Second of all if you're making $21k/yr or more (which these rules apparently affect) then you're making more that most Americans. These rules only affect the rich.
Median household income in 1999, United States: $41,994
That means half of the nation makes more than that, and half makes less.
Total number of households: 105,539,122 One-person household: 27,203,724 Total number of workers age 16+: 128,279,228
So, 25% of those households have only one income, by definition. There is an average of 1.21 workers per household, so a great many more multi-person households have only one income earner.
I don't think it's safe to say that $21k/year is the median individual income in the US. If you have a source to cite for that, I'd gladly retract.
Seriously, how reliable is [Cingular's] messaging system?
For quite some time, that is the only reason I am still on Sprint.
I've had Cingular service since it was Pac Bell Wireless... signed up back in 1998 or so. I've had the problems you mentioned above with voice mail... once, for a couple of days, three years ago or more. My messages reliably come through within minutes of recording. (I know this because I leave my phone on silent in class a lot... so it starts buzzing, I hit "C," and then a minute later it buzzes one more time to let me know I got a message.)
Generally I've been quite happy with my coverage, service, pricing, etc. Every 12-18 months I walk into a Cingular Authorized Dealer and get a new phone and a new contract with better rates. The phone is always free (except for sales tax). I've even called up and scaled *down* my service just months after signing a two-year contract without paying any fee or penalty. The CSR was even friendly and helpful about it. They've also been good about removing charges for SMS spam (granted, it's only 10 cents, but it's the principle of the thing).
The only thing I really *don't* like about them is, when there's something you absolutely have to go to one of their own stores for (and there's only two of those in the entire Los Angeles area), it's a nightmare. The people are rude, the wait is 45 minutes to *find out* if they can help you, etc. Fortunately, I've only had to do this once (to inquire about repairing my phone... then found out from an Authorized Dealer that I could just replace it for free), though I'll have to do it again if I want to collect my SIM card upgrade from the Bertoldi v. Pacific Bell Wireless LLC class action settlement. The saving grace here is that there's almost nothing you have to go to them for... once in over five years ain't bad.
First, I think there are sufficiently talented and experienced people to implement perhaps 5% of technology projects being built today.
I think that estimate is a little low. The problem is exacerbated, however, by skill misidentification. People with tons of experience and skill in designing, maintaining, or supporting systems might also be good at implementation, but it's far from given. Implementation requires a whole lot more understanding of human nature and the learning process than most people have, whatever their background. I've seen plenty of implementations go very badly because the folks who were responsible for it knew a *lot* about how the system worked, and nothing about how to pass this information on. Yet I can't tell you anything about what happens when someone who comes at it from the other side (such as a background in education or behavioral therapy) takes on a major technology implementation project, because this doesn't generally happen. It's assumed that, unless you start out knowing the system, you can't implement it.
Second, the IT field is so freaking complex it defies imagination. There is simply too much to know. So you have these specialists who know only their narrow field, but inevitably those fields go out of fashion and the former specialist joins another field they have no experience in. It's a vicious cycle caused by (I think) the fact that IT isn't truly a mature industry. It's a research field that has been adopted too early by other industries.
An interesting theory... I may have to bring it up to my professor in "Growth, Science and Technology" (a joint offering of the Management and Policy Studies programs).
I think that this issue is also related to the one above, however. In addition to changing very fast (I'm not sure that it's really a matter of complexity, but simply that you never get to a point where you know enough to coast for a while... because now it's all different), it's a discipline that attracts people who are very good at concentrating on a particular linear thread, and relate very well to deterministic systems. It therefore selects for people who have a very hard time understanding and communicating with human beings. People who can translate effectively between humans and computers are fairly rare, and those that *want* to even moreso. This adds to the mystique of the discipline, meaning that plenty of people who might be just fine at technology in addition to having other useful skills are convinced that they will NEVER understand it.
Read the article very carefully. You will see refrences to SILOS. This is where the current inner working people dont want to change the way they do thaing therefore, will not participate in converstions, upgrades and may do a little sabatoging.
Read the article even more carefully. You will see the following quote in context:
Coordination between the teams-
the responsibility of the lead integrator on the project, Deloitte and Touche-quickly got out of hand...."Everything was siloed among the different groups, and we all worked independently of each other," says a project team member.
