[So what is the alternative? Mandatory employment by businesses, high tariffs on foreign goods, remove ourselves from the world market? Should the US move towards economic isolationism, no imports, no exports? US companies are not the only source of jobs in the world. Should we handcuff domestic companies in the foreign markets such that they are no longer competitive?]
Well, first of all, outlaw offshoring anything that has to do with our personal data. That opens us up to far more than just a loss of jobs - that puts everyone at risk of being a victim of identity theft from criminals who are almost absolutely immune to prosecution due to jurisdictional barriers.
That is, unless you feel the profits gained by the upper class is worth you spending the rest of your life cleaning up your credit because of a criminal the FBI inherently cannot prosecute or pursue.
What good is being competitive if your citizens are being robbed by foreign criminals you can't prosecute?
That should also answer your data center question.
[You'll still have the issue of one person with automation being able to do the work of 1000, and what are those other 999 people supposed to do? Do you think people thought that computers, which used to be rooms full of women with slide rules, would be replaced by a $500 plastic box that is a million times faster.]
These computers still need programmers and admins. And customer service, which, mind you, has been depleted and that has resulted in a situation where people loathe the companies they have no choice but to deal with (or just do without).
Automation is going to hit a wall, as I said. Sentience and self-sufficiency of machines eventually is a global security threat. But I suspect that warning will get ignored until something really bad happens.
[I don't think it's false optimism to think better things will arise, it's following the trend of history.]
All I'm saying is show me the money. The good jobs are increasingly rare, the people seeking them are increasingly prodigious. That's the reality.
In the past, women using abacuses and slide rulers could learn how to use a computer. What are today's college grads, facing mostly jobs in the service industry, going to re-train for?
You're living in the past with these theories that you're giving me, and that doesn't feed or shelter the skilled workers I've had to turn down for employment, today.
Step down from your theories and look these people in the eye and tell yourself what they need besides playing musical chairs and betting against the tragedy of the commons for their survival.
And yes, before you say no one is actually being harmed by these "changes", I also work at the soup kitchens once a month, I see plenty more homeless now than I used to.
[Yet. People are rather creative, and we often don't give them enough credit. Look at how transmitting numbers across phone lines has become a trillion dollar industry.]
That's the whole point. "Yet" doesn't cut it for the millions of people put out of work by globalization and who currently are stuck with lower paying service sector jobs (which are the bulk of new jobs being created). See this documentation for proof: http://www.rte.ie/business/2005/0714/economy.html
You can't pay rent and pay for your health care on Mickey D's. To wit: the average price of new homes is far, far and away greater than the average income can finance (by traditional means). See this for documentation regarding California - the entire nation is seeing similar patterns: http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stori es/2005/05/02/daily27.html
Wages are stagnant for the most part, except for the handful of rich who now account for the majority of the growth in US tax income. See this for proof: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3138232.stm
Meanwhile, you want those without jobs and who are competing against six billion others in the greatest game of musical chairs EVER, to believe you, and follow your ideology, based on a "not yet" answer?
Do you do business with your customers by saying "not yet"?
[Wow did I miss the nanotech revolution? Right now I think that industry, as well as genetics, are still in their early stages. Where the internet was probably in the 80's.]
It doesn't matter what stages it gets to. Automation and offshoring will kill any further domestic job growth. Mark my words on that.
Tell me, why would anyone hire very many people in the US when a) You can hire work overseas cheaper, and with no workplace safety laws, pollution laws and no benefits b) India has a ton of college graduates?
There is really no reason for a corporation to hire anyone here except sales people to contact customers in the US directly. You'll see what I mean in the near future if offshoring is not legally clamped down on.
[And we replaced human welders who made those cars with robot ones. There is no giant welding robot arm industry for those people who were displaced. Sometimes it's obvious what change will bring, other times it isn't.]
That is your theory. Here's reality. What it is bringing now is underemployment - a lot of formerly high paid white collar workers stuck in service mcjobs.
