From one Harvard Study "But after shelling out for four fixed expenses - mortgage, health insurance, child care or education, and car payments - today's median-income family has less left over, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the single-income family of the 1970s."
Now, when you combine this with the fact that Job growth isn't keeping up with immigration you have a serious problem in the US--a problem that appears likey to get worse over time
I think we will see some fundamental, systemic changes to the US economy-changes similar to what the US did under the "New Deal" simply because the problem is getting bad enough that extreme social instability is likely if the problem isn't addressed meaningfully.
The problem is that while there are 1.5 million new jobs, this hasn't kept up with the rate of immigration. Basically the US has 1.5 million new jobs and over 4 million new immigrants since Bush has come into office. Since most immigrants need to work, that means that we have a lot of US citizens either unemployed, on public assistance or downscaled in various ways.
Now, as I understand it, patents only relate when you _sell_ something. This move wouldn't prevent someone from _distributing_ a Linux Kernel free of charge for anonymous download-but it would mean that someone would need to pay Micro$oft if they were going to charge for something and wanted to stay legal.
It also sounds like the main impact in any event will mean that Linux will have to work around the long file name stuff.
I would suggest the conditions in Britain were largely due to the closing of the American frontier in the mid 1800's. Until that point, there was a floor under wages(i.e. British industrialists couldn't pay their workers so little they didn't bolt and risk death and disease on the frontier). The point here is that the order in which advancements move towards nanotechnology are quite important.
I would also suggest folks look at the Nanotechnology timeline Sean Morgan did. Best estimates are this will unfold the next 20 years or so. The nice thing about Morgan's work is that he talks about some of the incremental advancements between now and then.
I was at HP 3.5 years ago-some things change over time. Also, remember, this was before the merger with Compaq--a lot of stuff can be done during a merger/reorganization of the scope to "cook the books".
I would also keep in mind that HP is the recipients of enormous corporate subsidies(this is what Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman calls the H-1b/L-1 visa programs). The value of a single H-1b visa is about $100,000. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been 10,000 H-1b and L-1 visa holders at HP and Compaq.
The only divisions of HP that actually made money when I was there were:
1) Servers
2) Printer Supplies
The rest of the product line was basically dead weight. This strikes me as one more piece of dead weight. HP seems desperate to find something that will make money-desperate enough to do just about anything except create strong incentives for technical excellence.
A while back, Sean Morgan did the most interesting work I've seen on a timeline and prerequisites for Nanotechnology. At present, odds are that we'll see an assember sometime around 2022.
This process isn't capitalism but corporate welfare. Outsourcing is aided by worker replacement visas like H-1b/L-1 which essentially turn immigration rights into a corporate perk.
Business Practices and Security
on
Real Security?
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· Score: 1, Troll
My experience is that many companies have business practices that stress their security procedures to the extreme. For example, look at Enron. Virtually their entire IT staff were H-1b/L-1 workers from places where they weren't able to do background checks. They had a practice of hiring closeted gay accountants(so they could be blackmailed into doing what management wanted). Then this bunch of managers with degrees from Westpoint and Annapolis(yes, many of their upper managers were from those schools with their honor traditions) wonder why things went sour (and at least $3 billion of the 12 billion in losses wound up in India).
The first key to decent security is building a community in which people have at least a degree of trust and respect for their leadership. If you have that, good security practices can go a long way. If management is playing a negative sum game with their staff and the larger community, sooner or later someone more devious and less honest is going to show up and take over that game. Those that live by the sword die by the arrow.
What is folks take on the accuracy of the Gartner Group's claim that open source content management systems aren't worth considering? (I've known Gartner group to be wrong before-so were they wrong here?) Did MIT actually make a sound business decision here or did they get taken? Somehow, this whole thing seems a little fishy to me-I suspect that someone wasted a bunch of MIT's money here. If in fact the MIT decision was a sound business decision, what would it take to create a solid, open source alternative solution to problems like those that were present in the MIT site?
The public library system strikes me as a grossly underutilized set of infrastructure. I'm glad to hear of IT helping the library system-I suspect that they'll return the favor.
Well, this government is _already_ deciding what kind of art is going to be produced via its mechanisms of copyright laws and patents. The question is whether there are potentially better governmental mechanisms here. I'd like to see a wider range of mechanisms-and metrics for evaluating the success of each.
