It would seem the Itainium 2 is doing pretty well by that list considering the 5th fastest computer in the world is a cluster of HP Itainium 2 boxes.
The slugfest between various incarnations of the Opteron, Itainium, IBM's Power, and Apple's PowerPC should be fun to watch in the next couple of years.
I wonder if HP will reconsider killing the Alpha given that the 2nd fastest computer in the world is a cluster of alpha boxes.
Sorry, mate, in Canada we have all sorts of stores that carry region-free DVD players. Most of them don't have a single word of English on the signs and are run by folks from the Far East. Didn't realize the US of A was behind the times...;-)
We have those sort of stores in the US as well, at least in most major cities. However the average white American suburbanite is typically too afraid of dealing with non-English speaking brown people to stray far from the big-box stores.
One problem (of many) is of course that if you make programmers legally responsible for security failures you also need to give them the authority to say "No! You can't do it that way! I don't care WHAT Marketeering says!"
From my understanding this is exactly what happens today in areas where a PE has to sign off on a design making himself legally liable for any design flaws. The PE doesn't like the design for safety reasons, the PE refuses to sign, the design gets changed. At least in an ideal world that is what happens, as I understand it the reality is somewhat different but it is still often better than what happens in the commercial software development world.
False. Enterprise financial apps don't depend on changing hardware every year like graphics applications. And "just plain works" doesn't mean is maintainable. And I would doubt very strongly that someone knows 30-year-old-multi-million-lines-apps of financial code in Fortran well enough to be sure that it does what it is supposed to do...
First of all 30 year old financial applications are most likely written in COBOL not Fortran.
Second of all there are plenty of good tools out there for understanding exactly what a COBOL application does, far better than anything I've ever seen for C, C++, Java, or even VB.
Third big COBOL shops understood the importance of things like documentation, coding standards, and code review long before anyone in the desktop computing community and to a lesser extent the UNIX community did. They started to run into maintainablity problems 20-30 years ago and therefore have had that much longer to work toward solving them.
Still, I hope XFree86 doesn't go the way of COBOL.
Rumors of the death of COBOL are greatly exagerated.
There is new software being written in COBOL every day and 20, 30, or even 40 year old COBOL applications are being updated, extended, and maintained all the time.
Chances are if you've ever booked an airline ticket, traded stock, used your bank account, credit card, booked insurance, paid taxes, or gotten a phone bill your transaction touched a COBOL application at some point.
The bulk of high-volume transaction processing is still mostly done with COBOL applications running on mainframes.
You simply don't throw out well debugged software implementing complex business rules representing many hundreds of man-years of developer time because it happens to be "old". Even if parts of your application are poorly documented, poorly structured, and poorly understood there are plenty of tools for COBOL to rectify this situation that are far less risky than porting your application to a new language and platform.
Also, you might be interested to know that legally owned / properly licensed fully automatic weapons are almost NEVER used in the commission of armed crimes. I don't have a direct link handy, but that's from the FBI's own crime statistics.
That statistic applies to most legally owned and properly licensed firearms. Not just fully automatic weapons. Even legally owned and properly licensed handguns are rarely used in the commission of crime, even in states that permit concealed carry. While the numbers aren't quite as low as they are for fully automatic weapons and other similarly licensed arms they are still quite low.
The essential truth is few law abiding firearms owners ever commit armed crimes. On the other hand plenty of crimes are prevented by legally owned civilian firearms every day.
If there were 10,000 people organized in this country, for any reason, then they'd be "on the radar". They would constitute an army of sorts and would be under close watch by the govt. (probably with a distrustful eye)
And what exactly is the NRA, AARP, EFF, ACLU, Sierra Club, AFL-CIO or Howard Dean campaign? Lots and lots of people organized together to promote an agenda they feel is important.
The main problem for most people is they don't realize that political action takes time and effort. They demand instant gratification like politics was 30-minute pizza delivery.
I just hope we can limp along for a few more decades before we have to remove all of the scum from power and start over.
Scum and power go together, kind of like peanut butter and chocolate.
Far better to start with the assumption that everyone in public office is scum by definition and set up the system to deal with it.
The other thing to remember is ultimately the aforementioned scum still serve at the pleasure of the people. The old scum can be thrown out and replaced with new scum.
We are already looking at a situation where corporations are more "EQUAL" than your average joe/jane citizen. Question: How many of us can afford to hire a lobbyist? How much can you afford to bribe.. er fund a govt offical's reelection campaign?
You may not be able to hire a lobbyist by yourself and I may not be able to hire a lobbyist by myself but you and I together might be able to hire a lobbyist. For that matter if you know someone with a lot of time you don't even have to necessarily hire a lobbyist.