Soon you will find that this translates into the majority of citizens not being able to afford goods and services. The warp and woof of consumer buying volumes you see today are nothing compared to what's coming if high paying jobs keep disappearing and this musical chairs game keeps escalating.
[The IT industry won't evaporate completely, and in fact has an opportunity to continue growing domesticlly and globally. With globalization communications networks are becoming more complex, and businesses are looking towards custom solutions. Also, consulting businesses will be a growth market in legal, technical, and marketing fields.]
Growing domestically? Ever see how many resumes exist for a single IT job? I'm a project manager, I filter through this shit every day, and I can smell a person who has mad skills and a family to feed. For every one I give an interview I have to pass on ten other qualified people, and then another ninety unqualified people.
Those unqualified people will never be qualified bec
[Back in the day people said the US was doomed because textile jobs moved, then steel making, then auto industry, then electronics manufacturing. The same issues of globalization came up in the late 1700's, and early 1800's with Federalism. States tried to tax each other because they were worried about their own industries. We've lost industries before, and then utilized cheaper goods to create higher value jobs.]
Well said. However, you did not address my point.
There are no new higher value job markets that can fill the gap that the IT and manufacturing industries filled in before.
The higher value jobs you mention are coming few and far between now, and that is how it will be from now on, because every single new industry that comes out is subject to large scale automation or offshoring as soon as it emerges.
Furthermore, what new industries could be higher on the food chain than nanotech and biotech? If we're not at the end of the industrial food chain then what could possibly be next? Picotech? Cloning? All of that is subject to immediate job market decimation by offshoring and automation.
We all knew that cars would replace the horse and cart, and that there'd be a whole industry rising up to build cars. But after biotech and nanotech, what industries could possibly come next? See? No one has any answers now. That is a unique problem that is an anomaly in your theory that "offshoring is good for America".
Show me one higher value industry that will supply as many jobs as IT did... heck, show me one that will supply even half as many. Or even a quarter.
In fact, let me answer that one for you: the space industry.
The next job boom, if it ever happens, will involve building things in space or building things that'll go into space. Once industry can reach beyond the atmosphere, and especially when bases appear elsewhere, automation cannot handle that. You're going to need countless people to get it all off the ground and keep it running. Say hello to education funding as well.
Pray that our leaders aim for the stars or you may find yourself looking at a severe employers' market that will outlive this country.
Your statement is wrong. We now have 6 billion people competing for a few million jobs. No new major jobs-creating industries are going to come up in the US any more; as soon as the potential appears, the jobs will be sent overseas. Prove your assertion; show me one example to the contrary.
I can prove my point, however. We've already lost the tech industry and we are now losing the biotech industry. Recent job growth has been heavily weighted toward the low paying service industry.
Except then there would be the problem with paying rent. For most people nowadays, an enjoyable job is not one that pays, or at least pays well. Unless you start your own business and all that, of course most businesses fail in the first year.
But yeah, lies and trickery on the job are not cool, either by the workers or by the executive officers...
Stuff like this could become the first direction all fingers point when a company goes down.
So much for it being because a company's product got beaten out by a competitor, or because its leadership embezzled it into the ground, or creative accounting.
Everyone now will be looking for the back office Richard Pryor type (I forgot the name of the movie) as a scapegoat.
American workers are already being called the laziest in the world (by conservatives, mind you) while statistics show them to be among the most productive (overall, if not per hour). If we're such collective goof offs then why are we so productive?
Had the US not developed and deployed the bomb, someone else would have been the first to use it.
Questions about our righteousness in nuking Japan (who themselves slaughtered even more civilians in Nanking than we killed with 2 A-bombs) will never die, but I'm confident that the US getting the bomb before China, the USSR and other nations, made it possible for us to scare everyone into not using them again.
We sure as heck could not have ended the war with harsh insults in Japanese... a direct invasion would have cost millions of lives and left Russia open to join in. Ask the Germans what happened when the Soviet men came into Berlin, and overlay that disaster onto Tokyo...
