Dude, the freedom of speech is not the same thing as the freedom to lie about your identity. That is NOT what the Constitution was meant to protect. But whatever, enjoy your corporate overlords -- you deserve them.
It's not the speech I'm concerned about, it's the astro-turfing. The problem here is when a corporation masquerades as a folksy "grass roots" organization when distributing their speech. Under the current system, you could write a satanist propoganda, and publish under the name of "The Association of Citizens to Elect Mitt Romney". Furthermore, you can do this right before an election, so that the truth of the identity of the author is not revealed until long after the point at which it matters. Not to mention that large corporations will not be severely hurt by a libel suit, and thus are not discouraged from this kind of activity in the future.
Yes. Congress shall make no law. Period. End of Constitution. Right? There are limits to freedom of speech, as the founding fathers well knew. Though if you want to get really technical with it, I could point out that corporations can't speak, since they don't have mouths, and the first amendment only pertains to speech, not written communication. Follow the *intent* of the Constitution, not the letter.
You're serious? This is slashdot.. Probably half of us are developers that have built or worked on one system or another that's made a difference in society. It's not always a big difference, but it's more than the financial market pricks have done for society.
And just how many Apple users know how to write a simple shell script? Or do regular expression matching/text replacement in sed & awk? Or even know how to use vi or emacs?
N, where N is the number of geeks who use OSX because it's a Unix box with a pretty UI and a large third party software base. How many Linux users know how to write a bash script? Probably a larger percentage, but the actual number of them is still fairly small.
You should note that not all techies care about the ideological stuff (or care all that much). All else being equal, I'll choose FOSS over proprietary, but it's not the only thing that factors into my evaluation of software. I love Unix for the command line. I like Apple's design, but not enough to pay $2500 for a desktop (my wife, on the other hand...). And for a development environment, I've become quite fond of the.NET environment. I use all 3 at home, and each fills its niche quite nicely.
It's because of two things.. 1.) It's Unix. All geeks worth their 2 ft. long beards love Unix. and 2.) geeks appreciate good design, even if they believe that sort of work is beneath them.
Facebook was nothing new or revolutionary. There was Friendster way before it came along, Granted, FB was a lot better than MySpace (it's biggest competitor at the time), but that was more due to a failing on the part of MySpace than on the merits of FB. Social networking sites are not really complicated.. Why so much worship, hatred, and jealousy over this?
I scoffed at Microsoft back when I had first graduated college. I got 5 or 6 recruiters trying to get me to interview with them, but I turned them all down because a.) I didn't want to live in Redmond, b.) I didn't want to work 60 hours a week, and c.) the salary was too low. Instead I took a job at a small company in Portland as their sole programmer. I had it really easy there. I had pretty much total creative control, and even spent several hours a week working through courses on MIT OCW, but my career has suffered for it. Now, 5 years later, I should be making about 50% more than I am, but I have to work my way up from the start because I never had any "team" experience.
Maybe because there's a difference between stealing a 99 cent song that you wouldn't have bought anyway vs. defrauding millions of people out of billions of dollars?
People not working? What has the world come to? Thankfully, we have social welfare over here to take care of the mandatory costs of living for those who currently don't want to, or can't work.
...and never was there a worse way to redistribute wealth than welfare checks. It creates resentment on the part of the payers, promotes laziness and/or fraud on the part of the payees, and generally doesn't serve anyone except for the very few who have no other way of living.
Then why do Americans work more hours now than in 1960 for a lower standard of living? Electronics are not the rule when it comes to consumer benefit, they are the exception. The fact is that, though the workers may get some benefit from increased productivity, the lion's share of the benefits go to a few people at the top. The divide between rich and poor right now is greater than it has been in over a century. If that wealth at the top was spread according to actual value to society, 99% of us would be much better off.
If unemployment was static, that would be true. I'll admit that my post oversimplified the problem, but fewer work hours should result in lower unemployment, assuming the amount of work to be done remains relatively constant. One could argue that wages would have to be cut in order to accomodate more workers for the same amount of work. I would, however, contend that low end workers are underpaid, executives are overpaid, and that an adjusted work-life balance could help bring pay back in line with employee worth.
Hrm.. Well at least they're not any worse-off in terms of unemployment, and they get a 35 hour work week and 6 weeks vacation per year.. Sounds like a deal to me!
I think a big part of our problem though is the culture of work. Most people on salary are willing to work 60+ hours per week, because they think that's what they're supposed to do, and that they will get fired otherwise (and they're probably right most of the time). It would be nice to crack down on it, though I can see some problems with the practical application of that, since it relies on workers who are afraid of getting fired to tip off investigators.