Siloing is a term for when different aspects of a supposedly integrated project become isolated from each other and communcation breaks down. It can happen from the inside because of pride/stupidity/whatever, *or* from the outside because of bad planning and implementation. The latter appears to be the case here. So the original poster's complaint about the experts not listening to the team members probably still holds.
Newsflash for Managers {tm}: People expecting to be fired, will make their own plans for their futures instead of working 100% at your projects. Like, duh, eh?
That was pretty much my response. It's one thing to let people know that if they don't meet your (clearly defined and within the realm of the possible) standards, they won't be kept around for sentimental reasons. But generally, if you want loyalty you have to give it.
I think maybe these people are operating under the false belief that, if their employees think they might be replaced, they'll work harder to try to prove themselves more valuable. But they don't realize that people are much more pessimistic these days than they were during the dot-com boom. If outsourcing is being considered, it comes across as an inevitable death-knell, not a spur to do better.
For some reason I just cant feel sorry for a company not being able to rally its workers and threaten the workers of off shoring their work.... AWE insisted on moving towards outsourcing instead of figuring out what needed to be done. I have seen similarly situations where no matter how much cheaper labor you look for, if you can't devise the plan, no one will be able to follow it.
Did you RTFA? I did...WLNP went live on Nov 24th. Offshoring hadn't begun by then. Blame this on the 200$/hr consultants from D&T.
Did you read the quote you posted? The planning had begun, and people saw the signs... while they were up against an immovable deadline on number portability. No doubt D&T can share the blame generously, but frankly, when you're counting on your employees to complete a very difficult job is not the time to be plotting to fire them all and replace them with cheap knock-offs.
surely people are intelligent enough to realize it's a scam, I mean they are intelligent enough to be allowed into a voting booth, for heaven's sake.
Hm... that gives me an idea...
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
Greetings US Citizen,
I am Dr. Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Politician, Former Governor Abacha Tunde. He was the first African in office when he made a secret campaign to become mayor in 1979. He was on a later cabinet post, Undersecretary to the secret military tribunal in 1989. He was stranded there in 1990 when the Soviet Union was dissolved. Now he is trapped in a Diebold poll booth, and though he is in good humor, he wants to come home.
But have you noticed that the proverb never tells you how the fool gets the money in the first place?
In my family, he inherited it...
After much geneological research, it was determined that the reason my mother's family never became wealthy was because of a long-standing tradition of leaving everything to the dumbest son.
If I understand SCO's current position (which I think is #781), not quite.
Quite. Mr. McBride has said, flat-out, in interviews that the GPL is invalid and therefore all works released under it are in the public domain.
This is without regard to what their current legal claims are... which I believe you have stated correctly. But he still holds the opinion that GPL = PD.
No. Actually it's not about the money. It's all the same. If someone is using Kazaa to steal music/movies, they're just as bad as someone at Microsoft who steals pieces of the Linux kernel to put into Windows.
Uhh...
First of all, it *is* about the money, since that's what all the judgements are based on... the perceived financial harm to the copyright holder. Whether or not there is an out-of-pocket gain or loss is perhaps irrelevant, but the RIAA and MPAA's entire argument is that they are *losing money* because of file sharing... a claim they've presented absolutely no evidence to support, and that several studies have in fact directly contradicted.
The other big difference: if you use GPL code in your software product, this is perfectly legal, *provided* you comply with the terms of the license (distribute the code with your product). For music and movie file sharing, in several cases, there is *no* legal way to do the same thing... there's a whole lot of music out there that online music stores don't carry in their catalog, and so far no major studio has made any effort to market their feature films online.
Furthermore, the RIAA and MPAA are doing their best to prevent people from legally *having* digital copies of works on their computer, regardless of how they are used. They abuse copyright by trying to take away legitimate fair use from people who actually *did* pay for that CD or DVD fair and square. The GPL makes no such attempt; in fact, it makes software *more* usable to licensees (which includes everyone who complies with the terms of the license).
It is perfectly consistent to support upholding the GPL and at the same time decry the RIAA and MPAA's abuse of copyright. There's a difference between using legal tools responsibly and irresponsibly.
>> Under copyright law you have *no* rights to begin with, beyond fair use.
