I'm still undecided whether Google as a whole genuinely are agents of good in the corporate world or if it's just the spin they're clever at putting on things, but if the latter is the case... then damn they're good.
This discussion isn't about minimum wage though, and it never was. That's something of a straw man to the topic at hand, which is union negotiated wages above legally required minimum wage. The reason it is a straw man is that people employed at minimum wage are generally easily replaceable, whereas people employed above minimum wage generally aren't. In other words, these people are going to be employed whether their employer is forced to pay $20 an hour or $30 an hour, assuming the employer can afford the latter without going out of business.
This brings us back to the original point, which is whether wage fixing is deleterious as price fixing is seen to be. Now, we will assume that the unions will not make demands quite so unreasonable that it would put the employers out of business to meet them, which is a reasonable assumption in my experience. Now, the matter at hand is something as an oddball, because it's about royalties rather than straight wages as I understand it. Even so, we will generalize to all union wage disputes, and say that it is really an argument about distribution of wealth, with the above premise that it is not going to degenerate to a matter of employment versus unemployment. And my position stands as it was, that in cases such as this wage fixing is not deleterious to society in the same way as price fixing, because it is essentially a redistribution of wealth in favor of the majority.
My argument is nothing more than that. I am not even saying that wage fixing is right, just that it isn't wrong in the same way as price fixing is. Whether it's wrong in another way is a whole other debate.
----- and now for something different ---
Now, with that out of the way, I'm very curious about the example you give of your company. You hired a person, presumably to do some task that you felt needed to be done, but decided to pay him less than minimum wage. Now, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and say the reason you did so was that you did not value the task he was performing at more than a certain amount, and when forced to pay that amount the benefit did not match the cost. What I find troubling, however, is your description of this individual seems to indicate that he was able perform this task proficiently. Now, after firing him, was it the case that this task simply no longer got done? I find that difficult to believe. Did you turn around and hire somebody else to perform the task at the same rate, risking legal intervention again? I also find that difficult to believe.
The conclusion I draw from your story is this: a handicapped person who was proficient at a task was fired, to be replaced by a non-handicapped person... proficient at the task. Perhaps there is an element missing from the story--perhaps this was some non-essential task that was being given to this person to do out of good will (although why you wouldn't just pay him as a part time position so you could pay him less within the bounds of law I don't know)--but as it stands I would say that I'm surprised you didn't suffer the brunt of anti-discrimination laws (although you say it was a while ago, so there may have been none such). Please, correct me if I'm wrong, I'd hate to think that this was the case.
We don't prevent price fixing in our society because there is something inherently wrong with it, in and of itself. We prevent it because, as a whole, it is detrimental to the majority of citizens for the benefit of the few. Essentially, it is prevented not because it's inherently wrong to fix prices, but because it hurts society.
Now, consider the same argument with wages. Does it hurt society to enforce a minimum adequate wage? No, and if you want to argue this point then that's an entirely different track to get off on. My argument then, is that the two really aren't comparable. Price fixing is considered unacceptable for reasons that simply do not apply to wage fixing, and it's simply a confusion of language that describing both situations as "fixing" makes them appear commensurable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but he is proposing the beginning of a solution--stop wasting taxpayer dollars on stupid moral crusade cause of the month bullshit that doesn't matter and take care of the stuff that does. Or was that not clear enough for you?
Well, as for rendering hints, if that were the case then either Microsoft told some pretty big lies or we'd be talking about a patent deal with Apple or Adobe instead (patent holders on hinting in TrueType and Type 1/PostScript respectively I believe). As for using Microsoft's actual fonts, that would be a copyright license, not patent (maybe design patent? I doubt it though). Could be maybe a license of ClearType maybe if it's font-related, but that applies more to rendering text on an LCD display than printers as I understand. Other than that, I don't know that Microsoft really owns any meaningful font-related technologies, but then again I'm no expert.