Same thing with campaign contributions you or I may not be able to give much individually to someone's campaign but lots of us together can have a huge impact. 10,000 people giving $100 total each is $1 million. Now if those 10,000 are organized, communicate with each other and vote they are a force to be reconed with. No sane politician is going to ignore a group that represents 10,000 voters in his district and a collective $1 million in campaign contributions.
But this is only until the first terrorist attack against railroad infrastructure. After that, I can see traveling with such high end trains being as much hassle than with airplanes today.
If I want to attack a high-speed train it makes much more sense to damage the tracks or place a bomb alongside. If I am a terrorist it makes very little sense for me to actually get on the train with a weapon.
Even if someone does attack a train for the most part the only people who's lives are at risk are the people on the train. It's not like you can slam a train into a random office building or government installation.
To be fair right after 9/11 there were proposals floating about to require airport like screening in the US for Amtrak, ferries, intercity buses, and cruise ships. As far as I know only cuise ships ended up getting much in the way of increased screening.
If so then it's a bad bill. The answer to a bad bill is not a lack of oversight. The bill should be restructured to provide more control and power to the people that the data is being collected on.
I suspect you are likely thinking of various European regulations that give ownership and control of some types of personal information to the person who's information it is.
The answer if you would like to see that sort of regulation here is separate legislation specificly granting those privacy rights.
As I understand the proposed legislation mentioned in the story it applies to most types of factual data one might collect into a database. Not just personal information like Visa purchases but sports scores, player stats, stock quotes, phone directories, election results, card catalogs, or building codes.
The legislation would give ownership of the data and the right to disseminate it to the entity who first collected it.
One example of a potential abuse would be for the NFL to claim it "owns" the rights to scores and stats from NFL games. It would have the right to sue anyone who attempted to report this information even if they got the data not from the NFL database but by watching the game in person or on TV.
Because it does not. In this case if there was no govt regulation then all data collected would be de-facto property of whoever collected it. In a world without govt you would have absolutely zero control over what a corporation could do with "your" information. The best that you could possibly hope for would be to try and sue the corporation which would go nowhere because the corporation would not be breaking any laws.
Yes and no. If there is no law saying data collected is the property of the entity collecting it then there is nothing really to prevent me from obtaining a copy of the data and using it for my own purposes.
While those with collections of data containing information about you would have few legal restrictions on what they could do with the data there would still be some restrictions based not on law but on the data collector wanting to maintain a certain reputation and what information people were willing to share with the data collector.
Consider for a moment how utterly reluctant many people are nowdays to share their real telephone numbers or email addresses with businesses, non-profits, or anyone else they don't know personally. True it's not everyone, but as someone who has done some volunteering for various non-profits it seems like well over half the people I encounter are reluctant to divulge phone numbers or email adresses until I explain exactly how we plan on using them and how often they will be contacted. Even then roughly 1/5 people still refuse to give us any information and about 20% of the email addresses and phone numbers we collect are bogus. For businesses the percentages of valid data can be even worse. At my last employer again about 1/5 of the emails and phone numbers we got off the "please contact me I'd like to learn more about your product" form on our web site were bogus. Remember these were people who wanted to be contacted by us. Based on the server logs nearly half of the visits to that page never resulted in a completed form. This is dispite having a very clearly stated privacy policy at the top of the page.
Lastly, although IANAL, I believe that even if there isn't a law explicitly prohibiting an activity you can still file a civil suit against someone as long as you can show you have been harmed somehow. This is the legal basis for many personal injury lawsuits for instance. If I recall correctly the legal term for this concept is "tort" and it goes back quite a ways in English common law.
Certainly not. Open source is supposed to be about choice. If government is used to fund open source, the element of choice is eliminated. In the free market, individuals choose for themselves whether to support open source. Under a socialist program, those decisions would be made by an elite few and forced upon everyone else. That's not individual choice; that's forced participation.
It depends on how that government support comes about for judging if the support is coercive or not. If the support is because a government funded research project wrote or extended open source software then it isn't coercive. Same thing if the government develops or pays to develop or customize open source applications to suit it's needs.
On the other hand the government just randomly funding open source projects for the sake of open source would be wrong.
What japanese plants are you talking about in Ohio that are unionized? Honda is the only one I know of that has plants in Ohio (at least 3, one motorcycle, one engine and one car). Considering that the UAW has an article about trying to unionize them on their website, they clearly are not unionized.
I'm guessing the Michigan plant you are thinking of is the Flat Rock Mazda/Ford plant. I googled and couldn't find any mentions of their quality record, though I don't ever remember hearing anyone talk about what great cars the Ford Probe was.
Sorry I got a whole bunch of old news stories mixed up in my head. I don't know where the idea there was a unionized Japanese auto plant in Ohio came from. As for Michigan I was probably thinking of the Ford/Mazda plant. Didn't there used to be a Ford/Nissan plant in MI as well?
