You sound like a really talented and insightful individual that has obviously been there in person.
Consider how you can apply your skills to make the lives of the people living there better in person. If not, learn some new skills. Honestly a decent latrine or water sanitation or windmill or shit that some of us can build in high school can help out the less fortunate. If you have an opportunity to go back, try to leave something behind that will have an impact on future generations there.
If it can be put together, it can almost certainly be taken apart and put back together again. That's one of the most important lessons I learned growing up. Saved me boatloads of money, too - still using the same keyboard for 12 years because I've been able to maintain it. Finally had to ditch my mouse though, haha... =|
This is why fines don't work. They need to be severe enough to factor in the profit motive.
Let's say a tech company made a laptop without a certain safety device in it and violated EU regs as a result. They are fined 110% of the profits they made from that product while it was violating regulations (so it isn't even economical to say "at least it evened out at cost" - it's a measurable loss). Get fines like that in corporate law and this shit will stop post haste.
tl;dr fines don't actually lose a company enough money to be considered anything other than a cost of doing business.
Besides, it has to be able to be repaired by some poor schmuck out in China or India or wherever they've outsourced it to. If a factory can do it, odds are the end user can do it given the proper tools.
How many of us have hexagon drivers, star drivers, etc. that we're not really "supposed" to have? Hell, my uncle had a key to turn his water back on. As in the actual tool the water company uses.
If Apple somehow comes up with some sort of magic proprietary way to keep people out of the iPad, I can practically fucking guarantee that someone will smuggle that method and/or tool out of a factory and make a boatload of money selling it.
Were the financial incentive missing and nothing there to replace it, American society would lose many bright minds from some of its most economically productive workforces. We'd probably also get rid of 10 times as many greedy turds who ride the best and brightest. So the hard question is whether or not it's worth it. Americans seem to think so, and we have big SUVs and large new homes to show for it. Go Team.
I think it's entirely possible to have the "profit motive" (sacred words in the Cult of the Free Market) and not be completely fucking unethical. SEE: damn near every industrialized nation in Europe. Like, Idunno, maybe Germany where they don't treat their workers or citizens like shit. Unsurprisingly, they have one of the strongest economies in the world.
I don't think that this is indicative of just this company, but a trend of many companies who are mismanaged.
After more than a few interviews go really well and no one has the decency to give you a rejection letter anymore it starts to get a wee bit frustrating. It's becoming all too common a practice.
It is kind of... weird that we can't seem to scale up the speed of fighter jets and the like. But we'll solve it soon enough. The Concorde was an interesting experiment, but this might actually be usable.
I just hope the layperson would be able to use it in 20 years and that the airports still won't be a wasteful black hole of time-seeping despair. A 5 hour security checkpoint kinda deflates the fun and novelty of popping over to Britain for dinner with a friend and then back home to sleep.
Let me explain that to you: OpenOffice/LibreOffice is supposed to allow word processing, creating and editing spreadsheets and presentations. It is not a product supposed to import Microsoft files. Once you accept that, you have to say that OOo/LOo do what they are supposed to do. And they do it well.
I... I am aware of this. Perhaps you did not read my post in its entirety?
P.S., I used OpenOffice and now use LibreOffice in my home on all of my computers and I love it. It's great when you create documents natively in it. It just isn't always that great when opening docs from other programs, but I'm a technically-savvy person and I can adjust. The layperson can not.
The problem isn't one person using LO/OO. It's someone else using Word and sending a document to someone who uses LO/OO. Even if you can get them to put in the effort to change it to a different format (and if it's some luddite manager up in a corner office, you can forget that shit ever happening), the majority of people will not and you are still out in the cold.
I also take issue with the whole "it's not supposed to support Microsoft files". That has been built into OO for a very long time and in fact was touted as one of its advantages when it started getting popular. "Use OO! Open any Microsoft file in our program!" I guess they left out "and it won't render correctly."
It's hilarious how people bash LO for not being 100% compatible with what is effectively an undocumented, proprietary format that shifts greatly between versions.
...that nearly every business, government, university, high school, and grade school in the world uses.
Use,.doc,.docx, OOXML, etc. are fucked, but they are the (unfortunate) standard. And if LO/OO can't render them properly then they are all but useless in those situations, which is honestly the majority of places you would use a word processor.