I tend to think that having congress award grants is a pretty bad mechanism for rewarding artists and inventors-as is completely leaving things up to major corporations. I think it might be interesting to distribute some vouchers to the public or a random subset of the public, empower inventors(patent holders) to reward basic science. I think there is also some room here for using democratic means to establish goals-and have some market-based mechanisms for determining how those goals might be met.
I would suggest that the real signficance of the RIAA isn't the money that it rakes in(which it does)-but the precise mechanisms in which it turns down money. The RIAA folks have an aspect of monopoly power-and within some limits they can promote art that might not be optimally profitable under the present system or surpress art for which there is a real demand. IMHO it would be important to do good analysis here (one of the other participants here, baldrson has done something similar with analysis of films).
Copyright/patents aren't the only way to support artists and inventors. A substantial amount of basic research and art is already funded by government/private grants or prize awards. Those mechanisms could be expanded and formalized-and this would quite possibly involve less overhead than the hiring of armies of accountants, attorneys and MBA's associated with the copyright/patent system. It is really a question of what is the right balance here-and what creates for people the kind of future and culture they want.
The fundamental question is how long can they continue along this path before the public demands a fundamental reform of copyright laws and intellectual property mechanisms.
The simple fact is that the RIAA is a pretty dang poor mechanism for mediating between the public and artists(i.e. the transaction costs are just too high-and this will become more obvious in time). These various court battles having nothing to do with creative effort and everything to do with maintaining power and control.
When I read this article, I was struck by the lack of imagination here. What is it worth to the the industry as whole to see Moore's law continue substantially longer? Is it possible for basic scientific research to "amend" Moore's law so that computing advances using mechanisms fundamentally different than semiconductors? What is the chance that given proper incentives such scientific advances might actually happen?
There are well-established techniques for assessing indeterminate risks in areas like this. The end of Moores law is a risk. Still, what are the major options-and their chance of success. What I'm seeing out of Intel is the level of innovation I might expect from the Post Office. It is worth many billions of dollars to the Intel shareholders to see Moore's law continue longer. Intel has an obligation to its shareholders to organize its resources to make this happen. If Intel can't do this stuff in-house-they could set up prize awards for those that can--and structure those in such a way there is minimal risk to Intel's shareholders. Instead, these folks come off like a general speculating to his troops about the possibility of defeat before entering a major battle.
A company like Intel is virtually a de-facto monopoly. Such organizations can afford basic research-as companies like AT&T and IBM have shown. More importantly, I would suggest that monopolistic companies that _don't_ do quite a bit of basic research find that in time they become objects of considerable hotility and regulation. If companies like Intel aren't going to seriously innovate, then in time, it may eventually make more sense to the public to just turn these functions over to non-innovative bureacracies(which in this case will probably mean a Chinese government-owned manufacturing firm).
What I see here is that in most cases when the suits edge the techs out, the company in question starts to go downhill. The exception might be Microsoft-they've managed to make money even if their products have serious quality and security problems--but that may just be because Microsoft is in a very special niche.
1) raising the age at which people collect pension benefits(to help with the budget).
2) maintaining their own legitimacy by having long life expectencies.
Now, you may have a point with respect to some of the types in the US congress. Still, the Chinese have a long history of their leaders seeking to live a long time-and doing all kinds strange of things in the process. I have trouble believing that a Chinese leader won't try to do what his predecessors have tried and failed at-now that some real solutions are in his grasp.
Historically, major new industries have put new practices in place. Industrialization for example was a major part of the impulse behind universal, cumpulsory education in Germany.
What I read here:
Major portions of the biotech community feel their field would be enhanced by moving towards something more like the Open Source community. The implication of this is that the intellectual property rules may need to change a bit for this to really happen. What might motivate the powers that be to want to make this happen: most wealth/political power in the world is controlled by older folks. Biotech is especially important to the old because biotech has the serious possibility of extending human life spans-and more importantly extending the quality of human life. Basically the political elites have a choice:
Continue playing their games-and die at age 70-85.
Listen to the biotech folks and live comfortably an extra 15-30 years.
I think that the powers-that-be will choose the second choice. We'll see a greater mix in means of rewarding inventors as the biotech revolution develops.
The GPL allows organizations that don't distribute software outside their organization to incur no obligation to distribute source. The GPL also allows people to create a usable system using GPL tools and incur no obligation to distribute source. The RPL is much more viral and was designed specifically to be used in situations where dual licensing would be available(I doubt it would be wise to distribute software under the RPL unless you also have a commercial license also available at modest cost).