There is one way to fairly strongly demonstrate the existence of a hidden volume, and that's to have access to the file over a period of usage without the owner's knowledge. While you can't demonstrate that it's necessarily a hidden volume, you CAN demonstrate that data has been written to a portion of the outer volume that supposedly contains no data. That is to say, the blank space still contains random data, but it contains DIFFERENT random data from what it used to. That kind of thing is rather difficult to explain--it's not like programs go about writing random data to blank space for no reason all the time. As I understand it that's the only real weakness to hidden volumes.
Well, I noticed that more or less the very first thing in the article is making note of the fact that the US military is ILLEGALLY maintaining chemical weaponry among its troops in Iraq and has in fact, apparently, manufactured for our own use the mobile chemical weapons plants we had originally accused Hussein of harboring. The way I'm reading it, this does indeed look very very bad.
Well, I think what this argument really comes down to is that yes, the US is free to ignore its international obligations to whatever extent it likes for whatever reason it likes, just like the international community is free to enforce those obligations to the extent that is possible regardless. I don't think the WTO really cares whether the US thinks itself obligated to follow up on their treaty obligations--they're going to attempt to enforce it anyway, and rightfully so.
Sure, it's hard to spot when you turn it off maybe... does that make up for the fact that it looks like it glows like a goddamn spotlight when it's turned on, or am I missing something?
"The fact is that the vast majority of businesses do not want homogeneous IT infrastructures," Pund-IT analyst King said. "Instead, they want to be able to better and more easily manage their IT assets no matter what hardware or OS platforms they buy.
Microsoft and Novell deserve congratulations on their one-year anniversary, but the needs of Linux and Windows customers are as much responsible for the partnership as the companies themselves.'
You're quite right I think. I've quoted the two separately for a reason here; read one, then read the other. You might notice that those two sentences actually have no explicitly stated connection with each other. It's really just a cleverly stated non sequitur, phrased in such a way as to make you think the two parts share some kind of causal relationship. There's a reason, I think, that he doesn't instead say, "Microsoft and Novell deserve congratulations for making this freedom possible," or something of the like, and that's because, really, they haven't.
What a tremendous fucking waste of our country's resources. How about we go after actual CRIMINALS, rather than copyright violators? You know... stuff that actually MATTERS?
There are other ends than amassing wealth, even in the business world. Perhaps I am wearing rose colored glasses, but it's sad the degree to which the modern world has forgotten this. There is no pride in making a superior and well crafted product--cheaper crappy ones can be resold to the consumer when they break every year. There is no honor in doing the right thing for the people, the country, the planet--it usually cuts into the bottom line, which is of course unacceptable. Maybe it's always been this way, I dunno... but it need not be and we need not accept it.
In other words, I don't think his statement is at all foolish. It IS a matter of greed, it's just that greed has been so thoroughly condoned from the corporate sector that we no longer see it as such--now it's just business as usual. Do I believe that the major manufacturers should simply have sat down and come to an agreement for the sake of providing the consumer with a solid product and moving forward with technical innovation rather than playing out the motions of another meaningless pissant little business war that ten years down the line won't matter to anybody whether it's won one way or the other? Yeah, but maybe that's asking too much...
I think maybe you have been going to a bad Radio Shack? That store, more so than almost any other large chain I can think of, REALLY lives or dies on the employees. The one I went to, for example, had a guy who knew exactly what I was talking about and led me straight to the capacitor in question, then recommended a certain solder for the job. *shrug*
I've done this a couple times. Leave for a few months and come back. Every time I would discover I liked the game less and less. Last time I came back I sorta played around for a couple weeks, thought, "Meh, this is really lame and mind numbingly repetitive," and really just totally lost all interest. I don't suspect I'll be going back again.
If you're looking for an MMO that is actually fun to play, you might want to give Tabula Rasa a try. It's a pretty decent departure from the standard MMO fare. It's a very immersive experience, because friendly NPCs take a HUGE part in what's going on, and there is a dynamic feel to it. For example, you might be standing in some forward base and suddenly have a swarm of enemies fly in and land in dropships, only to be confronted by the NPC defenders as you lend a helping hand. Stuff like that happens all the time.
