People with skills that are in demand do not have trouble finding a paycheck. It's when someone has highly specialized skills that aren't in demand that there's trouble.
Every society strikes a balance between individualism and collectivism. We're all individuals, but we're also functional units within a larger system that keeps everyone alive.
Interesting way of phrasing that. I would phrase it as follows:
In a society, individuals most choose to specialize in order to obtain the economic benefits of specialization. This requires a degree of trust and cooperation, all of which is motivated by self-interest. Price signals efficiently allocate labor to its most productive role.
Saying that this is due to collectivism implies that people do not participate solely for selfish reasons. I don't think that is the case. Cooperation can be 100% selfish. This is a good thing.
It may actually be for his own good (and that would be a good thing). As a wealthy guy, he is probably able to count on his fingers the millions of dollars of his own taxes that are invested in NASA. He sees little success coming from NASA and so he hedges his tax "investment" by helping private industry begin manned spaceflight, something that had heretofore been solely under the control of inefficient government agencies.
He's spending money now so that he can save it later in lower taxes once the public realizes that NASA is a waste of money. He may also make money if SpaceShipOne succeeds as a company.
I can't tell if your comment was intended to be a joke or not.
Leave it up to businesses to decide who they want to hire. If someone wants to hire a team of Indian programmers instead of a team from California, or a team of Californian programmers instead of a team from New York or Michigan, so be it. It is that person's decision, and he/she will have to live with the consequences.
I'm sure there are a lot of Indian programmers who are all around better programmers than many US programmers. These programmers might cost more than some US programmers, and so businesses might choose them only if a high level of expertise is deemed necessary for a particular project.
If you are a programmer, do two things:
1) Do what you can to make yourself as skilled and valuable as possible
2) Be aware of trends that may make you extinct and act accordingly, even if it means learning new skills.
People have the idea that a human being should only be required to learn one trade during his lifetime and should be able to earn a decdent wage at that trade, whatever it happens to be. That is rediculous.
People have work done offshore becaue the price and quality are better than work done in the US, or at least they seem to be.
sql*kitten is right on target that innovation will remain in the west, and grunt work will flee to places of cheaper labor.
So, if you feel like your programming job is grunt work, be ready for it to disappear.
Can anyone explain what the following means and how one might determine an optimal setting for a particular use?:
-/proc/sys/vm/swappiness defines the kernel's preference for pagecache over
mapped memory. Setting it to 100 (percent) makes it treat both types of
memory equally. Setting it to zero makes the kernel very much prefer to
reclaim plain pagecache rather than mapped-into-pagetables memory.
That is true of gen X and Y, etc., but pre gen-X it's not necessarily true. People had (and still have) secretaries, underlings, etc., who often do the detail work.
Uh, I don't think it's generally debated that different people have different levels of experience with publishing software. Clearly, the people who used pagemaker had some experience, while the people who used powerpoint were more likely new to the whole idea of publishing (and maybe even computers).
So you sat there thinking how dumb they were just because they didn't understand scalable vector graphics, dpi, etc.
Maybe they were idiots, or maybe their expertise was in some other field and they were highly productive in that field but wanted to produce a publication. Perhaps as an "intelligent person" you could have written software to make the job of creating high quality books and posters easy... but no, you were just an ass with a chip on your shoulder working in a print shop thinking how dumb everyone else was...
Uh, your comment about pasting images and the alleged reduced quality after an image has been in PowerPoint is utterly untrue. As of PowerPoint 2000, all images are stored in their original state, and any crops or resizing operations do not modify the original or degrade it in any way.
On a side note, if you read Tufte's book then you wouldn't let a software tool get in the way of your ability to communicate information.
On a second side note, your comment was really a troll.
I'm not sure how much Chomsky you've read, but it sounds like you've read a lot. I think that based on the following facts it is likely that syntax (the field) will have a tough time making unified scientific progress:
1) There are few people who are both trained syntacticians and native speakers of all of the obscure languages needed to provide data to test an aspect of a theory of syntax, and so native speaker judgments are required in order to "prove" a given theoretical contribution... There end up being a few "classic" sentences (such as "John loves Mary" and a few from Icelandic that I am thinking of) that make up the primary data points for any particular theory of syntax, to the extent that the theory is empirically testable at all, and the possibility that there are some sentences which are simply tough for any native speaker to judge due to some structural aspect that is just as likely a quirk as it is a consistent universal.