I didn't write the RPL(it was written by Scott Shattuck at Technical Pursuit--but I helped with some of the legal research and also helped walk the license through the OSI approval process.
The author assumed that media companies mediate between consumers and artists. Another major factor is that media corporations mediate between both consumers and artists and government. The very existance of copyright laws is a mechanism created by government. Other societies have sometimes used other mechanisms to fund the arts-for example in the old Soviet Union, artists received a stipend from the state. In the 1700's, artists such as Mozart would sometimes find patronage from members of the nobility.
The copyright laws in the United States today go substantially beyond the mechanisms first mandated by the constitution--the concept of "limited time" for Copyrights is getting streched. I personally don't think the Founding Fathers really meant for Copyright to be such a big part of people's lives. Had they understood how information technology would evolve, I think they'd have wanted a substantial mechanism for funding freely available educational and cultural material--just as much as they wanted infrastructure like roads and bridges.
Instead, what we have now are major media monopolies that actively work to get greater concessions from government and media companies that are major recipients of corporate welfare.
Nice approach
on
Javascrypt
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This stuff is nice because Javascript is a very accessible language(i.e. lots of people know it). This is stuff that can be maintained in situations where other approaches aren't really practical.
I'm also glad to see folks doing more with the capabilities within a browser. The folks that are taking this the furthest that I've seen are the folks at Technical Pursuit.
From what I've heard from the folks that live there-the prices aren't in line with the vacancy rate. Some folks are having a real hard time adjusting to reality.
Slashdot Mirror
This was from a CIO of a major insurance company in the early nineties.
Now, when you combine this with the fact that Job growth isn't keeping up with immigration you have a serious problem in the US--a problem that appears likey to get worse over time
I think we will see some fundamental, systemic changes to the US economy-changes similar to what the US did under the "New Deal" simply because the problem is getting bad enough that extreme social instability is likely if the problem isn't addressed meaningfully.
The problem is that while there are 1.5 million new jobs, this hasn't kept up with the rate of immigration. Basically the US has 1.5 million new jobs and over 4 million new immigrants since Bush has come into office. Since most immigrants need to work, that means that we have a lot of US citizens either unemployed, on public assistance or downscaled in various ways.
It also sounds like the main impact in any event will mean that Linux will have to work around the long file name stuff.
I would also suggest folks look at the Nanotechnology timeline Sean Morgan did. Best estimates are this will unfold the next 20 years or so. The nice thing about Morgan's work is that he talks about some of the incremental advancements between now and then.
I would also keep in mind that HP is the recipients of enormous corporate subsidies(this is what Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman calls the H-1b/L-1 visa programs). The value of a single H-1b visa is about $100,000. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been 10,000 H-1b and L-1 visa holders at HP and Compaq.
1) Servers
2) Printer Supplies
The rest of the product line was basically dead weight. This strikes me as one more piece of dead weight. HP seems desperate to find something that will make money-desperate enough to do just about anything except create strong incentives for technical excellence.
A while back, Sean Morgan did the most interesting work I've seen on a timeline and prerequisites for Nanotechnology. At present, odds are that we'll see an assember sometime around 2022.
This process isn't capitalism but corporate welfare. Outsourcing is aided by worker replacement visas like H-1b/L-1 which essentially turn immigration rights into a corporate perk.
(and at least $3 billion of the 12 billion in losses wound up in India).
The first key to decent security is building a community in which people have at least a degree of trust and respect for their leadership. If you have that, good security practices can go a long way. If management is playing a negative sum game with their staff and the larger community, sooner or later someone more devious and less honest is going to show up and take over that game. Those that live by the sword die by the arrow.
What is folks take on the accuracy of the Gartner Group's claim that open source content management systems aren't worth considering? (I've known Gartner group to be wrong before-so were they wrong here?) Did MIT actually make a sound business decision here or did they get taken? Somehow, this whole thing seems a little fishy to me-I suspect that someone wasted a bunch of MIT's money here. If in fact the MIT decision was a sound business decision, what would it take to create a solid, open source alternative solution to problems like those that were present in the MIT site?
I tend to think that having congress award grants is a pretty bad mechanism for rewarding artists and inventors-as is completely leaving things up to major corporations. I think it might be interesting to distribute some vouchers to the public or a random subset of the public, empower inventors(patent holders) to reward basic science. I think there is also some room here for using democratic means to establish goals-and have some market-based mechanisms for determining how those goals might be met.