This isn't meant as a troll or flamebait, seriously, I think millions of lives were saved, perhaps billions.
Splash damage. Gas giants have enough mass to hold moons in place. The shock wave of such a planet being blown up, would pulverize the nearby moons. More likely, the explosion of the planet would obliterate the moons with cosmic shrapnel. At the very least, the sudden dissipation of mass and the loss of the gravitational pull, would fling the moons off into space.
Yeah, and consider that these girls were engaging in prostitution to avoid starving to death. There was no good to come of this whatsoever. The UN troops shoulda just gave them money out of good will and to have sex with them made them just as bad as
eh
troops from... other countries (wouldn't wanna name names and thus sound like a troll or a traitor now would I).
BTW I fail to see what this has to do with their ability to manage the internet... which is more of a remark to the parent post above Rei, not to Rei...
that'll control the internet. Whether it's the UN that implements surveillance or corporate ISPs that submit personal information in a clandestine manner, the UN that taxes us or ISPs that hit us with secret bandwidth caps and usage fees, we're still doomed.
The UN will fail here, no doubt about that (and thank God), but as with all things Communism, we find ultimately that we can beat the Government but we can't stop ourselves from being blind sided by the big money industries.
The moral of this twisted post? I'm watching the UN but I've got eyes in the back of my head regarding those handful of megaconglomerates that run the US media industry and are close to controlling the Internet, too.
I'd never heard of any Elder Scrolls game before I got Morrowind, which I did based on what appeared to me to be a unanimous chorus of glowing reviews from game sites.
I bet plenty of Morrowind players were n00bs to Elder Scrolls just like me.
BTW can some mod please up soccerisgod's parent post? Please? Thanks.
Because it'll take away from their ability to utilize CPU power (unless all said extra features are handled by the GPU) to do such things as manage characters and handle their "thoughts", etc.
It's a trade off.
Consider the trade off of using Quake 2 graphics which would leave the GPU handling 99% of all graphics work, thus leaving the CPU to handle a Sims 2 style character profile system for ten thousand townie NPCs in a major virtual city. Or the trade-off of having Unreal 3 level graphics and nowhere near enough CPU power left over to manage more than, say, the virtual minds of a dozen people on screen at once.
I'd take the former.
I would accept those low quality graphics since I could plug-in super high quality skins and textures, and perhaps smoother animations.
Morrowind, of course, was an RPG, but it wouldn't be impossible to remake Doom 3 or UT2004 to look and act like it.
The thing is, non linear games where your actions determine your standing in the game, as well as its path and outcome, are the wave of the future. Especially games with thousands of mini adventures on the side. Also, in Morrowind you interacted with practically *everything*.
If Morrowind were not done years ago and were done today through the Doom 3 *or* Unreal 2 Engine (either of which would imply far fewer bugs than Bethesda's own "engine"), it would eclipse all other games in popularity for 2 years. I say that because Morrowind appears to be almost the single player's equivalent of Starcraft in popularity and longevity.
The lesson: forget the graphics arms race, achieve Doom 3 or UT2004 level graphics and leave it at that, and concentrate on a deep, complex, non linear, "easy to get into it quick" story lines, and endless paths of quest resolution. Give FPS players a world to explore, tweak the outcomes, and generally have fun in.
ID somehow appears to be furthest behind in pursuing this goal, even though Doom 3 is no more linear than HL2 or Unreal 2.
This is why I have avoided upgrading to these new generation of cards... I have the lowly 6600 now and that's going to be it, perhaps. I don't like onboard sound (I prefer my Audigy 2, especially for Linux), thank God for the on board USB, FireWire and NIC though; I have a video capture card and a SCSI card for legacy stuff, and there'd be no room for these two cards in any PCI-E system I'd upgrade to... they all come with fewer slots now.
... and their gang... you know, like Time Warner, etc., who all suddenly jumped into the online biz by merging with AOL?
MicroSoft = 1/2 of MSNBC, also.