> This is totally incorrect. Your conception of copyright law is backwards, and you don't understand the nature of Fair Use.
Did you hit Submit too early?
Would you care to explain that statement?
Copyright law states that the author of a work retains sole right to distribute and perform a work. Though the author can license that right to others, such license is not assumed by or incorporated into copyright law... the default is, no one (but the author) has any rights. Fair Use allows certain types of limited distribution or performance in spite of those restrictions. How was the parent post wrong?
>> That's because the German legal system has the will to stand up to SCO.
> And the US doesn't? How so?
Germany put a gag order on SCO, prohibiting them from spouting massively unsubstantiated statements about their IP rights until they're proven in court.
The US has done no such thing, and doesn't really have any legal basis for doing so... corporations have free speech rights here.
And that one IDE cable easily reaches up to the next 5 1/2 bay up from it. 1 cable is still better than 2.
I simply don't agree. Two cables the size of a CAT-5 ethernet cable are still easier to use than one which is flat and two inches wide (or so).
Sure, that cable *can* reach up to the next bay, and in my computer it does exactly that. But it's a biotch getting the drives in and out, and getting the cable routed up there properly, and so on. And chance forbid your drives should have their IDE ports on different sides, such that the cable has to traverse a *horizontal* direction too....
For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?
In this case, it seems that the folks who didn't have an interest in supporting SATA optical drives were the SATA controller manufacturers. It's all well and good to say there's no reason for a manufacturer to go to the trouble of making an SATA optical drive, but if they actually do bother, it's pretty lame for the controller manufacturer to say "we're not interested in supporting it."
However, there are a number of things we currently do which can be entirely or partially privatized. Private companies, by virtue of having a profit motive while being (mostly) unable to change the law to suit them, are naturally better suited to the job. People can (barely) control the corporations - controlling the government is a much harder affair.
You've named many things that you believe cannot effectively be privatized (and I completely agree). But you haven't mentioned anything that you believe *can* be effectively privatized.
The biggest problem of privatization of (currently) governmental functions is that a great many of them are simply not profitable. Therefore, the profit motive doesn't actually control corporations if we leave them to provide these things. What we end up doing when we "privatize" such things (such as public transit) is using public funds to subsidize the private operation *and* to pay the company their "profit." The company makes more money if they lower their costs, but they can't really lose money unless they make a serious error in the contract. So there's not really the motivation to lower costs as much as possible. Instead, private companies that secure these contracts tend to see them as safe cash cows that they don't have to try very hard at.
Also, I totally disagree that the government is harder to control than corporations. Heck, I live in a state where we just fired our governor. It was a whole lot easier and quicker than getting Michael Eisner fired as Chairman of the Board at Disney... and, as expensive as the recall was, it probably cost less than Disney & Gold's campaign to unseat Eisner.
If I have to pay 30-50% of my paycheck to see "society", which is, at best, an ambiguous term, benefit in a vague and unmeasurable way...
Then it's good that you live in a country where you pay about 12% of your paycheck in income taxes, and maybe another 10% in various other taxes. If you do your deductions right, it's probably even less than that. Very, very few Americans pay more than a third of their income in all taxes.
How can we determine if society is better by government-funded education? I'd say the easiest, and most logical way is to compare scores in basic skills from publicly-education children to privately-educated children.
There's a very fundamental flaw in that method of measurement: you have to control for many, many factors which are often determinants in both school performance *and* whether a child goes to public or private school. After you've controlled for family income, education of the parents, ethnicity, rural vs. urban setting, and the kid's IQ, you're left with very few comparable cases. This makes it very difficult to examine outcomes of children in private vs. public schools.
Also, if you only measure academic performance, you're only getting part of the picture. Frankly, high school isn't anywhere near as much about what you learn in the classroom as what you learn about living in society (btw, I'm going to keep using that term, because I happen to know that human beings are social animals, and we will literally wither away and die without each other's company). So you'd also have to look at how many form successful relationships, raise happy children, end up in therapy or on drugs... it would be a daunting task.
If I had to put away 15% of my paycheck every month so I could live comfortably 40 years from now when I reture, would I bother? I mean, I wouldn't be able to afford the lifestyle I want now (analogous to being in debt), and I might not even live long enough to retire. See the correlation?