The problem is that jobs disappear, and the total amount of work to be done in society is reduced, yet the savings in time and money are never passed on to the workers. This is not a problem with tech, but society in general, and it is a big part on why we have 10% unemployment right now. If we changed to a 35 hour work week, as France did, we could solve the unemployment problem. I'm all for automation, but that reduced work load should be passed on to society in the form of increased wages elsewhere (besides the top 1%) or more leisure time for workers.
Except that, if you're a federal civilian employee (FERS), it's 1.1% * number of years.. So 22% of your salary after 20 years service. That's not all that special.
For bonus points, get rid of excessively generous government employee pensions.
Those are already phased out. I'm a Fed, and the retirement benefits are almost not worth it. There's an extremely small pension if you stay long enough, but most of your retirement comes from what is essentially a 401k (though the call it something else).
True viruses are few and far between in this day and age. A true virus must a.) be able to attach itself to any other executable, and b.) propagate itself to other executables. Most malware these days is spread using a trojan as an attack vector. The closest to a real virus that you're likely to find is the occasional worm that replicates via a remote exploit, but those are also fairly uncommon these days.
Ah, but you see, it is. It's the job of the government to do what's in the best interests of its citizens. And it's in our collective best interest to not be annoyed by blaring commercials. Is it a minor issue? Yes. But it's still an issue.
Yawn. More "teh free market will take care of it!" BS. The fact is, it's in the best interests of the companies to blare their commercials (I'm sure they've done studies and found they get more sales than they lose), and it's in the best interests of the people to have the commercials not be blared.
If people could have "voted with their wallets" to get rid of this BS, they would have. The fact is there are too many idiots who buy things because someone is really, really excited about them on TV, and voting with your wallets results in the lowest common denominator dictating policy.
And for the record, I don't have cable. I watch maybe 3 hours of TV a week, which is about all I have time for when caring for an infant. And I'd really, really like to watch those 3 hours without the constant hassle of blaring commercials.
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Dude, the freedom of speech is not the same thing as the freedom to lie about your identity. That is NOT what the Constitution was meant to protect. But whatever, enjoy your corporate overlords -- you deserve them.
It's not the speech I'm concerned about, it's the astro-turfing. The problem here is when a corporation masquerades as a folksy "grass roots" organization when distributing their speech. Under the current system, you could write a satanist propoganda, and publish under the name of "The Association of Citizens to Elect Mitt Romney". Furthermore, you can do this right before an election, so that the truth of the identity of the author is not revealed until long after the point at which it matters. Not to mention that large corporations will not be severely hurt by a libel suit, and thus are not discouraged from this kind of activity in the future.
Yes. Congress shall make no law. Period. End of Constitution. Right? There are limits to freedom of speech, as the founding fathers well knew. Though if you want to get really technical with it, I could point out that corporations can't speak, since they don't have mouths, and the first amendment only pertains to speech, not written communication. Follow the *intent* of the Constitution, not the letter.
Hrm, I dunno.. Maybe by mixing toxic chemicals into baby formula? The Chineese killed the top dude.. But do you really think the US would do the same?
And who does time if a corporation commits murder?
Beacuse Java, unlike .net, actually scales
So what you're saying is that a giant pool of molasses moves at roughly the same rate as a small pool of molasses?
You're serious? This is slashdot.. Probably half of us are developers that have built or worked on one system or another that's made a difference in society. It's not always a big difference, but it's more than the financial market pricks have done for society.
The problem is, what has the government done that entitles themselves to Google's income?
You mean besides building the internet in the first place?
It's Unix.
And just how many Apple users know how to write a simple shell script? Or do regular expression matching/text replacement in sed & awk? Or even know how to use vi or emacs?
N, where N is the number of geeks who use OSX because it's a Unix box with a pretty UI and a large third party software base. How many Linux users know how to write a bash script? Probably a larger percentage, but the actual number of them is still fairly small.
You should note that not all techies care about the ideological stuff (or care all that much). All else being equal, I'll choose FOSS over proprietary, but it's not the only thing that factors into my evaluation of software. I love Unix for the command line. I like Apple's design, but not enough to pay $2500 for a desktop (my wife, on the other hand...). And for a development environment, I've become quite fond of the .NET environment. I use all 3 at home, and each fills its niche quite nicely.
It's because of two things.. 1.) It's Unix. All geeks worth their 2 ft. long beards love Unix. and 2.) geeks appreciate good design, even if they believe that sort of work is beneath them.