It's hard to do what the BBC is doing in America, unless you have deep pockets to pay for bandwidth costs which are highly overinflated. Which is why we have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but they obviously are also lagging way behind the BBC, and they've just barely evaded some big funding cuts (er, cuts in funding increases, that is).
It's ironic that a socialist funded network can innovate faster than our great and mighty capitalist free market media can.
America used to innovate like this before MicroSoft and their gang came along... before the dotcom bust there was a huge sense of "let's throw money into the great evolutionary genesis pit and see which species wins". Now the winners have been declared by the decree of those with the big money, and new technologies are threatened with patent disputes or RIAA/MPAA lawsuits.
What the heck went wrong? How can we get our free market system working again?
Someone please mod Ralph's post up.. it's the best commentary on DRM I've ever seen.
That article doesn't say much
on
Tetherless Wireless
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
What benefits do I get with 3G over wireless/wifi access?
I rarely encounter a wifi hotspot that is that slow, and certainly the cost per month for a commercial wifi spot is not as bad; my neighborhood coffee shop near the Albertson's around Fair Oaks blvd (Sacramento) charges way less than that for much faster service.
At such high prices and low speeds I am not convinced that this 3G thing won't jump the shark.
Then European workers can shrug and stop buying IBM products.
Then who will IBM sell to, besides the US?
Re:Actually some of us pay attention to both
on
Darknet: Hollywood's War
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Possible definitions of an illegal war: a) a war based on untrue premises (long standing claims of the existence of WMD's, which turned out to be untrue)
b) a war not based on the defense of our nation from an imminent threat
Slashdot Mirror
[So what is the alternative? Mandatory employment by businesses, high tariffs on foreign goods, remove ourselves from the world market? Should the US move towards economic isolationism, no imports, no exports? US companies are not the only source of jobs in the world. Should we handcuff domestic companies in the foreign markets such that they are no longer competitive?]
Well, first of all, outlaw offshoring anything that has to do with our personal data. That opens us up to far more than just a loss of jobs - that puts everyone at risk of being a victim of identity theft from criminals who are almost absolutely immune to prosecution due to jurisdictional barriers.
That is, unless you feel the profits gained by the upper class is worth you spending the rest of your life cleaning up your credit because of a criminal the FBI inherently cannot prosecute or pursue.
What good is being competitive if your citizens are being robbed by foreign criminals you can't prosecute?
That should also answer your data center question.
[You'll still have the issue of one person with automation being able to do the work of 1000, and what are those other 999 people supposed to do? Do you think people thought that computers, which used to be rooms full of women with slide rules, would be replaced by a $500 plastic box that is a million times faster.]
These computers still need programmers and admins. And customer service, which, mind you, has been depleted and that has resulted in a situation where people loathe the companies they have no choice but to deal with (or just do without).
Automation is going to hit a wall, as I said. Sentience and self-sufficiency of machines eventually is a global security threat. But I suspect that warning will get ignored until something really bad happens.
[I don't think it's false optimism to think better things will arise, it's following the trend of history.]
All I'm saying is show me the money. The good jobs are increasingly rare, the people seeking them are increasingly prodigious. That's the reality.
In the past, women using abacuses and slide rulers could learn how to use a computer. What are today's college grads, facing mostly jobs in the service industry, going to re-train for?
You're living in the past with these theories that you're giving me, and that doesn't feed or shelter the skilled workers I've had to turn down for employment, today.
Step down from your theories and look these people in the eye and tell yourself what they need besides playing musical chairs and betting against the tragedy of the commons for their survival.
And yes, before you say no one is actually being harmed by these "changes", I also work at the soup kitchens once a month, I see plenty more homeless now than I used to.
[Yet. People are rather creative, and we often don't give them enough credit. Look at how transmitting numbers across phone lines has become a trillion dollar industry.]
