There are one million factors to consider when setting up a business. Somehow I don't think "What if it hurts when we leave the country?" is all that high up on the list.
That's because just about no country does what the GP recommended doing.
If they want to leave, make it hurt badly(if not something that outright kills the company). Then make the company an example of how things can go wrong in a robbery
And then no company will want to set up shop in your country again. Why would they, when the risk is driven up that high?
Pass a constitutional amendment that strips Congress of civil immunity for their unconstitutional laws. Let them get sued for lost wages, profits, trebble damages and emotional distress and suddenly we'll have 535 originalist legal scholars.
Sweet, so when Congress fails to pass laws outlawing and filtering any device or program that is used for piracy, the RIAA and MPAA sue them for piracy 'damages?' We'd be worse off than if we were back at square one.
Slashdot is staffed by, and read by many people who want to be free to make their own decisions. They don't want either the government or some large corporate trust removing those possibilities.
One thing CGI and modern technology has allowed for are the impossible camera moves. Yes, it's impressive to zoom in on a flying aircraft and right through the glass into the interior. It's impressive to follow a bomb dropping from the plane until it goes down the stack of a battleship or fly down Orthanc into the flaming pits below it. But these impossible shots draw attention to their artificiality by being so impossible. I'll give Lord of the Rings a pass on some of the more extreme camera stuff because the CGI was so impressively integrated but I did wonder how the whole thing would have looked if it was filmed in a more deliberately like an old Hollywood sword and sandals epic, acting like a real camera was involved and just happening to sprinkle in all the CGI monsters.
I think one of my favorite recent "impossible shots" was Spielburg's War of the Worlds. What happens after the city is destroyed and your main characters are driving away and need to talk? You have a driving scene with discussion in the car. Okay, but Spielburg thought it wasn't tense enough and looked for a way to ratchet that up, and found that if the entire thing was one long take, the audience was more involved. Instead of cutting to exterior shots, the camera swept around, then back in again to the window. I thought it worked magnificently, though I could see how an inexperienced director could have totally flubbed it.
You know, I really didn't appreciate the Beatles when they were still the Beatles, but they did, in fact, change society and music. Did Justin Bieber, whoever he is?
His music seems to be encouraging more people to throw things at performers on stage.
I think Robert Jordan's greatest curse was that he set out to make a 12-book series. He blew through the first 6 books, fantastic. 7 and 8 meandered, book 9 seemed decent, book 10 was awful (I remember getting annoyed when I realized that I'd read 500 pages and not a SINGLE plot point had advanced). Book 11 is where the series started getting good again, as if he'd realized "Oh shit, the next book is the last, I'd better start wrapping things up!"
The last five books should have been condensed into two, leaving it as a 9 (or maybe 10) book series instead of the 12-13 book series it became.
Any time a company claims it will make a major announcement, a lot of people buy stock, then sell it off after the announcement is made to try to turn a profit. It rarely has to do with any particular approval of disapproval of the content of the announcement.
It goes back a lot further than Hearst. How about the churches, for example? They controlled a lot of the information flow, well before the printing press was invented.
"Smaller more efficient government is good?" I'm all for efficiency, as it translates to being more productive. But usually this is just a code phrase for deregulation. Which hasn't worked all that well, has it? Deregulation of the housing markets lead to massive abuses by banks and lenders. Deregulation (actually, NO regulation) of derivative markets also lead to massive abuses and the more recent bailout of the banking system.
Unfortunately, each "side" has its own story of the reasons for various disasters. The left will claim that it was deregulation that led to the housing collapse, while the right will claim that the government required banks to make loans to lower-income applicants, many of whom couldn't pay back the mortgages they now had (in other words: It was Carter's and Clinton's fault). Both sides have a very very firm belief in the correctness of these conclusions and can come up with all sorts of "non-biased" reports, articles, and statistics to support it.
All of a sudden, out of nowhere they're being told that, hooray, Earth is growing plants again, we all get to go home... And every single person is totally, completely, enthusiastically on board with changing their entire way of life, to repopulate a deserted (and actually, still pretty polluted and disgusting) planet from scratch when none of them have ever had any sort of experience or exposure to even the outdoors, much less things like farming and the hardships of a largely non-technological existence.
I think you could make the case that almost none of them knew what they were actually getting into (even the videos the captain watched whitewashed the process of farming). Much like, say, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie might think going to spend the summer on a farm milking cows and such might be "rustic" and "fun," then the realities of hard work and getting dirty set in, things that didn't occur to them since that way of life is so foreign.