2) Few syntax papers (journal articles) are based on a particular chomskian theory: Most are based on a variety of citations from a variety of different works, some by Chomsky, and some in response to Chomsky's various works. The point is, there is not a consistent theoretical starting point for most papers. Most typically start out with the latest theory and then drege up something from P&P or one of Chomsky's older works, and claim that it combined with some new data (in some heretofore unstudied language) ought to be considered proof that warrants a change to "the theory"...
3) There are no formal tools for describing theories of syntax, merely formal tools (most typically trees and x' notation) for describing sentences. Such notation for theories of syntax would likely resemble the notion of sets of functions, as in the lambda calculus, or something like that. A given piece of sentence data (along with a given tree interpretation) could then be checked against n theories to see which class of theories allowed it, and why.
It seems to me that the formal tools and the methodological approach to syntax do not make it likely that the field will go much beyond Chomsky's initial (and insightful) observations about the existence of potentially quantifiable universals.
I've had Airtouch, Sprint, and T-Mobile (in that order).
T-Mobile is by far the best provider. I live in a city with good coverage, and in the past 2 years I have been very pleased with the quality and coverage. In more rural towns, or out in the country the phone has lousy coverage. I would say that for the most part GSM makes sense if you're in an urban/suburban area and having 100% reliable coverage elsewhere isn't a must.
T-Mobile customer support has been excellent the few times I've had to call. They have sent me a new phone twice, and they've been extremely helpful.
As a side note, my Motorola P280 is actually configurable (in Windows) as a modem, and you can dial up to the net at about 19,200 and use airtime instead of having to pay for the overpriced service that T-Mobile offers (56K) where you are charged for bandwidth. I have 5000 anytime/anywhere minutes per month on my plan ($99/month, now costs a bit more) and so occasionally using a few hundred for dial-up in a pinch isn't a big deal. The phone cost about $60 or so after rebates.
The phone also has great conference calling features which make it extremely useful at work. I don't know how many times I've avoided the hassle of calling someone who was supposed to be on a conference and telling them the 800 number and pin by simply conferencing them in via my phone.
T-Mobile also does frequent promotions, and you can always switch plans to take advantage of them. It does requrire extending your contract another year, but it's often well worth it.
Trust is important, and ultimately trust in the computer world will come down to biometrics, just as it will in the world of finance. When you act untrustworthy and fail to pay your debts, or if you pirate software, you will be widely considered to have broken an important social contract, and systems will exist so that others will be aware of your past history before allowing you to take advantage again.
Similar to today, where some less risk-averse lenders will loan those with poor credit history money at a high interest rate (sub-prime financing), those who decide they value the ability to share a piece of digital music, forge an email, etc., will pay a higher price in order to have such freedom. This is similar to the higher price afforded to those who decide that the due date on their bills is inconsequential.
Society has evolved to be able to hedge against risk. This has made things like credit cards possible for even the poorest Americans. In order for something to be hedged it must be well defined and its risks well known. Weak computer security and insufficient DRM is currently holding back TONS of investment that is waiting to be made in new technologies and other innovations that will ultimately lower the cost (and increase the value) for everyone.
Those who glorify soft DRM (or no DRM) are as backwards as someone who glorifies the days in which the only way you could secure a significant loan was if you had gone to kindergarten with the town banker.
A formalized series of trust rules/guidelines, and the techology to enforce those rules, is absolutely necessary if we want people to continue to innovate and for society to be able to fully benefit from the distribution potential of the internet.
For the content management part, all you need to do is create the capability for them to add new sections, each with a customizable title and content. For the content, just have them type into a DIV, and write some simple javascript functions to handle formatting within the DIV, and then save the innerHTML to an XML file or to a database.
Storing the data in an XML file is pretty simple. Then use XSLT to generate the page. That way, you can also give them a new "skin" or "theme" for future holidays/gifts and they will be able to immediately apply it to their existing content. Just make sure you escape the HTML you store inside the XML properly...:)
IMHO this can be done a lot simpler with XML/XSLT and a simple schema, and will be very portable if they change web hosting providers, etc.