(one of the other participants here, baldrson has done something similar with analysis of films).
Copyright/patents aren't the only way to support artists and inventors. A substantial amount of basic research and art is already funded by government/private grants or prize awards. Those mechanisms could be expanded and formalized-and this would quite possibly involve less overhead than the hiring of armies of accountants, attorneys and MBA's associated with the copyright/patent system. It is really a question of what is the right balance here-and what creates for people the kind of future and culture they want.
The simple fact is that the RIAA is a pretty dang poor mechanism for mediating between the public and artists(i.e. the transaction costs are just too high-and this will become more obvious in time). These various court battles having nothing to do with creative effort and everything to do with maintaining power and control.
Space settlement is the major activity of immediate practical importance.
There are well-established techniques for assessing indeterminate risks in areas like this. The end of Moores law is a risk. Still, what are the major options-and their chance of success. What I'm seeing out of Intel is the level of innovation I might expect from the Post Office. It is worth many billions of dollars to the Intel shareholders to see Moore's law continue longer. Intel has an obligation to its shareholders to organize its resources to make this happen. If Intel can't do this stuff in-house-they could set up prize awards for those that can--and structure those in such a way there is minimal risk to Intel's shareholders. Instead, these folks come off like a general speculating to his troops about the possibility of defeat before entering a major battle.
A company like Intel is virtually a de-facto monopoly. Such organizations can afford basic research-as companies like AT&T and IBM have shown. More importantly, I would suggest that monopolistic companies that _don't_ do quite a bit of basic research find that in time they become objects of considerable hotility and regulation. If companies like Intel aren't going to seriously innovate, then in time, it may eventually make more sense to the public to just turn these functions over to non-innovative bureacracies(which in this case will probably mean a Chinese government-owned manufacturing firm).
It sounds like Intel has gotten seduced by the lure of indentured servitude and corporate welfare.
What I see here is that in most cases when the suits edge the techs out, the company in question starts to go downhill. The exception might be Microsoft-they've managed to make money even if their products have serious quality and security problems--but that may just be because Microsoft is in a very special niche.
1) raising the age at which people collect pension benefits(to help with the budget).
2) maintaining their own legitimacy by having long life expectencies.
Now, you may have a point with respect to some of the types in the US congress. Still, the Chinese have a long history of their leaders seeking to live a long time-and doing all kinds strange of things in the process. I have trouble believing that a Chinese leader won't try to do what his predecessors have tried and failed at-now that some real solutions are in his grasp.
What I read here:
Major portions of the biotech community feel their field would be enhanced by moving towards something more like the Open Source community. The implication of this is that the intellectual property rules may need to change a bit for this to really happen. What might motivate the powers that be to want to make this happen: most wealth/political power in the world is controlled by older folks. Biotech is especially important to the old because biotech has the serious possibility of extending human life spans-and more importantly extending the quality of human life. Basically the political elites have a choice:
Continue playing their games-and die at age 70-85.
Listen to the biotech folks and live comfortably an extra 15-30 years.
I think that the powers-that-be will choose the second choice. We'll see a greater mix in means of rewarding inventors as the biotech revolution develops.
I didn't write the RPL(it was written by Scott Shattuck at Technical Pursuit--but I helped with some of the legal research and also helped walk the license through the OSI approval process.
The author assumed that media companies mediate between consumers and artists. Another major factor is that media corporations mediate between both consumers and artists and government. The very existance of copyright laws is a mechanism created by government. Other societies have sometimes used other mechanisms to fund the arts-for example in the old Soviet Union, artists received a stipend from the state. In the 1700's, artists such as Mozart would sometimes find patronage from members of the nobility.
The copyright laws in the United States today go substantially beyond the mechanisms first mandated by the constitution--the concept of "limited time" for Copyrights is getting streched. I personally don't think the Founding Fathers really meant for Copyright to be such a big part of people's lives. Had they understood how information technology would evolve, I think they'd have wanted a substantial mechanism for funding freely available educational and cultural material--just as much as they wanted infrastructure like roads and bridges.
Instead, what we have now are major media monopolies that actively work to get greater concessions from government and media companies that are major recipients of corporate welfare.
I'm also glad to see folks doing more with the capabilities within a browser. The folks that are taking this the furthest that I've seen are the folks at Technical Pursuit.
From what I've heard from the folks that live there-the prices aren't in line with the vacancy rate. Some folks are having a real hard time adjusting to reality.