The plant I was thinking of is the Freemont, CA GM/Toyota plant, which is unionized. I couldn't find anything on their quality record either, though I suspect it is quite good given Toyota's reputation and the reputation of the Corolla. Also I know Toyota has exported cars from this plant back to Japan.
As far as how German and Japanese companies treat their workers in Japan and Germany, that has no bearing on how they teach their workers in their U.S. plants.
My point was German and Japanese auto workers in Germany and Japan are generally treated better than auto workers in the US, union or not. As for how German or Japanese companies treat their US workers, they still have fairly similar pay, benifits, and work rules to plants run by the big 3. After all they are competing for the same pool of workers. I suppose someone could open an auto plant here where they paid US minimum wage, and had only the legally mandated benefits and work rules. But I suspect they wouldn't be very happy with the quality of the workforce they attracted nor the retention rate once those workers were trained and had experience.
Solving flexible officing problems also helps you with other emerging trends, like distributed workgroups and working from home. Ideally you don't just save money on real estate. You also make your workers happier by allowing them to work where they want.
This doesn't suit workers well who need to have a certain amount of equipment, tools, or printed material near them. While some people can work with online documentation only many find it doesn't work for them at all. Add the fact that many sysadmins and programmers like securities traders need lots of screen real-estate or multiple machines that likely isn't present with a laptop or shared office.
I have mild ADHD and while I don't have the problems you do with being unmedicated I sitll don't deal with certain types of distraction well even when on meds.
I can work in almost any environment for a week or so as long as I'm getting enough sleep but long-term I need to keep very aware of distractions and other things that keep me from getting work done.
At my last fulltime job my productivity was pretty much inversely proportional to the amount of distractions present in the workplace.
When I started in our old building I was in a cube in a cube where I didn't have line of sight to the aisleway and the most of the other people within earshot were all in my group. When we moved to a new building the problem was more one of isolation than too many distractions due to being fairly spread out and not being able to have impromptu "prarie dog" meetings. As we hired more people and people from an unrelated group were seated next to me it became steadily more difficult to get anything accomplished. The worst factors for me were being relatively far away from the "center" of our team, having tech support occupy the cubes nearby, and having someone who liked to talk loudly on speakerphone such that it was audible 50 feet away. As bad as this was things got even worse when I was moved even further from my group and closer to tech support with my cube opening onto a high-traffic walkway. I basicly wasn't able to get anything requiring concentration and focus done between the hours of 9 and 5 and was so burnt by the end of the day that I rarely got anything done by staying late.
In the future I plan to be much more insistant about being located as far as possible from people who talk on the phone all day and not having visual distractions such as aisleways within direct line of sight from my desk. Strangely enough while I can't stand being located next to interior walkways, windows even ones that look out onto busy streets don't provide the same level of distraction.
Yes and no. It is true that many "foreign" cars are made in the US - Hondas in Ohio, Toyotas in Kentucky, Mercedes SUV's in Alabama, Mitsubishis and Subarus in Indiana, ect. But to my knowledge NONE of those plants are unionized. There is a reason most foreign car companies build plants in the south, where unions are weak and frequently are right-to-work states.
Some of the Japanese plants are unionized, particularly the ones in places like Michigan, and Ohio. In fact the unionized Michigan plant of one Japanese automaker (sorry can't remember who off the top of my head) is among the most productive companywide and has among the lowest defect rate.
Many people would argue that the reason for the problems the US is having is the unionization of their workforce. Their labor contracts require car companies to pay them even when they are not working. The result is companies run the lines because it's cheaper than shutting down and paying union workers anyway, producing a glut of cars that wind up being sold to rental car companies and fleets at little profit - and then wind up on the "barely used" market killing off resale value.
Again not true. German unions are much more powerful and the union contracts there make it very difficult to lay off workers. While some of the cost of slack periods is shifted to the government, it is fairly common to provide additional training or otherwise keep workers on the payroll during downturns. In Japan even though "lifetime employment" is no longer guarenteed, there is still a huge stigma against the sort of layoffs we see in the US. Companies in Japan are still incredibly reluctant to lay off workers and will typically try to place them in another job, even retraining them at company expense for placement at another company, rather than just laying them off.
The US is still a huge market for manufactured goods, including cars. Even if Detroit is depressed, the rest of the country is doing rather well. I suspect that the big three automakers would be the big zero instead of the big two if they didn't attempt to reduce their costs to compete with the Japanese: the fact that they haven't reduced their costs enough by kicking out the unions and their expensive, lazy workforce means that year over year they lose even more business to the Japanese on quality and price and to the Germans on quality and luxury.
You are *VERY* wrong.
Measured in terms of dollars of goods produced per dollar of labor US workers are still some of the most productive in the world.