It's absolutely OK... however I don't agree that what you describe is a flaw, but merely an un-capitalized-on area.
Consumer reports isn't doing an adequate job, and nobody else has been clever enough (yet) to figure out a way to provide product reviews on a massive scale so that people will pay for them.
Looks like you've hit upon a business opportunity. Companies like consumer reports, good housekeeping, etc, all specialize in cutting through the "advertising fluff" to help people make the best decision.
Before I buy new hardware, I try to read at least a couple of reviews.
If you don't do that, then it must not be worth your time. That is your decision in a free society, but capitalism is what brought consumer reports, etc., into being: They enjoy making a profit by distributing valuable information.
Your argument that consumers fall for marketing fluff and therefore capitalism isn't the best and fairest economic system ever devised really isn't convincing.
In a communist system, you'd only have one option, and would have been manufactured by the government, and it would probably be less reliable than even the worst products available to free market consumers.
There is nothing idealistic about recognizing the incentive for companies to produce ever-better products and to use advertising to draw attention to their products' advantages. No company will be successful for long if it falsely advertises its products.
For those Slashdotters who are skeptical about capitalism, competition is a good thing.
Firms that can settle for making less profit, or who can innovate ways to legitimately earn top dollar for their products and services, will rise to the top, while those who can't compete will go out of business.
Gore Vidal is related (albeit distantly) to Al Gore. Doesn't this sound like sour grapes to you? Plus, he's got a new book out so he's probably going after some free publicity. The new book looks pretty good, though, I must say.
Slashdot Mirror
People with skills that are in demand do not have trouble finding a paycheck. It's when someone has highly specialized skills that aren't in demand that there's trouble.
Every society strikes a balance between individualism and collectivism. We're all individuals, but we're also functional units within a larger system that keeps everyone alive.
Interesting way of phrasing that. I would phrase it as follows:
In a society, individuals most choose to specialize in order to obtain the economic benefits of specialization. This requires a degree of trust and cooperation, all of which is motivated by self-interest. Price signals efficiently allocate labor to its most productive role.
Saying that this is due to collectivism implies that people do not participate solely for selfish reasons. I don't think that is the case. Cooperation can be 100% selfish. This is a good thing.
It may actually be for his own good (and that would be a good thing). As a wealthy guy, he is probably able to count on his fingers the millions of dollars of his own taxes that are invested in NASA. He sees little success coming from NASA and so he hedges his tax "investment" by helping private industry begin manned spaceflight, something that had heretofore been solely under the control of inefficient government agencies.
He's spending money now so that he can save it later in lower taxes once the public realizes that NASA is a waste of money. He may also make money if SpaceShipOne succeeds as a company.
I'm not stating an opinion, I'm stating what the opinion of the decision maker who decides to use offshore labor must think.
I can't tell if your comment was intended to be a joke or not.
Leave it up to businesses to decide who they want to hire. If someone wants to hire a team of Indian programmers instead of a team from California, or a team of Californian programmers instead of a team from New York or Michigan, so be it. It is that person's decision, and he/she will have to live with the consequences.
I'm sure there are a lot of Indian programmers who are all around better programmers than many US programmers. These programmers might cost more than some US programmers, and so businesses might choose them only if a high level of expertise is deemed necessary for a particular project.
If you are a programmer, do two things:
1) Do what you can to make yourself as skilled and valuable as possible
2) Be aware of trends that may make you extinct and act accordingly, even if it means learning new skills.
People have the idea that a human being should only be required to learn one trade during his lifetime and should be able to earn a decdent wage at that trade, whatever it happens to be. That is rediculous.
People have work done offshore becaue the price and quality are better than work done in the US, or at least they seem to be.
sql*kitten is right on target that innovation will remain in the west, and grunt work will flee to places of cheaper labor.
So, if you feel like your programming job is grunt work, be ready for it to disappear.
Uh... the "patch" still sends all of the URLs that you type to their server for analysis. How else does it know the page is spoofed?
That's precisely what it was. Did you see the website of the company that produced the "patch"?
dear zealot:
the "patch" simply redirects all URLS to the organization's own server, where they attempt to verify that they are authentic.