That's the whole point. "Yet" doesn't cut it for the millions of people put out of work by globalization and who currently are stuck with lower paying service sector jobs (which are the bulk of new jobs being created). See this documentation for proof: http://www.rte.ie/business/2005/0714/economy.html
You can't pay rent and pay for your health care on Mickey D's. To wit: the average price of new homes is far, far and away greater than the average income can finance (by traditional means). See this for documentation regarding California - the entire nation is seeing similar patterns: http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stori es/2005/05/02/daily27.html
Everything else in life is also catching up with or passing, cost-wise, the average wage. See this for documentation: http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snap shots_12172004
Wages are stagnant for the most part, except for the handful of rich who now account for the majority of the growth in US tax income. See this for proof: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3138232.stm
Meanwhile, you want those without jobs and who are competing against six billion others in the greatest game of musical chairs EVER, to believe you, and follow your ideology, based on a "not yet" answer?
Do you do business with your customers by saying "not yet"?
[Wow did I miss the nanotech revolution? Right now I think that industry, as well as genetics, are still in their early stages. Where the internet was probably in the 80's.]
It doesn't matter what stages it gets to. Automation and offshoring will kill any further domestic job growth. Mark my words on that.
Tell me, why would anyone hire very many people in the US when
a) You can hire work overseas cheaper, and with no workplace safety laws, pollution laws and no benefits
b) India has a ton of college graduates?
There is really no reason for a corporation to hire anyone here except sales people to contact customers in the US directly. You'll see what I mean in the near future if offshoring is not legally clamped down on.
[And we replaced human welders who made those cars with robot ones. There is no giant welding robot arm industry for those people who were displaced. Sometimes it's obvious what change will bring, other times it isn't.]
That is your theory. Here's reality. What it is bringing now is underemployment - a lot of formerly high paid white collar workers stuck in service mcjobs.
Soon you will find that this translates into the majority of citizens not being able to afford goods and services. The warp and woof of consumer buying volumes you see today are nothing compared to what's coming if high paying jobs keep disappearing and this musical chairs game keeps escalating.
[The IT industry won't evaporate completely, and in fact has an opportunity to continue growing domesticlly and globally. With globalization communications networks are becoming more complex, and businesses are looking towards custom solutions. Also, consulting businesses will be a growth market in legal, technical, and marketing fields.]
Growing domestically? Ever see how many resumes exist for a single IT job? I'm a project manager, I filter through this shit every day, and I can smell a person who has mad skills and a family to feed. For every one I give an interview I have to pass on ten other qualified people, and then another ninety unqualified people.
Those unqualified people will never be qualified bec
Actually, Tojo was the war criminal. And, IIRC, he was hung.
[Back in the day people said the US was doomed because textile jobs moved, then steel making, then auto industry, then electronics manufacturing. The same issues of globalization came up in the late 1700's, and early 1800's with Federalism. States tried to tax each other because they were worried about their own industries.
We've lost industries before, and then utilized cheaper goods to create higher value jobs.]
Well said. However, you did not address my point.
There are no new higher value job markets that can fill the gap that the IT and manufacturing industries filled in before.
The higher value jobs you mention are coming few and far between now, and that is how it will be from now on, because every single new industry that comes out is subject to large scale automation or offshoring as soon as it emerges.
Furthermore, what new industries could be higher on the food chain than nanotech and biotech? If we're not at the end of the industrial food chain then what could possibly be next? Picotech? Cloning? All of that is subject to immediate job market decimation by offshoring and automation.
We all knew that cars would replace the horse and cart, and that there'd be a whole industry rising up to build cars. But after biotech and nanotech, what industries could possibly come next? See? No one has any answers now. That is a unique problem that is an anomaly in your theory that "offshoring is good for America".
Show me one higher value industry that will supply as many jobs as IT did... heck, show me one that will supply even half as many. Or even a quarter.
In fact, let me answer that one for you: the space industry.
The next job boom, if it ever happens, will involve building things in space or building things that'll go into space. Once industry can reach beyond the atmosphere, and especially when bases appear elsewhere, automation cannot handle that. You're going to need countless people to get it all off the ground and keep it running. Say hello to education funding as well.