Facebook was nothing new or revolutionary. There was Friendster way before it came along, Granted, FB was a lot better than MySpace (it's biggest competitor at the time), but that was more due to a failing on the part of MySpace than on the merits of FB. Social networking sites are not really complicated.. Why so much worship, hatred, and jealousy over this?
But the irony is that the Daily Show, despite being a fake news show, is still more accurate than Fox News.
I scoffed at Microsoft back when I had first graduated college. I got 5 or 6 recruiters trying to get me to interview with them, but I turned them all down because a.) I didn't want to live in Redmond, b.) I didn't want to work 60 hours a week, and c.) the salary was too low. Instead I took a job at a small company in Portland as their sole programmer. I had it really easy there. I had pretty much total creative control, and even spent several hours a week working through courses on MIT OCW, but my career has suffered for it. Now, 5 years later, I should be making about 50% more than I am, but I have to work my way up from the start because I never had any "team" experience.
Maybe because there's a difference between stealing a 99 cent song that you wouldn't have bought anyway vs. defrauding millions of people out of billions of dollars?
People not working? What has the world come to? Thankfully, we have social welfare over here to take care of the mandatory costs of living for those who currently don't want to, or can't work.
...and never was there a worse way to redistribute wealth than welfare checks. It creates resentment on the part of the payers, promotes laziness and/or fraud on the part of the payees, and generally doesn't serve anyone except for the very few who have no other way of living.
Then why do Americans work more hours now than in 1960 for a lower standard of living? Electronics are not the rule when it comes to consumer benefit, they are the exception. The fact is that, though the workers may get some benefit from increased productivity, the lion's share of the benefits go to a few people at the top. The divide between rich and poor right now is greater than it has been in over a century. If that wealth at the top was spread according to actual value to society, 99% of us would be much better off.
If unemployment was static, that would be true. I'll admit that my post oversimplified the problem, but fewer work hours should result in lower unemployment, assuming the amount of work to be done remains relatively constant. One could argue that wages would have to be cut in order to accomodate more workers for the same amount of work. I would, however, contend that low end workers are underpaid, executives are overpaid, and that an adjusted work-life balance could help bring pay back in line with employee worth.
Hrm.. Well at least they're not any worse-off in terms of unemployment, and they get a 35 hour work week and 6 weeks vacation per year.. Sounds like a deal to me!
I think a big part of our problem though is the culture of work. Most people on salary are willing to work 60+ hours per week, because they think that's what they're supposed to do, and that they will get fired otherwise (and they're probably right most of the time). It would be nice to crack down on it, though I can see some problems with the practical application of that, since it relies on workers who are afraid of getting fired to tip off investigators.
The problem is that jobs disappear, and the total amount of work to be done in society is reduced, yet the savings in time and money are never passed on to the workers. This is not a problem with tech, but society in general, and it is a big part on why we have 10% unemployment right now. If we changed to a 35 hour work week, as France did, we could solve the unemployment problem. I'm all for automation, but that reduced work load should be passed on to society in the form of increased wages elsewhere (besides the top 1%) or more leisure time for workers.
Except that, if you're a federal civilian employee (FERS), it's 1.1% * number of years.. So 22% of your salary after 20 years service. That's not all that special.
For bonus points, get rid of excessively generous government employee pensions.
Those are already phased out. I'm a Fed, and the retirement benefits are almost not worth it. There's an extremely small pension if you stay long enough, but most of your retirement comes from what is essentially a 401k (though the call it something else).
True viruses are few and far between in this day and age. A true virus must a.) be able to attach itself to any other executable, and b.) propagate itself to other executables. Most malware these days is spread using a trojan as an attack vector. The closest to a real virus that you're likely to find is the occasional worm that replicates via a remote exploit, but those are also fairly uncommon these days.
Ah, but you see, it is. It's the job of the government to do what's in the best interests of its citizens. And it's in our collective best interest to not be annoyed by blaring commercials. Is it a minor issue? Yes. But it's still an issue.
Yawn. More "teh free market will take care of it!" BS. The fact is, it's in the best interests of the companies to blare their commercials (I'm sure they've done studies and found they get more sales than they lose), and it's in the best interests of the people to have the commercials not be blared.
If people could have "voted with their wallets" to get rid of this BS, they would have. The fact is there are too many idiots who buy things because someone is really, really excited about them on TV, and voting with your wallets results in the lowest common denominator dictating policy.
And for the record, I don't have cable. I watch maybe 3 hours of TV a week, which is about all I have time for when caring for an infant. And I'd really, really like to watch those 3 hours without the constant hassle of blaring commercials.