As for unions without them you get the situation we see with Wal-Mart or in the tech industry. Workers get paid as little as the company can get away with, shat on at every opportunity, layed off on the slightest whim, and outsourced to the third world whenever possible. Fact is at least in manufacturing union workforces tend to be more productive than non-union workforces. As for Germany the UAW would LOVE to have the power, wages, benefits, work rules, and hours the German industrial unions have. With Japan, while mostly non-union, the workers are protected by the traditional social contract between the employers and workers. In fact while real wages in Japan are somewhat lower than in the US typical benefits are much better including things like vacation time, health care, and pensions. Also many Japanese companies have benefits almost unheard of in the US like lifetime employment, free company owned resorts and recreation centers, company provided housing, etc. Even when Japanese companies have to reduce their workforces they typically will try to make sure anyone let go has a job to go to before their last day.
I, for instance, will not buy an American car unless and until they do something to reduce their total costs, which probably means destroying the major labor unions, reducing pay for line workers, and exporting a large number of jobs. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels the same way.
Funny thing is most Japanese and German automakers make a majority of their vehicles for the US market in the US. In fact many "Japanese" and "German" cars have a higher percentage of US and Canada made content than almost any vehicle made by one of the "big 3". In fact some of the most productive Japanese owned auto plants in the US are unionized and located in traditional centers of auto manufacturing like Michigan and Ohio. For that matter some Japanese automakers are even making cars in the US for the Japanese and other overseas markets. I doubt they would do so if the Japanese workers were really that much better or the US workers as horrible as you say. The quality, reliablity, and price of a car are more of a function of design and corprate culture than if the workforce is well paid and unionized or not.
It surprises me that landlords over there do not take the same view, though it is possible that there is some liability question under US law of which I am unaware.
It really depends on the particulars of the tennant and building owner.
With smaller spaces the company moving in or the building owner will often pay a departing tennant to leave network and phone cabling in place along with things like furniture and phone switches. In sublease situations it's not uncommon for the master tennant to require the subleasing tennant to leave things like walls and wiring alone.
I'd hate to imagine what this could be like in larger companies, making 500+ cables run nicely has got to be a not-so-fun task in any situation...
If the coms racks are set up properly it isn't too difficult you just have to put a little thought into routing the cable properly when you drop a new one in.
Patch panels, cable trays, and color coded patch wires are your friend.
The big fun comes when you outgrow what you had planned for, inevitablely the cabling turns into a rats nest at this point.
Okay, sure. So let's develop wind and solar instead, damn it! Or geothermal or wave power or....whatever.
Agreed, coal sucks and nuclear sucks and carbon emissions sucks. Let's do something else.
The problem is there just aren't all that many good large scale energy sources. At least not when we're talking the scale of World or even North American electric consumption.
While wind is getting competitive with other power sources due to its very nature the output tends to vary over time and not in tune with demand. Photovoltaic solar requires enormious amounts of energy and toxic chemicals during production. While I think a modern PV panel will produce more energy during it's lifetime than consumed in production and disposal the ratio isn't that good compared to other sources of power. Tidal hasn't been deployed on any sort of large scale yet to date. Geothermal has some negative envionmental effects. Nither Tidal nor Geothermal is likely to provide enough power to make up a signifigant amount of North American or world electric production.
As far as storing the output from solar, wind, or tidal power sources the technology is better than it used to be but still not very efficient. Any power source that relies on storing energy for night or calm conditions will have to factor in storage losses.
Nuclear energy really is probably the best source for large scale electric production we have for the near future. There are plenty of reactor designs out there far safer and produce far less waste than conventional boiling-water reactors. In addition there are plenty of ways to reduce the final waste by reprocessing or burning it in breeder reactors.
Dispite a few incidents nuclear power's safety record is actually quite good other than in the former USSR. Even there the increase in the death rate from tchernobyl is still less than from the pollution and ash from a single coal plant during its lifetime.
I spend a lot of time on high-performance Human Powered Vehicles (HPVs), and efficiency is a big thing among high-speed bikes. The main problem with these internally geared drivetrains is that they are not very efficient at all. They rob you one heck of a lot more power than chains and derailers. The regular chain and derailer design is something in the neighborhood of 97-98% efficient, while these geared drivetrains are about 70% or less.
Good modern gearhubs like the Rolhoff aren't anywhere near as bad as 70% effcient, they're closer to the 97% or so you get from a standard chain/derailuer set-up. The biggest penalty you pay with the Rolhoff other than cost ($850 or so for the hub) is a slight increase in weight (200 gm or so, not a big deal really, my light set for commuting weighs more)
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The biggest FLOPS can be found here.
It would seem the Itainium 2 is doing pretty well by that list considering the 5th fastest computer in the world is a cluster of HP Itainium 2 boxes.
The slugfest between various incarnations of the Opteron, Itainium, IBM's Power, and Apple's PowerPC should be fun to watch in the next couple of years.
I wonder if HP will reconsider killing the Alpha given that the 2nd fastest computer in the world is a cluster of alpha boxes.