They crew seemed kind of disappointed in Earth once they got there.
I love sci-fi. I just remember finding the whole movie annoyingly lame after all the hype that was surrounding it. There were ads for it in the cinema something like 5 months before it even came out.
Five months? These days that's nothing. I remember being shocked when I saw a commercial for Godzilla (1998) in the theater a full twelve months before it came out.
...but sadly no one is forcing them to learn about computers if they constantly confuse G**gle with the Web.
Or, for that matter, "the Web" with "the Internet".
Oh, that used to be the case! But with the rise of IMs/online games/etc, it seems like more people than before call it The Internet.
Around here, AT&T (who really SHOULD know better) is airing radio commercials that start out, I shit you not, with the statement: "Did you know that when the Internet was created people called it the World Wide Web?"
While Oracle might be up there in terms of desire to reduce freedom, I don't see that they'd have much -ability- to affect net freedom very much. Yeah, there's the whole Java thing, and that might end up driving a nail in the Java coffin, but there are a lot of alternatives to Java, especially since it was never able to deliver on its write once, run anywhere promise.
I'm still not able to run arbitrary code on the processor in my microwave or my refrigerator. Why can't I manually deploy the airbag in my car? How come there's no flash client for my wristwatch.
Apple is small potatoes--this goes all the way to the top.
For the most part, those markets have never been free, and even most geeks don't care about running their own code on their freezer. I don't care about running alternative code on my freezer/microwave/etc, but I care very very strongly about running it on my computing devices.
He's probably buying into Steve Jobs's belief that the desktop market has little point, and that the whole future of computing is tied up in mobile devices, where Apple has far more clout.
I'm interested in hearing what your take is on the Tea Party these days. About 6-12 months ago, I had somewhat... optimistic hopes for them, and felt they could be a much-needed transformative force for the Republican Party. However, looking at the various "Tea Party" Republicans from the last election, I'm not seeing a real difference between them and, say, the Republican crop of 1994. I see the same governmentalist intervention bullshit in social circles (anti-gay-rights, religious education in schools, etc), the same lip-service to lower taxes, smaller government, government is the enemy and problem that the neo-conservatives came up with in the Reagan Revolution.
From where I sit, it looks like the Republican Party completely conquered the Tea Party. I see little deviation from the old Republican Party line in the newly elected crop of Tea Partiers. It's quite depressing.
It's that "because..." I'm having trouble filling in here. MSFT is claiming infringement on something they had no hand in creating with Android; how could they turn around and sue somebody for using something which *they helped create,* and which *they supported,* and which *they contributed source code to*? If they closed-source future revisions, somebody was bored enough to fork the GPL-released version and attempt to keep it in sync, and that forked version somehow implemented a new feature for compatibility, I could then see *some* possibility they'd go after the competing implementation, but I think if they changed the licensing on Mono back to closed, it would die from neglect soon enough anyway.
You're treating Microsoft as if it was some single, monolithic, unchanging entity, but executives come and go, and their philosophies and attitudes hugely affect how a company treats the various communities that use or work with that companies products and standards. Maybe Ballmer has no intention to bring patent lawsuits, but what if he retired at the end of the end of the year and someone aggressively anti-source takes over and decides it would no longer be in Microsoft's interest to allow Mono to exist?
IBM used to be the Evil Empire before Microsoft, then for awhile it seemed like it would be the business champion of Open Source. Now everything is murky there. Apple used to champion open source, even advertising the OSX kernel as being open. Steve Jobs used to talk about it. Now Apple is leading the charge in one of the greatest removal of developer and user rights since the company's founding.
You can hope that a company will show restraint and wisdom, but your only true protection is to not allow a company to have that type of power over your projects in the first place.
Remember, developers at SCO used to contribute to Open Source and GPLed projects too. That didn't prevent new management from coming in, looking at the books, and doing everything in the company's power to generate income regardless of whether it meshed with prior philosophies or not. And they did it with Microsoft's direction and money, one of the many reasons why many around here would be a bit distrustful of MS's benevolence.
For a current example, look at what's happening with the whole Oracle/Java debacle.
Deny deny deny. Obfuscate and confuse the issue. Introduce an alternative theory. Have "independent" expert validate alternative theory. Never admit truth. Wait for public to forget incident.