Pray that our leaders aim for the stars or you may find yourself looking at a severe employers' market that will outlive this country.
Your statement is wrong.
We now have 6 billion people competing for a few million jobs. No new major jobs-creating industries are going to come up in the US any more; as soon as the potential appears, the jobs will be sent overseas. Prove your assertion; show me one example to the contrary.
I can prove my point, however. We've already lost the tech industry and we are now losing the biotech industry. Recent job growth has been heavily weighted toward the low paying service industry.
Offshoring.
Except then there would be the problem with paying rent. For most people nowadays, an enjoyable job is not one that pays, or at least pays well. Unless you start your own business and all that, of course most businesses fail in the first year.
But yeah, lies and trickery on the job are not cool, either by the workers or by the executive officers...
We're more than Bill Gates. We're more than Bush.
:)
As an American I apologize for both of them.
Oh, and Linus is from Finland but he came to America. *grin* We're DEFINITELY proud of him! And Richard Stallman, too
Stuff like this could become the first direction all fingers point when a company goes down.
So much for it being because a company's product got beaten out by a competitor, or because its leadership embezzled it into the ground, or creative accounting.
Everyone now will be looking for the back office Richard Pryor type (I forgot the name of the movie) as a scapegoat.
American workers are already being called the laziest in the world (by conservatives, mind you) while statistics show them to be among the most productive (overall, if not per hour). If we're such collective goof offs then why are we so productive?
Had the US not developed and deployed the bomb, someone else would have been the first to use it.
Questions about our righteousness in nuking Japan (who themselves slaughtered even more civilians in Nanking than we killed with 2 A-bombs) will never die, but I'm confident that the US getting the bomb before China, the USSR and other nations, made it possible for us to scare everyone into not using them again.
We sure as heck could not have ended the war with harsh insults in Japanese... a direct invasion would have cost millions of lives and left Russia open to join in. Ask the Germans what happened when the Soviet men came into Berlin, and overlay that disaster onto Tokyo...
This isn't meant as a troll or flamebait, seriously, I think millions of lives were saved, perhaps billions.
Splash damage. Gas giants have enough mass to hold moons in place. The shock wave of such a planet being blown up, would pulverize the nearby moons. More likely, the explosion of the planet would obliterate the moons with cosmic shrapnel. At the very least, the sudden dissipation of mass and the loss of the gravitational pull, would fling the moons off into space.
Yeah, and consider that these girls were engaging in prostitution to avoid starving to death. There was no good to come of this whatsoever. The UN troops shoulda just gave them money out of good will and to have sex with them made them just as bad as
... other countries (wouldn't wanna name names and thus sound like a troll or a traitor now would I).
eh
troops from
BTW I fail to see what this has to do with their ability to manage the internet... which is more of a remark to the parent post above Rei, not to Rei...
that'll control the internet. Whether it's the UN that implements surveillance or corporate ISPs that submit personal information in a clandestine manner, the UN that taxes us or ISPs that hit us with secret bandwidth caps and usage fees, we're still doomed.
The UN will fail here, no doubt about that (and thank God), but as with all things Communism, we find ultimately that we can beat the Government but we can't stop ourselves from being blind sided by the big money industries.
The moral of this twisted post? I'm watching the UN but I've got eyes in the back of my head regarding those handful of megaconglomerates that run the US media industry and are close to controlling the Internet, too.
I'd never heard of any Elder Scrolls game before I got Morrowind, which I did based on what appeared to me to be a unanimous chorus of glowing reviews from game sites.
I bet plenty of Morrowind players were n00bs to Elder Scrolls just like me.
BTW can some mod please up soccerisgod's parent post? Please? Thanks.
Because it'll take away from their ability to utilize CPU power (unless all said extra features are handled by the GPU) to do such things as manage characters and handle their "thoughts", etc.
It's a trade off.