No, not really. Having a lower standard of living now so that you can have a higher one later is not the same as going into debt and putting your life on hold such that you *never* have certain opportunities. Going into debt is expensive. Americans don't really seem to get this.
Something many, many people in this country don't seem to understand is that while going to college may be important, it's more important to learn skills that will help you make money.
Actually, for a lot of people, it's most important to study something that will make you *happy*. For some people, that happens to be whatever will make them the most money... their happiness is tied to their financial status. For most, though, they can make tons of money and be perfectly miserable.
Here is where our philosophies differ. Your concern is society, while mine is myself. Some may call me selfish. I prefer to think of it as practical. I can only control what I do, not what society does. Therefore, I try to make myself as successful as possible, and benefit those around me as much as possible.
That part about benefiting those around you... where does it come from? Why would you do that? How does that serve your "selfish" ends?
Your view is centralized around "society". Let me make this comparison -- If you live the kind of life you think would be most beneficial to society, how will you be able to measure your success on your deathbed 70 years from now?
Ever seen the movie "It's a Wonderful Life"? Ok, a bit of an extreme example. But you can tell on your deathbed how well you've contributed to society by who is around you and sorry to see you go.
To measure that kind of success, each person has to use differing standards. Therefore, it is practically impossible to measure your success.
It is practically impossible for *you* to measure *my* personal feeling of success. It is entirely possible for me to measure my own success, in my own terms
wouldn't a common circular wheel, while going over a steep hill both be circular shapes?
Well, maybe some naturally-occuring hills, but not any roads going over hills. Vertical curves (any road or rail section which joins two different grades) are always parabolic. Horizontal curves are circular.
Which they only had to tell me once before I got it. Apparently this is very, very hard to teach to Civil Engineering students, though (I was visiting from the Transportation Planning program), because we spent about two weeks on this single topic.
The difference is between free choice and government mandated donations to charity.
The difference is between public goods that are under-provided because, when given a choice, people will usually understate their desire for a public good in hopes that it will be provided by someone else... and a society where we jointly decide what the priorities are and fund them equitably.
The problem is that the government forces you to donate where someone else has decided it's more important.
That "someone else" is society at large. You're a participating member. We have a majority-rules system (except for many weirdnesses like the Electoral College) with representatives making a lot of the day-to-day decisions. If more than half of the voters in the US don't agree with you, chances are, you won't get your way.
Boo hoo. I don't get my way a whole lot of the time, but I generally lay the blame on lack of information and education on the part of the folks I'm *jointly* making the decision with, rather than pretending there's no system and someone's just handed down an edict.
I think it's even worse than being expected, as an able-bodied sane adult, to pay your own rent and buy your own food.
And what about all the folks who don't fall into that category? Not able-bodied, not sane, not adult? A really huge proportion of the homeless population falls into these categories.
So what about "the rest"? You know Wal-Mart, the country's largest employer, pays an average wage of $7.50. Most of their employees are part-time, and can't afford to buy into the company health insurance plan. The kind human resources folks at Wal-Mart actually hand out instructions on applying for food stamps, because so many of their employees are eligible. They should starve, I suppose, because they should have been able to get a better job?
The Federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. That's $10,712 a year, for someone with 100% full-time employment. There are a few places you can live on that, but not many. Reflecting this, the 2003 Department of Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines set the poverty line at $12,120 for a family of two. So if you're a single parent working full-time at minimum wage, you're below the poverty line, which is based on the cost of the "emergency temporary diet" -- a construction that has nothing to do with three squares a day or the USRDA of any nutrient -- multiplied by three, since the average family spends a third of their budget on food.
So, no, I don't generally think that in the American labor market we can expect everyone to pay their own rent and buy their own food, given that you can be employed full-time and not be able to do these things.
First, why should the government pay for your education?
To answer that question, ask this: how does society benefit from having well-educated people from diverse backgrounds?
Currently, Southern California's economy is at a very strange place. While we seem to be going "downhill" in many respects, we command extremely strong positions in many industries. A critical place where we fall down is on an educated workforce. We're not even necessarily talking about college-level education; even our working class doesn't get the skills they need to fill the jobs that are available. Southern California survives by importing skilled and educated workers, and has for some time. By strengthening all levels of our educational system, we can offer companies a place to do their business where they know they'll be able to hire the people they need, without paying relocation.