This is spyware, and you got fooled into cheering for it!
The installer is now a web-based installer package, the kind Apple has been using for Quicktime for a while.
I have installed the last couple of iTunes updates without any problems, but this one encountered a number of errors.
It forced a restart, so we'll see how it turns out.
The point: I think there will be another release fairly soon to fix this problem. You may want to hold off on this update until then.
Can anyone explain what the following means and how one might determine an optimal setting for a particular use?:
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness defines the kernel's preference for pagecache over
-
mapped memory. Setting it to 100 (percent) makes it treat both types of
memory equally. Setting it to zero makes the kernel very much prefer to
reclaim plain pagecache rather than mapped-into-pagetables memory.
That is true of gen X and Y, etc., but pre gen-X it's not necessarily true. People had (and still have) secretaries, underlings, etc., who often do the detail work.
A PowerPoint presentation is only as interesting and boring as you are.
Uh, I don't think it's generally debated that different people have different levels of experience with publishing software. Clearly, the people who used pagemaker had some experience, while the people who used powerpoint were more likely new to the whole idea of publishing (and maybe even computers).
So you sat there thinking how dumb they were just because they didn't understand scalable vector graphics, dpi, etc.
Maybe they were idiots, or maybe their expertise was in some other field and they were highly productive in that field but wanted to produce a publication. Perhaps as an "intelligent person" you could have written software to make the job of creating high quality books and posters easy... but no, you were just an ass with a chip on your shoulder working in a print shop thinking how dumb everyone else was...
PowerPoint is just software. It's only as shallow or deep as you are.
Uh, your comment about pasting images and the alleged reduced quality after an image has been in PowerPoint is utterly untrue. As of PowerPoint 2000, all images are stored in their original state, and any crops or resizing operations do not modify the original or degrade it in any way.
On a side note, if you read Tufte's book then you wouldn't let a software tool get in the way of your ability to communicate information.
On a second side note, your comment was really a troll.
I'm not sure how much Chomsky you've read, but it sounds like you've read a lot. I think that based on the following facts it is likely that syntax (the field) will have a tough time making unified scientific progress:
1) There are few people who are both trained syntacticians and native speakers of all of the obscure languages needed to provide data to test an aspect of a theory of syntax, and so native speaker judgments are required in order to "prove" a given theoretical contribution... There end up being a few "classic" sentences (such as "John loves Mary" and a few from Icelandic that I am thinking of) that make up the primary data points for any particular theory of syntax, to the extent that the theory is empirically testable at all, and the possibility that there are some sentences which are simply tough for any native speaker to judge due to some structural aspect that is just as likely a quirk as it is a consistent universal.
2) Few syntax papers (journal articles) are based on a particular chomskian theory: Most are based on a variety of citations from a variety of different works, some by Chomsky, and some in response to Chomsky's various works. The point is, there is not a consistent theoretical starting point for most papers. Most typically start out with the latest theory and then drege up something from P&P or one of Chomsky's older works, and claim that it combined with some new data (in some heretofore unstudied language) ought to be considered proof that warrants a change to "the theory"...
3) There are no formal tools for describing theories of syntax, merely formal tools (most typically trees and x' notation) for describing sentences. Such notation for theories of syntax would likely resemble the notion of sets of functions, as in the lambda calculus, or something like that. A given piece of sentence data (along with a given tree interpretation) could then be checked against n theories to see which class of theories allowed it, and why.
It seems to me that the formal tools and the methodological approach to syntax do not make it likely that the field will go much beyond Chomsky's initial (and insightful) observations about the existence of potentially quantifiable universals.
Thoughts?
I've had Airtouch, Sprint, and T-Mobile (in that order).
T-Mobile is by far the best provider. I live in a city with good coverage, and in the past 2 years I have been very pleased with the quality and coverage. In more rural towns, or out in the country the phone has lousy coverage. I would say that for the most part GSM makes sense if you're in an urban/suburban area and having 100% reliable coverage elsewhere isn't a must.
T-Mobile customer support has been excellent the few times I've had to call. They have sent me a new phone twice, and they've been extremely helpful.
