has ever been developed using money obtained by selling copies of the standard.
The kind of work described by you, which is indeed needed for developing a new communication standard cannot be made profitable by selling copies of a text describing its results.
If such work provides valuable techniques that are necessary for the implementation of the standard, they are patented and those who want to implement the standard for commercial purposes must license the patents.
Any owner of a device that implements a standard has the right to know what the standard does, so all standards should be distributed if not for free only for a small price covering the distribution expenses and not for the prices with many digits that are in use now.
The big prices that are requested for certain standards have a single purpose, to protect the incumbent companies from new competitors, or sometimes to prevent the owners of some devices to do whatever they want with what they own.
The very high prices that are demanded for many standards nowadays are a recent phenomenon, of the same kind with the fact that nowadays most sellers of electronic devices no longer provide schematics and maintenance manuals for them as it was the rule until a few decades ago, in order to force the owners to either never repair their devices or to repair them at a few authorized repair shops, which do not have competitors. These kinds of harmful behavior of the corporations have been made possible by the lack of adequate legislation for consumer protection, as the legislators in most countries are much less interested in making laws for the benefit of their voters than they are interested in things like facilitating the surveillance of the voters by the government, to prevent any opposition against unpopular measures.
In the more distant past, there was no way to download standards over the Internet for a negligible cost, but you could still avoid to pay for a printed standard by consulting it in a public library and making a copy. There were no secret standards that you could not access without paying a yearly subscription of thousands of $, like today.
Most of the development costs are recouped through licenses on the base-stations and somewhat on the very low patent licenses per chip/device, not the price of access to the standard.
Back to the the HDMI standard, the licensing fee has already been paid by the hardware manufacturer. Restricting software is unnecessary, as the patent license fees have already been collected on the device.
In the telecom world, that would be a pretty terrible business model, as the list of entities who would need a copy of the standard is relatively short.
> The people developing standards are in the business of developing standards
Are they? Usually these standards consortiums are composed of the companies that develop products based on the standards, where their products gain value from having a standard (a Blu-ray player and a TV with no way to connect them together is worth less). Even if they couldn't gatekeep the standards they would still have developed them out of necessity.
There is no business developing standards. All the technical parts are written by engineers from the various companies wanting to implement the standard. All that's left for the standards association is to host a mailing list and potentially organise some in-person meetings. And hosting the resulting PDF doesn't exactly cost $4000 / download either.
That's what patents are for. The handful of standards that actually cost money to produce (i.e. MPEG, 3GPP, LTE etc) have patent holders that are specifically required to provide "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" licensing terms. If paywalling the spec paid for those standards we wouldn't have had a decade of HTML5 video not specifying a baseline codec.
Yeah, I'm curious about this too. I would think that making a standard freely available (and at most doing what NVMe does where you pay membership dues) would make the standard be adopted far more universally than putting up weird barriers to even access the standard.
Honest answer (since your not trolling): The difference is more of time than anything else. If I somehow find $5000 to buy access to the PCIe spec, my understanding is that it's per access request. NVMe doesn't charge at all for their specifications; instead, you can join for just $500 per year last time I checked.
I don't think the fee to get access to the standard is generating much income for anyone. Most of what your talking about seems to be money made from licensing of the technology, right?
Bad example, the 3GPP standards are not at all closed like HDMI 2.1 is, unlike HDMI 2.1 there are open source implementations https://osmocom.org/projects
My wife is obsessed with a woman in Scandinavia who makes videos glorifying cottage life in the wilderness in Scandinavia ... I guess this is similar ...
See also depictions of vaguely European historical trappings in anime, especially as in Miyazaki’s works, a variety of shojo manga and anime since the 70s, and many isekai settings.
“Representations of Europe in Japanese Anime: An Overview of Case Studies and Theoretical Frameworks”. Mutual Images Journal, no. 8, June 2020, pp. 47-84, https://doi.org/10.32926/2020.8.ara.europ .
An especially interesting quote from the above:
> According to Frederik Schodt, Jaqueline Berndt, and Deborah Shamoon, the European settings, depicted in the 1970s shōjo series took the role of a remote idealised elsewhere with a strong exotic appeal, radically different from Japanese society and reality, where the recurrent conventions of the shōjo narratives were developed. Some of these themes, like the deconstruction of the feminine subject and the development of transgressive romantic stories (which contain incests, infidelities, idyllic and allusive sexual scenes or homosexual relationships), were hard to conceive in the Japanese society of that moment, which enabled the European setting with a range of creative possibilities due to the depiction of foreign cultures (Schodt, 2012 [1983]: 88-93; Berndt, 1996: 93-4, Shamoon, 2007, 2008). Such a use and depiction of Europe fits with what Pellitteri has coined as the “mimecultural” scenario of anime, a mode of representation present in those anime series that adopt contents, settings, and other visual elements from different cultural backgrounds to develop their original narratives and plots (2010: 396). [italics added for emphasis]
The concept of “mimecultral” aspects of anime and manga is not new to me, but that phrasing itself is, and it reminds me of Dawkins’ conception of memes.
The USA medical system is really fucked up. Finally a Canadian in Vancouver hooked me up with a plastic surgeon while on vacation who agreed to end his vacation early and do the surgery in Campbell, CA ( South San Jose )!
reply