It has its warts, but for people like you who are really looking for a new formula, it's (so far for me at least) a great breath of fresh air. Oh, not to mention that the developers don't seem to know what this whole "downtime" business is all about, and as a result failed to intentionally include it in core gameplay--if this game has any effect on MMOs of the future, I hope it's this.
Ah, the perfect thread to brag about an accomplishment about which I am (perhaps even unduly so) proud. You see, I have a Netgear combination ADSL modem/router, and after about 3 years of use it started to sporadically malfunction. The connection would drop, sometimes not coming back until the next day, only to quickly drop again. After a painful call to SBC (now ATT) tech support, I was able to determine that it was not a line problem. Being that the router wasn't exactly cheap (150ish?), I hated to buy a new one, so I went searching online...
Interestingly, I eventually discovered that I had been the unwitting casualty of industrial espionage! Apparently, a capacitor company, wanting to do things on the cheap, had tried to steal the recipe that a rival company used to manufacture capacitors. Apparently, however, the rival company got wind of this and planted a FAKE recipe for the ne'erdowell to find. The eventual fallout was that a little while down the road, this company's faulty capacitors started malfunction en masse.
Long story short, my modem used one such capacitor, and apparently a great many users were reporting similar problems. So, out come my trusty soldering iron and jeweler's screwdrivers, and the modem is quickly disassembled. Lo and behold, there is indeed a bulging capacitor. A quick trip to radio shack and a little painstaking soldering work later, I had a DSL modem working good as new. That was about two years ago, and I'm still using the same modem.
I'm still pretty damn proud of myself:P (I could be described, when it comes to electronics, as at BEST a very inexperienced hobbyist)
I'm sorry, and this is of course just my opinion, but I see you as being very very wrong in this. The whole point about "fantasy" is just that, it's a FANTASY. You're "venting" (since that seems to be the popular word here) frustrations into your imagination rather than into the real world. What would worry me is a person who NEVER had ANY kind of violent fantasies, I would be much more nervous of such a person eventually venting his or her frustrations (which are there whether they're fantasized about or not) into the REAL world.
To put it shortly, EVERYBODY gets incredibly angry sometimes, that's just the way it is. We have violent fantasies to allow that anger to vent in a non-destructive socially agreeable manner. Now, for people who can't make the distinction and turn those fantasies into reality... well I'd say that's another matter altogether.
I'm not sure whether most people complaining around here care whether it's the little guys or the big guys reaping the benefits of a broken patent system. I'd be willing to wager good money that if, say, some Joe Schmoe patented something absurd/pointless/obvious and proceeded to sue Microsoft over it, aside from the outliers the majority of/. would come down on the side of Microsoft.
Pointing out that, "Hey, this little guy made big bucks from the patent system," is something of a non-sequitur from the arguments I generally see being made. Or, to put it another way, One-Click patented out of somebody's garage is just as ridiculous as out of a major company like Amazon.
On another note, from the perspective of a patent attorney, these Proposed Rules are a nightmare. This Preliminary Injunction was a great thing, and anybody who has any thought of ever filing a patent application should be glad they've been stopped.
Sorry to be blunt, but realistically as a patent attorney I imagine you're interested in cramming as many patents through the system as you can find clients to charge for them. I would definitely argue that the convenience of patent attorneys and everybody who's got an idea they just really think is great is not something the public should be overly concerned about. There are bigger issues at stake.
I'm always just dumbfounded when I see how much you have to pay for electronics in some countries. £1,699.00... $3,500 for the lowest end Mac Pro? I mean, I can believe it, but it seems crazy.
Well, I would say that those who prefer gaming on a PC and don't want a Wii or any other console (or perhaps already have them) are buying these cards. Really it's apples to oranges, unless the Wii can execute x86 instructions and I haven't heard about it.