Education is not something that responds well to market forces. How many kids *want* to go to school? Their parents want them to, sure, but what do the parents ultimately want: a well-rounded education that allows their child to achieve their maximum potential in the area they have the greatest affinity for, or the cheapest route to prosperity? And then what about the really huge numbers of people who simply can't afford to go to school if it's not subsidized?
I'm in a full-time graduate program which this year costs $6,100 in fees, plus about $600 worth of books and another $300 or so of miscellaneous materials, lab fees, etc. So I'm costing my household $7,000 to go to school full-time, and can't even bring in a full-time income (it's actually "against the rules" in the program I'm attending to work full-time, though some people "get away with it"). I have a fieldwork requirement of 300 hours, so I have a part-time internship that pays $12/hour. In my last full-time permanent job before I started school, I was making $17.30/hour.
Do the math. If I had to pay the full cost of my education, would I bother? I'd be in debt for the next ten years or so, precluding buying a house. At the age of 30, putting off stuff like that starts to look really ooky... we're finally having our first child in June (right after graduation... glad those gowns are nice and flowy;-) and I hope that we won't be trying to raise them in an apartment for that long.
But does society as a whole benefit from me getting a degree in Transportation Planning? Probably so. Maybe they wouldn't so much if it was in Business, but since I'll probably be going into the public sector, getting well-trained, well-educated people who actually *want* to do this work is definitely going to have a positive impact on everyone. I tend to think it's a very good sign that many of the people who work in the planning department I'm interning at live their personal lives according to the same principles they practice at work: using transit, reducing driving, walking places, living in higher-density areas, investing in small businesses.
So maybe it still doesn't make sense to you that my education is subsidized. But that's a snapshot of why I don't feel particularly guilty about it.
Why should the government be responsible for providing glasses to the elderly? Glasses don't cost much, maybe $250 for a very, very good pair
Heh. If anyone living on a social security check read that, they probably burst out laughing. $250 is about half of a month's stipend for a lot of these folks.
Granted, $250 is more than most people pay for glasses. But even $100 for the exam and prescription is a huge chunk for a lot of people.
Keep in mind a few other things: many of the folks we're talking about didn't ever worry about stuff like this when they were our age, because either they didn't expect to live that long, or they expected their children to be able to take care of them, or whatever. IRAs weren't even invented until 1974; someone who is now 75 was already middle-aged by that time. 401
First of all, if you get mugged, would you rather have a gun or a cell phone? Choose carefully; one will help, one will not.
Let's see... if I have a gun, at 5'2" and female, it won't probably stay in my hand very long, especially if I'm surprised... so it's a lot more likely to kill me than I am to kill my assailant with it. If I have a cell phone, it can't kill me, and might summon aid fast enough to catch the guy. Certainly it can help me cancel my credit cards so fast that they do him no good.
Secondly, it does not follow that since government has for the most part, replaced volunteer fire departments with state employees, that the VFD's didn't do at least as good a job.
It doesn't follow that they did or didn't. One needs a whole lot more information about the subject to know why it was done.
However, any public good is likely to be under-provided without a coercive method like taxation to force compliance. A volunteer FD is in many cases only going to provide sufficient firefighters if people are in essence "required" to serve, which then eliminates the volunteer nature. Also, communities' firefighting forces will be drastically different based on a number of socioeconomic characteristics, whereas government-funded and provided FDs can be distributed more equally among different regions.
Thirdly, when it comes to accountability for government spending, who exactly are you trying to kid?
Apparently, you're still kidding yourself.
The information is all public record, and most of it is online. Check out the OMB's website sometime. Now try getting that much information about the spending of any given company you own stock in.
Just because people don't use the information doesn't mean it's not there. Usually, it means they want a scapegoat for their own laziness and lack of responsibility. The government we have is the government we want, ultimately. If you personally want something different, you've either been outvoted or you're part of the apathetic majority who would rather complain than actually write your congresscritter or participate in a campaign.
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Second of all if you're making $21k/yr or more (which these rules apparently affect) then you're making more that most Americans. These rules only affect the rich.