And I'm not passive agressive. You're passive agressive! And kind of a poopy head! So there. d=
Any drone that has a Raspberry PI as its payload is probably not all that expensive. I imagine they could get another back up in short order or have enough redundancy that shooting enough of them down would be a non-trivial problem. Well, shooting enough of them down without causing any collateral damage, at least. You can't exactly be firing guns into the air (or straight down from the air, as from a chopper or plane) anywhere near a coastline or city without some risk of a bullet or missile going stray and causing collateral damage. EWAR might be right out as well for fear of interfering with maritime navigation or accidentally firing a super-powered interference beam and clipping something like a hospital or airport control tower.
You know, I wonder if the antivirus suites of the future will be able to see stuff like this being written. Like "oh no, he is using emacs/vi and writing a php injection script - perhaps this is something we should look into specifically". I don't think heuristics of this sort would be any more onerous than the deep sort of file scanning that antivirus suites already do.
As an aside, Kaspersky is fantastic and aside from a small hiccup a year or two ago where they lost some CC data (and handled it pretty well IMO) I recommend it to my friends - especially the ones who are less computer literate. The whole "red light / yellow light / green light" thing on their Windows Vista/7 widget is very intuitive for computer newbies. (For some of my customers, I tell them to immediately call me on a red light. Makes my job easier lol.)
Quick, get Sydney Bristow on the case! I hear she's married to Daredevil now, so I guess he... well actually, that might be a hindrance to the whole thing.
But I will (and you probably will, too). I already have a bit, judging by the comment history. Talking about Linux or FOSS here in anything other than a positive light is tantamount to sacrilege. It'd be as if I went to the Apple community and called Steve Jobs anything other than a technological revolutionary. It's not a big deal, though - every community has its unreasonable fanatics.
You talk almost as if you were a sage or mystic, and it unsettles me all the more.
I get what you're saying about the market and all, but when I hear things like "consumer confidence" and all I feel as if the entirety of Wall Street is based on some sort of weird financial voodoo instead of any actual merit (on the part of companies).
OpenOffice had the same problem and probably still does.
I'm sure I'll be modded down into oblivion for saying the following, but it bears repeating and it's true, so... yeah. I really don't care if a bunch of people want to be shut out from hearing something true but uncomfortable.
The inability to nail down problems like this is one of the reasons open source is not always taken seriously in the business world. You can't claim to be a good alternative to the paid thing if your product doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Companies (and many individuals) need close to 100% reliability as possible. Too many FOSS projects seem to have people focused on geeky technical details (we made it 5% more RAM efficient!) and less so on user-friendliness or functionality.
I've tried to introduce people to OpenOffice (and LibreOffice after they forked from OO). I've had more than a few instances where a friend tries to open an old college assignment or something in OO/LO and the formatting is completely fucked. They deride it as being completely unusable when said document would open just fine in any version of Microsoft Office from that year or later, and inquire about pricing or where to grab a bootleg.
I mean, we all know that usability and function should win? If something has the features the majority of people want and make it easy as shit to use, they're going to take over the market. This is why the iPod and iPad are so successful compared to their competitors - they make it shiny, and they make it easy. Lots of open source software (specifically, all of the stuff marketed as "alternatives" to commercial products: OO/LO, Linux and its distros, GIMP, etc.) fails miserably at both and they're never going to gain any ground until they remedy that.
(Hoo boy, I just said Apple was better than open source software at something. I had better stock up on the KY for the reaming I'm about to get in downmods.)
P.S., I used OpenOffice and now use LibreOffice in my home on all of my computers and I love it. It's great when you create documents natively in it. It just isn't always that great when opening docs from other programs, but I'm a technically-savvy person and I can adjust. The layperson can not.
The critical difference here is that those Chinese workers are/not/ slaves. They are not forced into taking jobs at foxconn; they take these positions voluntarily, just like people in western countries do, because they think it's a favorable trade for them.
I understand this and the rest of your post, but they are about as close to getting to slaves as they can be. A lot of them are there because they literally have no chance at a better life without having to go through all the insane hours at Foxconn.
Your first sentence alone could be used in a similar way: "the slaves aren't running away from the fields or complaining much lately, so they must really like it here!" No, they're there because they really do not have much of a choice. I mean, they do in a technical sense. I'm sure they could leave and go back to the countryside to live in a hovel with a dirt floor and absolutely 0 contact with the outside world. That's better than nothing, right?
Argh, the logical leaps that some of us make to assuage our guilt about the shit ways people are treated in other countries! The ones who make our shiny gadgets, children's toys, and a vast majority of the stuff we use everyday, no less!
And yes, I am full well aware that I am using something also made somewhere in China or Southeast Asia. If I had a "buy American" option for electronics I'd take it, although right now I'm killing time at a public library so I don't have much in the way of choice on what sort of computer I use.