Maybe I'm on my own on this one, but upon reading about this my mind confronts me with a single inescapable truth. Our presidents are not elected to be scientists, and are generally not qualified to operate in that capacity. I honestly don't care what any of these people have to say on the topic of science. It is not really their job to decide matters of scientific import--a task for which entire branches of the government are populated with those infinitely more qualified. The attitude that the executive branch has any business deciding on scientific matters (particularly bad in the current administration), rather than accepting the conclusions of those paid by them and qualified to do so, boggles the mind. Perhaps I'm just jaded.
In short, leave the science to scientists. Legislate based on what they decide, rather than on the back of the mercurial political winds. Perhaps I'm just jaded...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still undecided whether Google as a whole genuinely are agents of good in the corporate world or if it's just the spin they're clever at putting on things, but if the latter is the case... then damn they're good.
There's an old phrase that America, though thankfully not the entire world, has sadly largely forgotten.
There but for the grace of God go I.
This discussion isn't about minimum wage though, and it never was. That's something of a straw man to the topic at hand, which is union negotiated wages above legally required minimum wage. The reason it is a straw man is that people employed at minimum wage are generally easily replaceable, whereas people employed above minimum wage generally aren't. In other words, these people are going to be employed whether their employer is forced to pay $20 an hour or $30 an hour, assuming the employer can afford the latter without going out of business.
This brings us back to the original point, which is whether wage fixing is deleterious as price fixing is seen to be. Now, we will assume that the unions will not make demands quite so unreasonable that it would put the employers out of business to meet them, which is a reasonable assumption in my experience. Now, the matter at hand is something as an oddball, because it's about royalties rather than straight wages as I understand it. Even so, we will generalize to all union wage disputes, and say that it is really an argument about distribution of wealth, with the above premise that it is not going to degenerate to a matter of employment versus unemployment. And my position stands as it was, that in cases such as this wage fixing is not deleterious to society in the same way as price fixing, because it is essentially a redistribution of wealth in favor of the majority.
My argument is nothing more than that. I am not even saying that wage fixing is right, just that it isn't wrong in the same way as price fixing is. Whether it's wrong in another way is a whole other debate.
----- and now for something different ---
Now, with that out of the way, I'm very curious about the example you give of your company. You hired a person, presumably to do some task that you felt needed to be done, but decided to pay him less than minimum wage. Now, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and say the reason you did so was that you did not value the task he was performing at more than a certain amount, and when forced to pay that amount the benefit did not match the cost. What I find troubling, however, is your description of this individual seems to indicate that he was able perform this task proficiently. Now, after firing him, was it the case that this task simply no longer got done? I find that difficult to believe. Did you turn around and hire somebody else to perform the task at the same rate, risking legal intervention again? I also find that difficult to believe.
The conclusion I draw from your story is this: a handicapped person who was proficient at a task was fired, to be replaced by a non-handicapped person... proficient at the task. Perhaps there is an element missing from the story--perhaps this was some non-essential task that was being given to this person to do out of good will (although why you wouldn't just pay him as a part time position so you could pay him less within the bounds of law I don't know)--but as it stands I would say that I'm surprised you didn't suffer the brunt of anti-discrimination laws (although you say it was a while ago, so there may have been none such). Please, correct me if I'm wrong, I'd hate to think that this was the case.
I think the argument goes something like this...
We don't prevent price fixing in our society because there is something inherently wrong with it, in and of itself. We prevent it because, as a whole, it is detrimental to the majority of citizens for the benefit of the few. Essentially, it is prevented not because it's inherently wrong to fix prices, but because it hurts society.
Now, consider the same argument with wages. Does it hurt society to enforce a minimum adequate wage? No, and if you want to argue this point then that's an entirely different track to get off on. My argument then, is that the two really aren't comparable. Price fixing is considered unacceptable for reasons that simply do not apply to wage fixing, and it's simply a confusion of language that describing both situations as "fixing" makes them appear commensurable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but he is proposing the beginning of a solution--stop wasting taxpayer dollars on stupid moral crusade cause of the month bullshit that doesn't matter and take care of the stuff that does. Or was that not clear enough for you?