Sorry, mate, in Canada we have all sorts of stores that carry region-free DVD players. Most of them don't have a single word of English on the signs and are run by folks from the Far East. Didn't realize the US of A was behind the times... ;-)
We have those sort of stores in the US as well, at least in most major cities. However the average white American suburbanite is typically too afraid of dealing with non-English speaking brown people to stray far from the big-box stores.
One problem (of many) is of course that if you make programmers legally responsible for security failures you also need to give them the authority to say "No! You can't do it that way! I don't care WHAT Marketeering says!"
From my understanding this is exactly what happens today in areas where a PE has to sign off on a design making himself legally liable for any design flaws. The PE doesn't like the design for safety reasons, the PE refuses to sign, the design gets changed. At least in an ideal world that is what happens, as I understand it the reality is somewhat different but it is still often better than what happens in the commercial software development world.
False. Enterprise financial apps don't depend on changing hardware every year like graphics applications. And "just plain works" doesn't mean is maintainable. And I would doubt very strongly that someone knows 30-year-old-multi-million-lines-apps of financial code in Fortran well enough to be sure that it does what it is supposed to do...
First of all 30 year old financial applications are most likely written in COBOL not Fortran.
Second of all there are plenty of good tools out there for understanding exactly what a COBOL application does, far better than anything I've ever seen for C, C++, Java, or even VB.
Third big COBOL shops understood the importance of things like documentation, coding standards, and code review long before anyone in the desktop computing community and to a lesser extent the UNIX community did. They started to run into maintainablity problems 20-30 years ago and therefore have had that much longer to work toward solving them.
Still, I hope XFree86 doesn't go the way of COBOL.
Rumors of the death of COBOL are greatly exagerated.
There is new software being written in COBOL every day and 20, 30, or even 40 year old COBOL applications are being updated, extended, and maintained all the time.
Chances are if you've ever booked an airline ticket, traded stock, used your bank account, credit card, booked insurance, paid taxes, or gotten a phone bill your transaction touched a COBOL application at some point.
The bulk of high-volume transaction processing is still mostly done with COBOL applications running on mainframes.
You simply don't throw out well debugged software implementing complex business rules representing many hundreds of man-years of developer time because it happens to be "old". Even if parts of your application are poorly documented, poorly structured, and poorly understood there are plenty of tools for COBOL to rectify this situation that are far less risky than porting your application to a new language and platform.
Also, you might be interested to know that legally owned / properly licensed fully automatic weapons are almost NEVER used in the commission of armed crimes. I don't have a direct link handy, but that's from the FBI's own crime statistics.
That statistic applies to most legally owned and properly licensed firearms. Not just fully automatic weapons. Even legally owned and properly licensed handguns are rarely used in the commission of crime, even in states that permit concealed carry. While the numbers aren't quite as low as they are for fully automatic weapons and other similarly licensed arms they are still quite low.
The essential truth is few law abiding firearms owners ever commit armed crimes. On the other hand plenty of crimes are prevented by legally owned civilian firearms every day.
If there were 10,000 people organized in this country, for any reason, then they'd be "on the radar". They would constitute an army of sorts and would be under close watch by the govt. (probably with a distrustful eye)
And what exactly is the NRA, AARP, EFF, ACLU, Sierra Club, AFL-CIO or Howard Dean campaign? Lots and lots of people organized together to promote an agenda they feel is important.
The main problem for most people is they don't realize that political action takes time and effort. They demand instant gratification like politics was 30-minute pizza delivery.
I just hope we can limp along for a few more decades before we have to remove all of the scum from power and start over.
Scum and power go together, kind of like peanut butter and chocolate.
Far better to start with the assumption that everyone in public office is scum by definition and set up the system to deal with it.
The other thing to remember is ultimately the aforementioned scum still serve at the pleasure of the people. The old scum can be thrown out and replaced with new scum.
We are already looking at a situation where corporations are more "EQUAL" than your average joe/jane citizen. Question: How many of us can afford to hire a lobbyist? How much can you afford to bribe.. er fund a govt offical's reelection campaign?
You may not be able to hire a lobbyist by yourself and I may not be able to hire a lobbyist by myself but you and I together might be able to hire a lobbyist. For that matter if you know someone with a lot of time you don't even have to necessarily hire a lobbyist.
Same thing with campaign contributions you or I may not be able to give much individually to someone's campaign but lots of us together can have a huge impact. 10,000 people giving $100 total each is $1 million. Now if those 10,000 are organized, communicate with each other and vote they are a force to be reconed with. No sane politician is going to ignore a group that represents 10,000 voters in his district and a collective $1 million in campaign contributions.
When in the history of aviation has anyone from any other region of the world hijacked a plane?
DB Cooper anyone? He was white and from the US.
It was only after Cooper and some copycats that we got security screening in airports at all.