Consider the trade off of using Quake 2 graphics which would leave the GPU handling 99% of all graphics work, thus leaving the CPU to handle a Sims 2 style character profile system for ten thousand townie NPCs in a major virtual city. Or the trade-off of having Unreal 3 level graphics and nowhere near enough CPU power left over to manage more than, say, the virtual minds of a dozen people on screen at once.
I'd take the former.
I would accept those low quality graphics since I could plug-in super high quality skins and textures, and perhaps smoother animations.
Morrowind, of course, was an RPG, but it wouldn't be impossible to remake Doom 3 or UT2004 to look and act like it.
The thing is, non linear games where your actions determine your standing in the game, as well as its path and outcome, are the wave of the future. Especially games with thousands of mini adventures on the side. Also, in Morrowind you interacted with practically *everything*.
If Morrowind were not done years ago and were done today through the Doom 3 *or* Unreal 2 Engine (either of which would imply far fewer bugs than Bethesda's own "engine"), it would eclipse all other games in popularity for 2 years. I say that because Morrowind appears to be almost the single player's equivalent of Starcraft in popularity and longevity.
The lesson: forget the graphics arms race, achieve Doom 3 or UT2004 level graphics and leave it at that, and concentrate on a deep, complex, non linear, "easy to get into it quick" story lines, and endless paths of quest resolution. Give FPS players a world to explore, tweak the outcomes, and generally have fun in.
ID somehow appears to be furthest behind in pursuing this goal, even though Doom 3 is no more linear than HL2 or Unreal 2.
It looks like those video cards overlap not just one, but TWO empty expansion slots that I could use for other cards!
m putex/images/crossfire_big.jpg
http://img.hexus.net/v2/features/dfi_crossfire_co
This is why I have avoided upgrading to these new generation of cards... I have the lowly 6600 now and that's going to be it, perhaps. I don't like onboard sound (I prefer my Audigy 2, especially for Linux), thank God for the on board USB, FireWire and NIC though; I have a video capture card and a SCSI card for legacy stuff, and there'd be no room for these two cards in any PCI-E system I'd upgrade to... they all come with fewer slots now.
I'm not dissing socialism or the BBC. I find it ironic that America is falling behind them.
... and their gang... you know, like Time Warner, etc., who all suddenly jumped into the online biz by merging with AOL?
MicroSoft = 1/2 of MSNBC, also.
It's hard to do what the BBC is doing in America, unless you have deep pockets to pay for bandwidth costs which are highly overinflated. Which is why we have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but they obviously are also lagging way behind the BBC, and they've just barely evaded some big funding cuts (er, cuts in funding increases, that is).
It's ironic that a socialist funded network can innovate faster than our great and mighty capitalist free market media can.
America used to innovate like this before MicroSoft and their gang came along... before the dotcom bust there was a huge sense of "let's throw money into the great evolutionary genesis pit and see which species wins". Now the winners have been declared by the decree of those with the big money, and new technologies are threatened with patent disputes or RIAA/MPAA lawsuits.
What the heck went wrong? How can we get our free market system working again?
Someone please mod Ralph's post up.. it's the best commentary on DRM I've ever seen.
What benefits do I get with 3G over wireless/wifi access?
I rarely encounter a wifi hotspot that is that slow, and certainly the cost per month for a commercial wifi spot is not as bad; my neighborhood coffee shop near the Albertson's around Fair Oaks blvd (Sacramento) charges way less than that for much faster service.
At such high prices and low speeds I am not convinced that this 3G thing won't jump the shark.
How about video games?
The Freespace 2 slicer beams were the coolest sounding beams I've ever seen.
Then European workers can shrug and stop buying IBM products.
Then who will IBM sell to, besides the US?
Possible definitions of an illegal war:
a q) and which may even be in violation of the UN charter
a) a war based on untrue premises (long standing claims of the existence of WMD's, which turned out to be untrue)
b) a war not based on the defense of our nation from an imminent threat
c) a war that is not approved by the UN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Ir