Right now the only thing I can really reliably and consistantly buy American are cigarettes and socks.
The shower water could have been redirected to flush the toilets (which is a common use for grey water), and he may be exceedingly poor at communicating this fact. Alternatively, he may be a complete moron.
Neither is a valid word under the rules of Scrabble, which restricts you to English words.
What.
You're a bit wrong there. Qi and Chi would both be "loanwords", i.e. words taken wholesale from another language, usually with no change in spelling or pronunciation. Here, try some others using the official Scrabble dictionary. I'll just throw together a short list, and you see how many of these aren't in there because they're technically not English words at all:
There's ten different words from six different languages. Only one of that list is not in there - and it will be as surprising to you which one is not in the dictionary as it was to me.
I get what you're saying, the "je ne sais quoi" example is a good one. But there are certain words from other languages we use that have pretty much been adopted into the language, especially for concepts we really don't have or can explain as concisely. Granted, some you may have never heard - usually only marital artists could describe what a kiai or kata is, for example - but we have loads of loanwords that are in everyday use in our language. (It personally makes me cringe when people say "hibachi" (hee-bah-chee) and "karaoke" (kah-rah-o-kay) and mangle the Japanese pronunciations, but that's accents for you. The Japanes hilariously mispronounce English words sometimes too, and they certainly misuse our words a lot of the time as well - surely some sort of revenge for all of those trendy kanji tattoos that so many of us Westerners like getting on our bodies.)
Incidentally, "qi" is in the Scrabble dictionary - at least according to the one on the Hasbro website (which I have linked above).
I thought it might be "I want to believe you" or "I believe you"? My Japanese is a bit rusty. Turns out it's neither of those. I was figuring it was some sort of weird conjugation of "shinjeru", haha...
Slashdot Mirror
I heard on Fox News the first ship will be christened the USS Fake Hawai'in Muslim Socialist.
You sound like a really talented and insightful individual that has obviously been there in person.
Consider how you can apply your skills to make the lives of the people living there better in person. If not, learn some new skills. Honestly a decent latrine or water sanitation or windmill or shit that some of us can build in high school can help out the less fortunate. If you have an opportunity to go back, try to leave something behind that will have an impact on future generations there.
Let OnLive develop the tech and customer base, then buy it and integrate it into XBOX/Windows Live.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish 101.
If it can be put together, it can almost certainly be taken apart and put back together again. That's one of the most important lessons I learned growing up. Saved me boatloads of money, too - still using the same keyboard for 12 years because I've been able to maintain it. Finally had to ditch my mouse though, haha... =|
This is why fines don't work. They need to be severe enough to factor in the profit motive.
Let's say a tech company made a laptop without a certain safety device in it and violated EU regs as a result. They are fined 110% of the profits they made from that product while it was violating regulations (so it isn't even economical to say "at least it evened out at cost" - it's a measurable loss). Get fines like that in corporate law and this shit will stop post haste.
tl;dr fines don't actually lose a company enough money to be considered anything other than a cost of doing business.
Besides, it has to be able to be repaired by some poor schmuck out in China or India or wherever they've outsourced it to. If a factory can do it, odds are the end user can do it given the proper tools.
How many of us have hexagon drivers, star drivers, etc. that we're not really "supposed" to have? Hell, my uncle had a key to turn his water back on. As in the actual tool the water company uses.
If Apple somehow comes up with some sort of magic proprietary way to keep people out of the iPad, I can practically fucking guarantee that someone will smuggle that method and/or tool out of a factory and make a boatload of money selling it.
Finally, a power glove that isn't a total disappointment!
Were the financial incentive missing and nothing there to replace it, American society would lose many bright minds from some of its most economically productive workforces. We'd probably also get rid of 10 times as many greedy turds who ride the best and brightest. So the hard question is whether or not it's worth it. Americans seem to think so, and we have big SUVs and large new homes to show for it. Go Team.
I think it's entirely possible to have the "profit motive" (sacred words in the Cult of the Free Market) and not be completely fucking unethical. SEE: damn near every industrialized nation in Europe. Like, Idunno, maybe Germany where they don't treat their workers or citizens like shit. Unsurprisingly, they have one of the strongest economies in the world.
I don't think that this is indicative of just this company, but a trend of many companies who are mismanaged.
After more than a few interviews go really well and no one has the decency to give you a rejection letter anymore it starts to get a wee bit frustrating. It's becoming all too common a practice.
I worked at an after-school program with 60 kids from grades K-5.