It works all the time.
Ummmm, it does?
Or could it be that most conspiracy theories that conspiracy buffs like to talk about are actually bullshit?
Assuming Wayland and the hardware get along, which requires modern Linux interfaces like KMS, and X.org as a Wayland client has full GLX functionality, it should have little effect. That would currently (probably indefinitely) exclude Nvidia proprietary drivers: just one more reason to dump them.
Actually it sounds like a great reason not to run Wayland.
A very large number of Linux users rely on the proprietary drivers, and the open source drivers will never be as good.
Your best bet if you don't like pulseaudio is probably to use jack instead, you can make it so that pulseaudio feeds it's streams to jack and by changing your asound.conf get alsa programs to use it too.
As a bonus you get high quality low latency audio, that doesn't die all the time like pulse and has more functionality... still think pulse should have never existed.
And... none of the above beats having a sound card with a hardware mixer to avoid all that software mixing BS that the long parade of Linux sound servers never solved with any measure of stability.
Because, while some jobs leave our country, goods made in their country are cheaper. If shipping a job to India lowers the average wage here by 10% but the price of goods goes down by 20%, that's a net gain.
Only past a certain level. If someone is right on the line and the wage lowering pushes them below the poverty line, it's a great blow to standard of living, as they can't afford those goods anymore, even at a low price.
Basic expenses, food, electricity, gas, even rents in most areas have not, and do not, as a trend, go down. There is a certain minimum that is required, and if wages go below that point, then that person is screwed. Oh, a new TV or a new car cost 20% less now? That's great, except they can barely make rent.
So you have an expanding upper class, an expanding lower class, and a contracting middle class.
Thank you for explaining why Wi-Fi is generally so shitty, even in urban areas. "Wi-Fi will fix all our network needs" is a mantra often heard on Slashdot, but I've yet to hear of a single large-scale wi-fi network that provides fast, uninterrupted, reliable service whatever time of day it is.
Slashdot Mirror
There are one million factors to consider when setting up a business. Somehow I don't think "What if it hurts when we leave the country?" is all that high up on the list.
That's because just about no country does what the GP recommended doing.
If they want to leave, make it hurt badly(if not something that outright kills the company). Then make the company an example of how things can go wrong in a robbery
And then no company will want to set up shop in your country again. Why would they, when the risk is driven up that high?
Pass a constitutional amendment that strips Congress of civil immunity for their unconstitutional laws. Let them get sued for lost wages, profits, trebble damages and emotional distress and suddenly we'll have 535 originalist legal scholars.
Sweet, so when Congress fails to pass laws outlawing and filtering any device or program that is used for piracy, the RIAA and MPAA sue them for piracy 'damages?' We'd be worse off than if we were back at square one.
I simply think that it's absolute bullshit that campaign contributions are considered "speech."
We've institutionalized bribery. What a fantastic system.
Slashdot is staffed by, and read by many people who want to be free to make their own decisions. They don't want either the government or some large corporate trust removing those possibilities.
One thing CGI and modern technology has allowed for are the impossible camera moves. Yes, it's impressive to zoom in on a flying aircraft and right through the glass into the interior. It's impressive to follow a bomb dropping from the plane until it goes down the stack of a battleship or fly down Orthanc into the flaming pits below it. But these impossible shots draw attention to their artificiality by being so impossible. I'll give Lord of the Rings a pass on some of the more extreme camera stuff because the CGI was so impressively integrated but I did wonder how the whole thing would have looked if it was filmed in a more deliberately like an old Hollywood sword and sandals epic, acting like a real camera was involved and just happening to sprinkle in all the CGI monsters.
I think one of my favorite recent "impossible shots" was Spielburg's War of the Worlds. What happens after the city is destroyed and your main characters are driving away and need to talk? You have a driving scene with discussion in the car. Okay, but Spielburg thought it wasn't tense enough and looked for a way to ratchet that up, and found that if the entire thing was one long take, the audience was more involved. Instead of cutting to exterior shots, the camera swept around, then back in again to the window. I thought it worked magnificently, though I could see how an inexperienced director could have totally flubbed it.
You know, I really didn't appreciate the Beatles when they were still the Beatles, but they did, in fact, change society and music. Did Justin Bieber, whoever he is?
His music seems to be encouraging more people to throw things at performers on stage.