Well, as for rendering hints, if that were the case then either Microsoft told some pretty big lies or we'd be talking about a patent deal with Apple or Adobe instead (patent holders on hinting in TrueType and Type 1/PostScript respectively I believe). As for using Microsoft's actual fonts, that would be a copyright license, not patent (maybe design patent? I doubt it though). Could be maybe a license of ClearType maybe if it's font-related, but that applies more to rendering text on an LCD display than printers as I understand. Other than that, I don't know that Microsoft really owns any meaningful font-related technologies, but then again I'm no expert.
There really needs to be a "-1 Idiot" mod option. Or perhaps "-1 Don'tMakeShitUp" would be better...
There is one way to fairly strongly demonstrate the existence of a hidden volume, and that's to have access to the file over a period of usage without the owner's knowledge. While you can't demonstrate that it's necessarily a hidden volume, you CAN demonstrate that data has been written to a portion of the outer volume that supposedly contains no data. That is to say, the blank space still contains random data, but it contains DIFFERENT random data from what it used to. That kind of thing is rather difficult to explain--it's not like programs go about writing random data to blank space for no reason all the time. As I understand it that's the only real weakness to hidden volumes.
Well, I noticed that more or less the very first thing in the article is making note of the fact that the US military is ILLEGALLY maintaining chemical weaponry among its troops in Iraq and has in fact, apparently, manufactured for our own use the mobile chemical weapons plants we had originally accused Hussein of harboring. The way I'm reading it, this does indeed look very very bad.
Well, I think what this argument really comes down to is that yes, the US is free to ignore its international obligations to whatever extent it likes for whatever reason it likes, just like the international community is free to enforce those obligations to the extent that is possible regardless. I don't think the WTO really cares whether the US thinks itself obligated to follow up on their treaty obligations--they're going to attempt to enforce it anyway, and rightfully so.
Sure, it's hard to spot when you turn it off maybe... does that make up for the fact that it looks like it glows like a goddamn spotlight when it's turned on, or am I missing something?
What a tremendous fucking waste of our country's resources. How about we go after actual CRIMINALS, rather than copyright violators? You know... stuff that actually MATTERS?
There are other ends than amassing wealth, even in the business world. Perhaps I am wearing rose colored glasses, but it's sad the degree to which the modern world has forgotten this. There is no pride in making a superior and well crafted product--cheaper crappy ones can be resold to the consumer when they break every year. There is no honor in doing the right thing for the people, the country, the planet--it usually cuts into the bottom line, which is of course unacceptable. Maybe it's always been this way, I dunno... but it need not be and we need not accept it.
In other words, I don't think his statement is at all foolish. It IS a matter of greed, it's just that greed has been so thoroughly condoned from the corporate sector that we no longer see it as such--now it's just business as usual. Do I believe that the major manufacturers should simply have sat down and come to an agreement for the sake of providing the consumer with a solid product and moving forward with technical innovation rather than playing out the motions of another meaningless pissant little business war that ten years down the line won't matter to anybody whether it's won one way or the other? Yeah, but maybe that's asking too much...
I think maybe you have been going to a bad Radio Shack? That store, more so than almost any other large chain I can think of, REALLY lives or dies on the employees. The one I went to, for example, had a guy who knew exactly what I was talking about and led me straight to the capacitor in question, then recommended a certain solder for the job. *shrug*
I've done this a couple times. Leave for a few months and come back. Every time I would discover I liked the game less and less. Last time I came back I sorta played around for a couple weeks, thought, "Meh, this is really lame and mind numbingly repetitive," and really just totally lost all interest. I don't suspect I'll be going back again.
Ha, that's actually the exact site I remember going to for the info I needed.
If you're looking for an MMO that is actually fun to play, you might want to give Tabula Rasa a try. It's a pretty decent departure from the standard MMO fare. It's a very immersive experience, because friendly NPCs take a HUGE part in what's going on, and there is a dynamic feel to it. For example, you might be standing in some forward base and suddenly have a swarm of enemies fly in and land in dropships, only to be confronted by the NPC defenders as you lend a helping hand. Stuff like that happens all the time.