I think if we ever entered a serious war I would rush to the front lines. I no longer fear death, for I have seen all there is to be seen.
It is kind of... weird that we can't seem to scale up the speed of fighter jets and the like. But we'll solve it soon enough. The Concorde was an interesting experiment, but this might actually be usable.
I just hope the layperson would be able to use it in 20 years and that the airports still won't be a wasteful black hole of time-seeping despair. A 5 hour security checkpoint kinda deflates the fun and novelty of popping over to Britain for dinner with a friend and then back home to sleep.
Let me explain that to you: OpenOffice/LibreOffice is supposed to allow word processing, creating and editing spreadsheets and presentations. It is not a product supposed to import Microsoft files. Once you accept that, you have to say that OOo/LOo do what they are supposed to do. And they do it well.
I... I am aware of this. Perhaps you did not read my post in its entirety?
P.S., I used OpenOffice and now use LibreOffice in my home on all of my computers and I love it. It's great when you create documents natively in it. It just isn't always that great when opening docs from other programs, but I'm a technically-savvy person and I can adjust. The layperson can not.
The problem isn't one person using LO/OO. It's someone else using Word and sending a document to someone who uses LO/OO. Even if you can get them to put in the effort to change it to a different format (and if it's some luddite manager up in a corner office, you can forget that shit ever happening), the majority of people will not and you are still out in the cold.
I also take issue with the whole "it's not supposed to support Microsoft files". That has been built into OO for a very long time and in fact was touted as one of its advantages when it started getting popular. "Use OO! Open any Microsoft file in our program!" I guess they left out "and it won't render correctly."
It's hilarious how people bash LO for not being 100% compatible with what is effectively an undocumented, proprietary format that shifts greatly between versions.
...that nearly every business, government, university, high school, and grade school in the world uses.
Use, .doc, .docx, OOXML, etc. are fucked, but they are the (unfortunate) standard. And if LO/OO can't render them properly then they are all but useless in those situations, which is honestly the majority of places you would use a word processor.
And I'm not passive agressive. You're passive agressive! And kind of a poopy head! So there. d=
The "moped" I was specifically referring to is the one that makes you go "brum brum i has a moped" in your head. Well, at least I do.
Any drone that has a Raspberry PI as its payload is probably not all that expensive. I imagine they could get another back up in short order or have enough redundancy that shooting enough of them down would be a non-trivial problem. Well, shooting enough of them down without causing any collateral damage, at least. You can't exactly be firing guns into the air (or straight down from the air, as from a chopper or plane) anywhere near a coastline or city without some risk of a bullet or missile going stray and causing collateral damage. EWAR might be right out as well for fear of interfering with maritime navigation or accidentally firing a super-powered interference beam and clipping something like a hospital or airport control tower.
You know, I wonder if the antivirus suites of the future will be able to see stuff like this being written. Like "oh no, he is using emacs/vi and writing a php injection script - perhaps this is something we should look into specifically". I don't think heuristics of this sort would be any more onerous than the deep sort of file scanning that antivirus suites already do.
As an aside, Kaspersky is fantastic and aside from a small hiccup a year or two ago where they lost some CC data (and handled it pretty well IMO) I recommend it to my friends - especially the ones who are less computer literate. The whole "red light / yellow light / green light" thing on their Windows Vista/7 widget is very intuitive for computer newbies. (For some of my customers, I tell them to immediately call me on a red light. Makes my job easier lol.)
Quick, get Sydney Bristow on the case! I hear she's married to Daredevil now, so I guess he... well actually, that might be a hindrance to the whole thing.
You shouldn't get reamed out for that
But I will (and you probably will, too). I already have a bit, judging by the comment history. Talking about Linux or FOSS here in anything other than a positive light is tantamount to sacrilege. It'd be as if I went to the Apple community and called Steve Jobs anything other than a technological revolutionary. It's not a big deal, though - every community has its unreasonable fanatics.
You talk almost as if you were a sage or mystic, and it unsettles me all the more.
I get what you're saying about the market and all, but when I hear things like "consumer confidence" and all I feel as if the entirety of Wall Street is based on some sort of weird financial voodoo instead of any actual merit (on the part of companies).
OpenOffice had the same problem and probably still does.
I'm sure I'll be modded down into oblivion for saying the following, but it bears repeating and it's true, so... yeah. I really don't care if a bunch of people want to be shut out from hearing something true but uncomfortable.