But this is only until the first terrorist attack against railroad infrastructure. After that, I can see traveling with such high end trains being as much hassle than with airplanes today.
If I want to attack a high-speed train it makes much more sense to damage the tracks or place a bomb alongside. If I am a terrorist it makes very little sense for me to actually get on the train with a weapon.
Even if someone does attack a train for the most part the only people who's lives are at risk are the people on the train. It's not like you can slam a train into a random office building or government installation.
To be fair right after 9/11 there were proposals floating about to require airport like screening in the US for Amtrak, ferries, intercity buses, and cruise ships. As far as I know only cuise ships ended up getting much in the way of increased screening.
If so then it's a bad bill. The answer to a bad bill is not a lack of oversight. The bill should be restructured to provide more control and power to the people that the data is being collected on.
I suspect you are likely thinking of various European regulations that give ownership and control of some types of personal information to the person who's information it is.
The answer if you would like to see that sort of regulation here is separate legislation specificly granting those privacy rights.
As I understand the proposed legislation mentioned in the story it applies to most types of factual data one might collect into a database. Not just personal information like Visa purchases but sports scores, player stats, stock quotes, phone directories, election results, card catalogs, or building codes.
The legislation would give ownership of the data and the right to disseminate it to the entity who first collected it.
One example of a potential abuse would be for the NFL to claim it "owns" the rights to scores and stats from NFL games. It would have the right to sue anyone who attempted to report this information even if they got the data not from the NFL database but by watching the game in person or on TV.
Because it does not. In this case if there was no govt regulation then all data collected would be de-facto property of whoever collected it. In a world without govt you would have absolutely zero control over what a corporation could do with "your" information. The best that you could possibly hope for would be to try and sue the corporation which would go nowhere because the corporation would not be breaking any laws.
Yes and no. If there is no law saying data collected is the property of the entity collecting it then there is nothing really to prevent me from obtaining a copy of the data and using it for my own purposes.
While those with collections of data containing information about you would have few legal restrictions on what they could do with the data there would still be some restrictions based not on law but on the data collector wanting to maintain a certain reputation and what information people were willing to share with the data collector.
Consider for a moment how utterly reluctant many people are nowdays to share their real telephone numbers or email addresses with businesses, non-profits, or anyone else they don't know personally. True it's not everyone, but as someone who has done some volunteering for various non-profits it seems like well over half the people I encounter are reluctant to divulge phone numbers or email adresses until I explain exactly how we plan on using them and how often they will be contacted. Even then roughly 1/5 people still refuse to give us any information and about 20% of the email addresses and phone numbers we collect are bogus. For businesses the percentages of valid data can be even worse. At my last employer again about 1/5 of the emails and phone numbers we got off the "please contact me I'd like to learn more about your product" form on our web site were bogus. Remember these were people who wanted to be contacted by us. Based on the server logs nearly half of the visits to that page never resulted in a completed form. This is dispite having a very clearly stated privacy policy at the top of the page.
Lastly, although IANAL, I believe that even if there isn't a law explicitly prohibiting an activity you can still file a civil suit against someone as long as you can show you have been harmed somehow. This is the legal basis for many personal injury lawsuits for instance. If I recall correctly the legal term for this concept is "tort" and it goes back quite a ways in English common law.
Certainly not. Open source is supposed to be about choice. If government is used to fund open source, the element of choice is eliminated. In the free market, individuals choose for themselves whether to support open source. Under a socialist program, those decisions would be made by an elite few and forced upon everyone else. That's not individual choice; that's forced participation.
It depends on how that government support comes about for judging if the support is coercive or not. If the support is because a government funded research project wrote or extended open source software then it isn't coercive. Same thing if the government develops or pays to develop or customize open source applications to suit it's needs.
On the other hand the government just randomly funding open source projects for the sake of open source would be wrong.
What japanese plants are you talking about in Ohio that are unionized? Honda is the only one I know of that has plants in Ohio (at least 3, one motorcycle, one engine and one car). Considering that the UAW has an article about trying to unionize them on their website, they clearly are not unionized.
I'm guessing the Michigan plant you are thinking of is the Flat Rock Mazda/Ford plant. I googled and couldn't find any mentions of their quality record, though I don't ever remember hearing anyone talk about what great cars the Ford Probe was.
Sorry I got a whole bunch of old news stories mixed up in my head. I don't know where the idea there was a unionized Japanese auto plant in Ohio came from. As for Michigan I was probably thinking of the Ford/Mazda plant. Didn't there used to be a Ford/Nissan plant in MI as well?
The plant I was thinking of is the Freemont, CA GM/Toyota plant, which is unionized. I couldn't find anything on their quality record either, though I suspect it is quite good given Toyota's reputation and the reputation of the Corolla. Also I know Toyota has exported cars from this plant back to Japan.