As a side note, my Motorola P280 is actually configurable (in Windows) as a modem, and you can dial up to the net at about 19,200 and use airtime instead of having to pay for the overpriced service that T-Mobile offers (56K) where you are charged for bandwidth. I have 5000 anytime/anywhere minutes per month on my plan ($99/month, now costs a bit more) and so occasionally using a few hundred for dial-up in a pinch isn't a big deal. The phone cost about $60 or so after rebates.
The phone also has great conference calling features which make it extremely useful at work. I don't know how many times I've avoided the hassle of calling someone who was supposed to be on a conference and telling them the 800 number and pin by simply conferencing them in via my phone.
T-Mobile also does frequent promotions, and you can always switch plans to take advantage of them. It does requrire extending your contract another year, but it's often well worth it.
Trust is important, and ultimately trust in the computer world will come down to biometrics, just as it will in the world of finance. When you act untrustworthy and fail to pay your debts, or if you pirate software, you will be widely considered to have broken an important social contract, and systems will exist so that others will be aware of your past history before allowing you to take advantage again.
Similar to today, where some less risk-averse lenders will loan those with poor credit history money at a high interest rate (sub-prime financing), those who decide they value the ability to share a piece of digital music, forge an email, etc., will pay a higher price in order to have such freedom. This is similar to the higher price afforded to those who decide that the due date on their bills is inconsequential.
Society has evolved to be able to hedge against risk. This has made things like credit cards possible for even the poorest Americans. In order for something to be hedged it must be well defined and its risks well known. Weak computer security and insufficient DRM is currently holding back TONS of investment that is waiting to be made in new technologies and other innovations that will ultimately lower the cost (and increase the value) for everyone.
Those who glorify soft DRM (or no DRM) are as backwards as someone who glorifies the days in which the only way you could secure a significant loan was if you had gone to kindergarten with the town banker.
A formalized series of trust rules/guidelines, and the techology to enforce those rules, is absolutely necessary if we want people to continue to innovate and for society to be able to fully benefit from the distribution potential of the internet.
you must never have played dopewars for palmOS
Here's a simple suggestion:
:)
For the content management part, all you need to do is create the capability for them to add new sections, each with a customizable title and content. For the content, just have them type into a DIV, and write some simple javascript functions to handle formatting within the DIV, and then save the innerHTML to an XML file or to a database.
Storing the data in an XML file is pretty simple. Then use XSLT to generate the page. That way, you can also give them a new "skin" or "theme" for future holidays/gifts and they will be able to immediately apply it to their existing content. Just make sure you escape the HTML you store inside the XML properly...
IMHO this can be done a lot simpler with XML/XSLT and a simple schema, and will be very portable if they change web hosting providers, etc.
It's absolutely OK... however I don't agree that what you describe is a flaw, but merely an un-capitalized-on area.
Consumer reports isn't doing an adequate job, and nobody else has been clever enough (yet) to figure out a way to provide product reviews on a massive scale so that people will pay for them.
Ok... so you were pointing out supposed flaws in Capitalism even though you like it? Or what?
Looks like you've hit upon a business opportunity. Companies like consumer reports, good housekeeping, etc, all specialize in cutting through the "advertising fluff" to help people make the best decision.
Before I buy new hardware, I try to read at least a couple of reviews.
If you don't do that, then it must not be worth your time. That is your decision in a free society, but capitalism is what brought consumer reports, etc., into being: They enjoy making a profit by distributing valuable information.
Your argument that consumers fall for marketing fluff and therefore capitalism isn't the best and fairest economic system ever devised really isn't convincing.
In a communist system, you'd only have one option, and would have been manufactured by the government, and it would probably be less reliable than even the worst products available to free market consumers.
There is nothing idealistic about recognizing the incentive for companies to produce ever-better products and to use advertising to draw attention to their products' advantages. No company will be successful for long if it falsely advertises its products.
For those Slashdotters who are skeptical about capitalism, competition is a good thing.
Firms that can settle for making less profit, or who can innovate ways to legitimately earn top dollar for their products and services, will rise to the top, while those who can't compete will go out of business.
Gore Vidal is related (albeit distantly) to Al Gore. Doesn't this sound like sour grapes to you? Plus, he's got a new book out so he's probably going after some free publicity. The new book looks pretty good, though, I must say.