I think Robert Jordan's greatest curse was that he set out to make a 12-book series. He blew through the first 6 books, fantastic. 7 and 8 meandered, book 9 seemed decent, book 10 was awful (I remember getting annoyed when I realized that I'd read 500 pages and not a SINGLE plot point had advanced). Book 11 is where the series started getting good again, as if he'd realized "Oh shit, the next book is the last, I'd better start wrapping things up!"
The last five books should have been condensed into two, leaving it as a 9 (or maybe 10) book series instead of the 12-13 book series it became.
Shareholders aren't happy either as Apple stock is dropping.
Any time a company claims it will make a major announcement, a lot of people buy stock, then sell it off after the announcement is made to try to turn a profit. It rarely has to do with any particular approval of disapproval of the content of the announcement.
It goes back a lot further than Hearst. How about the churches, for example? They controlled a lot of the information flow, well before the printing press was invented.
Your sig is genius.
"Smaller more efficient government is good?" I'm all for efficiency, as it translates to being more productive. But usually this is just a code phrase for deregulation. Which hasn't worked all that well, has it? Deregulation of the housing markets lead to massive abuses by banks and lenders. Deregulation (actually, NO regulation) of derivative markets also lead to massive abuses and the more recent bailout of the banking system.
Unfortunately, each "side" has its own story of the reasons for various disasters. The left will claim that it was deregulation that led to the housing collapse, while the right will claim that the government required banks to make loans to lower-income applicants, many of whom couldn't pay back the mortgages they now had (in other words: It was Carter's and Clinton's fault). Both sides have a very very firm belief in the correctness of these conclusions and can come up with all sorts of "non-biased" reports, articles, and statistics to support it.
All of a sudden, out of nowhere they're being told that, hooray, Earth is growing plants again, we all get to go home... And every single person is totally, completely, enthusiastically on board with changing their entire way of life, to repopulate a deserted (and actually, still pretty polluted and disgusting) planet from scratch when none of them have ever had any sort of experience or exposure to even the outdoors, much less things like farming and the hardships of a largely non-technological existence.
I think you could make the case that almost none of them knew what they were actually getting into (even the videos the captain watched whitewashed the process of farming). Much like, say, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie might think going to spend the summer on a farm milking cows and such might be "rustic" and "fun," then the realities of hard work and getting dirty set in, things that didn't occur to them since that way of life is so foreign.
They crew seemed kind of disappointed in Earth once they got there.
I love sci-fi. I just remember finding the whole movie annoyingly lame after all the hype that was surrounding it. There were ads for it in the cinema something like 5 months before it even came out.
Five months? These days that's nothing. I remember being shocked when I saw a commercial for Godzilla (1998) in the theater a full twelve months before it came out.
...but sadly no one is forcing them to learn about computers if they constantly confuse G**gle with the Web.
Or, for that matter, "the Web" with "the Internet".
Oh, that used to be the case! But with the rise of IMs/online games/etc, it seems like more people than before call it The Internet.
Around here, AT&T (who really SHOULD know better) is airing radio commercials that start out, I shit you not, with the statement: "Did you know that when the Internet was created people called it the World Wide Web?"
While Oracle might be up there in terms of desire to reduce freedom, I don't see that they'd have much -ability- to affect net freedom very much. Yeah, there's the whole Java thing, and that might end up driving a nail in the Java coffin, but there are a lot of alternatives to Java, especially since it was never able to deliver on its write once, run anywhere promise.
I'm still not able to run arbitrary code on the processor in my microwave or my refrigerator. Why can't I manually deploy the airbag in my car? How come there's no flash client for my wristwatch.
Apple is small potatoes--this goes all the way to the top.
For the most part, those markets have never been free, and even most geeks don't care about running their own code on their freezer. I don't care about running alternative code on my freezer/microwave/etc, but I care very very strongly about running it on my computing devices.
Apple has like 3-7% of the Desktop market.
He's probably buying into Steve Jobs's belief that the desktop market has little point, and that the whole future of computing is tied up in mobile devices, where Apple has far more clout.
I'm interested in hearing what your take is on the Tea Party these days. About 6-12 months ago, I had somewhat... optimistic hopes for them, and felt they could be a much-needed transformative force for the Republican Party. However, looking at the various "Tea Party" Republicans from the last election, I'm not seeing a real difference between them and, say, the Republican crop of 1994. I see the same governmentalist intervention bullshit in social circles (anti-gay-rights, religious education in schools, etc), the same lip-service to lower taxes, smaller government, government is the enemy and problem that the neo-conservatives came up with in the Reagan Revolution.