The inability to nail down problems like this is one of the reasons open source is not always taken seriously in the business world. You can't claim to be a good alternative to the paid thing if your product doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Companies (and many individuals) need close to 100% reliability as possible. Too many FOSS projects seem to have people focused on geeky technical details (we made it 5% more RAM efficient!) and less so on user-friendliness or functionality.
I've tried to introduce people to OpenOffice (and LibreOffice after they forked from OO). I've had more than a few instances where a friend tries to open an old college assignment or something in OO/LO and the formatting is completely fucked. They deride it as being completely unusable when said document would open just fine in any version of Microsoft Office from that year or later, and inquire about pricing or where to grab a bootleg.
I mean, we all know that usability and function should win? If something has the features the majority of people want and make it easy as shit to use, they're going to take over the market. This is why the iPod and iPad are so successful compared to their competitors - they make it shiny, and they make it easy. Lots of open source software (specifically, all of the stuff marketed as "alternatives" to commercial products: OO/LO, Linux and its distros, GIMP, etc.) fails miserably at both and they're never going to gain any ground until they remedy that.
(Hoo boy, I just said Apple was better than open source software at something. I had better stock up on the KY for the reaming I'm about to get in downmods.)
P.S., I used OpenOffice and now use LibreOffice in my home on all of my computers and I love it. It's great when you create documents natively in it. It just isn't always that great when opening docs from other programs, but I'm a technically-savvy person and I can adjust. The layperson can not.
The critical difference here is that those Chinese workers are /not/ slaves. They are not forced into taking jobs at foxconn; they take these positions voluntarily, just like people in western countries do, because they think it's a favorable trade for them.
I understand this and the rest of your post, but they are about as close to getting to slaves as they can be. A lot of them are there because they literally have no chance at a better life without having to go through all the insane hours at Foxconn.
Your first sentence alone could be used in a similar way: "the slaves aren't running away from the fields or complaining much lately, so they must really like it here!" No, they're there because they really do not have much of a choice. I mean, they do in a technical sense. I'm sure they could leave and go back to the countryside to live in a hovel with a dirt floor and absolutely 0 contact with the outside world. That's better than nothing, right?
Argh, the logical leaps that some of us make to assuage our guilt about the shit ways people are treated in other countries! The ones who make our shiny gadgets, children's toys, and a vast majority of the stuff we use everyday, no less!
And yes, I am full well aware that I am using something also made somewhere in China or Southeast Asia. If I had a "buy American" option for electronics I'd take it, although right now I'm killing time at a public library so I don't have much in the way of choice on what sort of computer I use.
Right now the only thing I can really reliably and consistantly buy American are cigarettes and socks.
I...I am not even sure what say to that...
Short answer: some Google employee was caught going to a strip club on his 20% time and had to get real creative real fast.
The shower water could have been redirected to flush the toilets (which is a common use for grey water), and he may be exceedingly poor at communicating this fact. Alternatively, he may be a complete moron.
Neither is a valid word under the rules of Scrabble, which restricts you to English words.
What.
You're a bit wrong there. Qi and Chi would both be "loanwords", i.e. words taken wholesale from another language, usually with no change in spelling or pronunciation. Here, try some others using the official Scrabble dictionary. I'll just throw together a short list, and you see how many of these aren't in there because they're technically not English words at all:
hibachi (Japanese), karaoke (Japanese), cafeteria (Spanish), alpaca (Spanish), gulag (Russian), taiga (Russian), wiener (German), kraut (German), moped (Swedish), brogue (Irish).
There's ten different words from six different languages. Only one of that list is not in there - and it will be as surprising to you which one is not in the dictionary as it was to me.
I get what you're saying, the "je ne sais quoi" example is a good one. But there are certain words from other languages we use that have pretty much been adopted into the language, especially for concepts we really don't have or can explain as concisely. Granted, some you may have never heard - usually only marital artists could describe what a kiai or kata is, for example - but we have loads of loanwords that are in everyday use in our language. (It personally makes me cringe when people say "hibachi" (hee-bah-chee) and "karaoke" (kah-rah-o-kay) and mangle the Japanese pronunciations, but that's accents for you. The Japanes hilariously mispronounce English words sometimes too, and they certainly misuse our words a lot of the time as well - surely some sort of revenge for all of those trendy kanji tattoos that so many of us Westerners like getting on our bodies.)
Incidentally, "qi" is in the Scrabble dictionary - at least according to the one on the Hasbro website (which I have linked above).
Shinjitai
I thought it might be "I want to believe you" or "I believe you"? My Japanese is a bit rusty. Turns out it's neither of those. I was figuring it was some sort of weird conjugation of "shinjeru", haha...