As far as how German and Japanese companies treat their workers in Japan and Germany, that has no bearing on how they teach their workers in their U.S. plants.
My point was German and Japanese auto workers in Germany and Japan are generally treated better than auto workers in the US, union or not. As for how German or Japanese companies treat their US workers, they still have fairly similar pay, benifits, and work rules to plants run by the big 3. After all they are competing for the same pool of workers. I suppose someone could open an auto plant here where they paid US minimum wage, and had only the legally mandated benefits and work rules. But I suspect they wouldn't be very happy with the quality of the workforce they attracted nor the retention rate once those workers were trained and had experience.
I really don't know why zero feels so put upon.
Zero as a number and a concept literally revolutionized mathmatics and philiosiphy.
Without zero algebra, calculus, statitistics, accounting, physics, and even computers aren't possible or are much more difficult.
Heck zero is probably even more important to mathmatics and all fields of endevour using math than other "magic" numbers such as pi, e, 1, and -1.
They've taken away job security.
They've taken away the benefits.
They've taken away overtime.
They've taken away the promotions.
They've taken away the adequate salary.
And now, they've taken the furniture.
It's not funny.
The next step is to take away the paycheck either by outsourcing overseas or hiring only unpaid interns.
Maybe unionizing wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Solving flexible officing problems also helps you with other emerging trends, like distributed workgroups and working from home. Ideally you don't just save money on real estate. You also make your workers happier by allowing them to work where they want.
This doesn't suit workers well who need to have a certain amount of equipment, tools, or printed material near them. While some people can work with online documentation only many find it doesn't work for them at all. Add the fact that many sysadmins and programmers like securities traders need lots of screen real-estate or multiple machines that likely isn't present with a laptop or shared office.
I have mild ADHD and while I don't have the problems you do with being unmedicated I sitll don't deal with certain types of distraction well even when on meds.
I can work in almost any environment for a week or so as long as I'm getting enough sleep but long-term I need to keep very aware of distractions and other things that keep me from getting work done.
At my last fulltime job my productivity was pretty much inversely proportional to the amount of distractions present in the workplace.
When I started in our old building I was in a cube in a cube where I didn't have line of sight to the aisleway and the most of the other people within earshot were all in my group. When we moved to a new building the problem was more one of isolation than too many distractions due to being fairly spread out and not being able to have impromptu "prarie dog" meetings. As we hired more people and people from an unrelated group were seated next to me it became steadily more difficult to get anything accomplished. The worst factors for me were being relatively far away from the "center" of our team, having tech support occupy the cubes nearby, and having someone who liked to talk loudly on speakerphone such that it was audible 50 feet away. As bad as this was things got even worse when I was moved even further from my group and closer to tech support with my cube opening onto a high-traffic walkway. I basicly wasn't able to get anything requiring concentration and focus done between the hours of 9 and 5 and was so burnt by the end of the day that I rarely got anything done by staying late.
In the future I plan to be much more insistant about being located as far as possible from people who talk on the phone all day and not having visual distractions such as aisleways within direct line of sight from my desk. Strangely enough while I can't stand being located next to interior walkways, windows even ones that look out onto busy streets don't provide the same level of distraction.
Yes and no. It is true that many "foreign" cars are made in the US - Hondas in Ohio, Toyotas in Kentucky, Mercedes SUV's in Alabama, Mitsubishis and Subarus in Indiana, ect. But to my knowledge NONE of those plants are unionized. There is a reason most foreign car companies build plants in the south, where unions are weak and frequently are right-to-work states.
Some of the Japanese plants are unionized, particularly the ones in places like Michigan, and Ohio. In fact the unionized Michigan plant of one Japanese automaker (sorry can't remember who off the top of my head) is among the most productive companywide and has among the lowest defect rate.
Many people would argue that the reason for the problems the US is having is the unionization of their workforce. Their labor contracts require car companies to pay them even when they are not working. The result is companies run the lines because it's cheaper than shutting down and paying union workers anyway, producing a glut of cars that wind up being sold to rental car companies and fleets at little profit - and then wind up on the "barely used" market killing off resale value.
Again not true. German unions are much more powerful and the union contracts there make it very difficult to lay off workers. While some of the cost of slack periods is shifted to the government, it is fairly common to provide additional training or otherwise keep workers on the payroll during downturns. In Japan even though "lifetime employment" is no longer guarenteed, there is still a huge stigma against the sort of layoffs we see in the US. Companies in Japan are still incredibly reluctant to lay off workers and will typically try to place them in another job, even retraining them at company expense for placement at another company, rather than just laying them off.
The US is still a huge market for manufactured goods, including cars. Even if Detroit is depressed, the rest of the country is doing rather well. I suspect that the big three automakers would be the big zero instead of the big two if they didn't attempt to reduce their costs to compete with the Japanese: the fact that they haven't reduced their costs enough by kicking out the unions and their expensive, lazy workforce means that year over year they lose even more business to the Japanese on quality and price and to the Germans on quality and luxury.