From where I sit, it looks like the Republican Party completely conquered the Tea Party. I see little deviation from the old Republican Party line in the newly elected crop of Tea Partiers. It's quite depressing.
It's that "because..." I'm having trouble filling in here. MSFT is claiming infringement on something they had no hand in creating with Android; how could they turn around and sue somebody for using something which *they helped create,* and which *they supported,* and which *they contributed source code to*? If they closed-source future revisions, somebody was bored enough to fork the GPL-released version and attempt to keep it in sync, and that forked version somehow implemented a new feature for compatibility, I could then see *some* possibility they'd go after the competing implementation, but I think if they changed the licensing on Mono back to closed, it would die from neglect soon enough anyway.
You're treating Microsoft as if it was some single, monolithic, unchanging entity, but executives come and go, and their philosophies and attitudes hugely affect how a company treats the various communities that use or work with that companies products and standards. Maybe Ballmer has no intention to bring patent lawsuits, but what if he retired at the end of the end of the year and someone aggressively anti-source takes over and decides it would no longer be in Microsoft's interest to allow Mono to exist?
IBM used to be the Evil Empire before Microsoft, then for awhile it seemed like it would be the business champion of Open Source. Now everything is murky there. Apple used to champion open source, even advertising the OSX kernel as being open. Steve Jobs used to talk about it. Now Apple is leading the charge in one of the greatest removal of developer and user rights since the company's founding.
You can hope that a company will show restraint and wisdom, but your only true protection is to not allow a company to have that type of power over your projects in the first place.
Remember, developers at SCO used to contribute to Open Source and GPLed projects too. That didn't prevent new management from coming in, looking at the books, and doing everything in the company's power to generate income regardless of whether it meshed with prior philosophies or not. And they did it with Microsoft's direction and money, one of the many reasons why many around here would be a bit distrustful of MS's benevolence.
For a current example, look at what's happening with the whole Oracle/Java debacle.
Deny deny deny. Obfuscate and confuse the issue. Introduce an alternative theory. Have "independent" expert validate alternative theory. Never admit truth. Wait for public to forget incident.
It works all the time.
Ummmm, it does?
Or could it be that most conspiracy theories that conspiracy buffs like to talk about are actually bullshit?
And since Mac OS X runs X applications properly, there is no worry this can not be done. It works today and it has been done.
Err, no it doesn't. It doesn't even come close.
Assuming Wayland and the hardware get along, which requires modern Linux interfaces like KMS, and X.org as a Wayland client has full GLX functionality, it should have little effect. That would currently (probably indefinitely) exclude Nvidia proprietary drivers: just one more reason to dump them.
Actually it sounds like a great reason not to run Wayland.
A very large number of Linux users rely on the proprietary drivers, and the open source drivers will never be as good.
Your best bet if you don't like pulseaudio is probably to use jack instead, you can make it so that pulseaudio feeds it's streams to jack and by changing your asound.conf get alsa programs to use it too.
As a bonus you get high quality low latency audio, that doesn't die all the time like pulse and has more functionality... still think pulse should have never existed.
And... none of the above beats having a sound card with a hardware mixer to avoid all that software mixing BS that the long parade of Linux sound servers never solved with any measure of stability.
EMU10k1 + ALSA for the win.
Because, while some jobs leave our country, goods made in their country are cheaper. If shipping a job to India lowers the average wage here by 10% but the price of goods goes down by 20%, that's a net gain.
Only past a certain level. If someone is right on the line and the wage lowering pushes them below the poverty line, it's a great blow to standard of living, as they can't afford those goods anymore, even at a low price.
Basic expenses, food, electricity, gas, even rents in most areas have not, and do not, as a trend, go down. There is a certain minimum that is required, and if wages go below that point, then that person is screwed. Oh, a new TV or a new car cost 20% less now? That's great, except they can barely make rent.
So you have an expanding upper class, an expanding lower class, and a contracting middle class.
Thank you for explaining why Wi-Fi is generally so shitty, even in urban areas. "Wi-Fi will fix all our network needs" is a mantra often heard on Slashdot, but I've yet to hear of a single large-scale wi-fi network that provides fast, uninterrupted, reliable service whatever time of day it is.