It has its warts, but for people like you who are really looking for a new formula, it's (so far for me at least) a great breath of fresh air. Oh, not to mention that the developers don't seem to know what this whole "downtime" business is all about, and as a result failed to intentionally include it in core gameplay--if this game has any effect on MMOs of the future, I hope it's this.
Ah, the perfect thread to brag about an accomplishment about which I am (perhaps even unduly so) proud. You see, I have a Netgear combination ADSL modem/router, and after about 3 years of use it started to sporadically malfunction. The connection would drop, sometimes not coming back until the next day, only to quickly drop again. After a painful call to SBC (now ATT) tech support, I was able to determine that it was not a line problem. Being that the router wasn't exactly cheap (150ish?), I hated to buy a new one, so I went searching online...
:P (I could be described, when it comes to electronics, as at BEST a very inexperienced hobbyist)
Interestingly, I eventually discovered that I had been the unwitting casualty of industrial espionage! Apparently, a capacitor company, wanting to do things on the cheap, had tried to steal the recipe that a rival company used to manufacture capacitors. Apparently, however, the rival company got wind of this and planted a FAKE recipe for the ne'erdowell to find. The eventual fallout was that a little while down the road, this company's faulty capacitors started malfunction en masse.
Long story short, my modem used one such capacitor, and apparently a great many users were reporting similar problems. So, out come my trusty soldering iron and jeweler's screwdrivers, and the modem is quickly disassembled. Lo and behold, there is indeed a bulging capacitor. A quick trip to radio shack and a little painstaking soldering work later, I had a DSL modem working good as new. That was about two years ago, and I'm still using the same modem.
I'm still pretty damn proud of myself
I'm sorry, and this is of course just my opinion, but I see you as being very very wrong in this. The whole point about "fantasy" is just that, it's a FANTASY. You're "venting" (since that seems to be the popular word here) frustrations into your imagination rather than into the real world. What would worry me is a person who NEVER had ANY kind of violent fantasies, I would be much more nervous of such a person eventually venting his or her frustrations (which are there whether they're fantasized about or not) into the REAL world.
To put it shortly, EVERYBODY gets incredibly angry sometimes, that's just the way it is. We have violent fantasies to allow that anger to vent in a non-destructive socially agreeable manner. Now, for people who can't make the distinction and turn those fantasies into reality... well I'd say that's another matter altogether.
I think it's pretty clear he intended "flashplugin-nonfree package. Gaa"
Pointing out that, "Hey, this little guy made big bucks from the patent system," is something of a non-sequitur from the arguments I generally see being made. Or, to put it another way, One-Click patented out of somebody's garage is just as ridiculous as out of a major company like Amazon. Sorry to be blunt, but realistically as a patent attorney I imagine you're interested in cramming as many patents through the system as you can find clients to charge for them. I would definitely argue that the convenience of patent attorneys and everybody who's got an idea they just really think is great is not something the public should be overly concerned about. There are bigger issues at stake.
I'm always just dumbfounded when I see how much you have to pay for electronics in some countries. £1,699.00... $3,500 for the lowest end Mac Pro? I mean, I can believe it, but it seems crazy.
Well, I would say that those who prefer gaming on a PC and don't want a Wii or any other console (or perhaps already have them) are buying these cards. Really it's apples to oranges, unless the Wii can execute x86 instructions and I haven't heard about it.
Maybe I'm on my own on this one, but upon reading about this my mind confronts me with a single inescapable truth. Our presidents are not elected to be scientists, and are generally not qualified to operate in that capacity. I honestly don't care what any of these people have to say on the topic of science. It is not really their job to decide matters of scientific import--a task for which entire branches of the government are populated with those infinitely more qualified. The attitude that the executive branch has any business deciding on scientific matters (particularly bad in the current administration), rather than accepting the conclusions of those paid by them and qualified to do so, boggles the mind. Perhaps I'm just jaded.
In short, leave the science to scientists. Legislate based on what they decide, rather than on the back of the mercurial political winds. Perhaps I'm just jaded...