You are *VERY* wrong.
Measured in terms of dollars of goods produced per dollar of labor US workers are still some of the most productive in the world.
As for unions without them you get the situation we see with Wal-Mart or in the tech industry. Workers get paid as little as the company can get away with, shat on at every opportunity, layed off on the slightest whim, and outsourced to the third world whenever possible. Fact is at least in manufacturing union workforces tend to be more productive than non-union workforces. As for Germany the UAW would LOVE to have the power, wages, benefits, work rules, and hours the German industrial unions have. With Japan, while mostly non-union, the workers are protected by the traditional social contract between the employers and workers. In fact while real wages in Japan are somewhat lower than in the US typical benefits are much better including things like vacation time, health care, and pensions. Also many Japanese companies have benefits almost unheard of in the US like lifetime employment, free company owned resorts and recreation centers, company provided housing, etc. Even when Japanese companies have to reduce their workforces they typically will try to make sure anyone let go has a job to go to before their last day.
I, for instance, will not buy an American car unless and until they do something to reduce their total costs, which probably means destroying the major labor unions, reducing pay for line workers, and exporting a large number of jobs. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels the same way.
Funny thing is most Japanese and German automakers make a majority of their vehicles for the US market in the US. In fact many "Japanese" and "German" cars have a higher percentage of US and Canada made content than almost any vehicle made by one of the "big 3". In fact some of the most productive Japanese owned auto plants in the US are unionized and located in traditional centers of auto manufacturing like Michigan and Ohio. For that matter some Japanese automakers are even making cars in the US for the Japanese and other overseas markets. I doubt they would do so if the Japanese workers were really that much better or the US workers as horrible as you say. The quality, reliablity, and price of a car are more of a function of design and corprate culture than if the workforce is well paid and unionized or not.
It surprises me that landlords over there do not take the same view, though it is possible that there is some liability question under US law of which I am unaware.
It really depends on the particulars of the tennant and building owner.
With smaller spaces the company moving in or the building owner will often pay a departing tennant to leave network and phone cabling in place along with things like furniture and phone switches. In sublease situations it's not uncommon for the master tennant to require the subleasing tennant to leave things like walls and wiring alone.
I'd hate to imagine what this could be like in larger companies, making 500+ cables run nicely has got to be a not-so-fun task in any situation...
If the coms racks are set up properly it isn't too difficult you just have to put a little thought into routing the cable properly when you drop a new one in.
Patch panels, cable trays, and color coded patch wires are your friend.
The big fun comes when you outgrow what you had planned for, inevitablely the cabling turns into a rats nest at this point.
Okay, sure. So let's develop wind and solar instead, damn it! Or geothermal or wave power or ....whatever.
Agreed, coal sucks and nuclear sucks and carbon emissions sucks. Let's do something else.
The problem is there just aren't all that many good large scale energy sources. At least not when we're talking the scale of World or even North American electric consumption.
While wind is getting competitive with other power sources due to its very nature the output tends to vary over time and not in tune with demand. Photovoltaic solar requires enormious amounts of energy and toxic chemicals during production. While I think a modern PV panel will produce more energy during it's lifetime than consumed in production and disposal the ratio isn't that good compared to other sources of power. Tidal hasn't been deployed on any sort of large scale yet to date. Geothermal has some negative envionmental effects. Nither Tidal nor Geothermal is likely to provide enough power to make up a signifigant amount of North American or world electric production.
As far as storing the output from solar, wind, or tidal power sources the technology is better than it used to be but still not very efficient. Any power source that relies on storing energy for night or calm conditions will have to factor in storage losses.
Nuclear energy really is probably the best source for large scale electric production we have for the near future. There are plenty of reactor designs out there far safer and produce far less waste than conventional boiling-water reactors. In addition there are plenty of ways to reduce the final waste by reprocessing or burning it in breeder reactors.
Dispite a few incidents nuclear power's safety record is actually quite good other than in the former USSR. Even there the increase in the death rate from tchernobyl is still less than from the pollution and ash from a single coal plant during its lifetime.
I spend a lot of time on high-performance Human Powered Vehicles (HPVs), and efficiency is a big thing among high-speed bikes. The main problem with these internally geared drivetrains is that they are not very efficient at all. They rob you one heck of a lot more power than chains and derailers. The regular chain and derailer design is something in the neighborhood of 97-98% efficient, while these geared drivetrains are about 70% or less.
Good modern gearhubs like the Rolhoff aren't anywhere near as bad as 70% effcient, they're closer to the 97% or so you get from a standard chain/derailuer set-up. The biggest penalty you pay with the Rolhoff other than cost ($850 or so for the hub) is a slight increase in weight (200 gm or so, not a big deal really, my light set for commuting weighs more)