Median household income in 1999, United States: $41,994
That means half of the nation makes more than that, and half makes less.
Total number of households: 105,539,122
One-person household: 27,203,724
Total number of workers age 16+: 128,279,228
So, 25% of those households have only one income, by definition. There is an average of 1.21 workers per household, so a great many more multi-person households have only one income earner.
I don't think it's safe to say that $21k/year is the median individual income in the US. If you have a source to cite for that, I'd gladly retract.
Seriously, how reliable is [Cingular's] messaging system?
For quite some time, that is the only reason I am still on Sprint.
I've had Cingular service since it was Pac Bell Wireless... signed up back in 1998 or so. I've had the problems you mentioned above with voice mail... once, for a couple of days, three years ago or more. My messages reliably come through within minutes of recording. (I know this because I leave my phone on silent in class a lot... so it starts buzzing, I hit "C," and then a minute later it buzzes one more time to let me know I got a message.)
Generally I've been quite happy with my coverage, service, pricing, etc. Every 12-18 months I walk into a Cingular Authorized Dealer and get a new phone and a new contract with better rates. The phone is always free (except for sales tax). I've even called up and scaled *down* my service just months after signing a two-year contract without paying any fee or penalty. The CSR was even friendly and helpful about it. They've also been good about removing charges for SMS spam (granted, it's only 10 cents, but it's the principle of the thing).
The only thing I really *don't* like about them is, when there's something you absolutely have to go to one of their own stores for (and there's only two of those in the entire Los Angeles area), it's a nightmare. The people are rude, the wait is 45 minutes to *find out* if they can help you, etc. Fortunately, I've only had to do this once (to inquire about repairing my phone... then found out from an Authorized Dealer that I could just replace it for free), though I'll have to do it again if I want to collect my SIM card upgrade from the Bertoldi v. Pacific Bell Wireless LLC class action settlement. The saving grace here is that there's almost nothing you have to go to them for... once in over five years ain't bad.
First, I think there are sufficiently talented and experienced people to implement perhaps 5% of technology projects being built today.
I think that estimate is a little low. The problem is exacerbated, however, by skill misidentification. People with tons of experience and skill in designing, maintaining, or supporting systems might also be good at implementation, but it's far from given. Implementation requires a whole lot more understanding of human nature and the learning process than most people have, whatever their background. I've seen plenty of implementations go very badly because the folks who were responsible for it knew a *lot* about how the system worked, and nothing about how to pass this information on. Yet I can't tell you anything about what happens when someone who comes at it from the other side (such as a background in education or behavioral therapy) takes on a major technology implementation project, because this doesn't generally happen. It's assumed that, unless you start out knowing the system, you can't implement it.
Second, the IT field is so freaking complex it defies imagination. There is simply too much to know. So you have these specialists who know only their narrow field, but inevitably those fields go out of fashion and the former specialist joins another field they have no experience in. It's a vicious cycle caused by (I think) the fact that IT isn't truly a mature industry. It's a research field that has been adopted too early by other industries.
An interesting theory... I may have to bring it up to my professor in "Growth, Science and Technology" (a joint offering of the Management and Policy Studies programs).
I think that this issue is also related to the one above, however. In addition to changing very fast (I'm not sure that it's really a matter of complexity, but simply that you never get to a point where you know enough to coast for a while... because now it's all different), it's a discipline that attracts people who are very good at concentrating on a particular linear thread, and relate very well to deterministic systems. It therefore selects for people who have a very hard time understanding and communicating with human beings. People who can translate effectively between humans and computers are fairly rare, and those that *want* to even moreso. This adds to the mystique of the discipline, meaning that plenty of people who might be just fine at technology in addition to having other useful skills are convinced that they will NEVER understand it.
Read the article even more carefully. You will see the following quote in context:Siloing is a term for when different aspects of a supposedly integrated project become isolated from each other and communcation breaks down. It can happen from the inside because of pride/stupidity/whatever, *or* from the outside because of bad planning and implementation. The latter appears to be the case here. So the original poster's complaint about the experts not listening to the team members probably still holds.
Newsflash for Managers {tm}: People expecting to be fired, will make their own plans for their futures instead of working 100% at your projects. Like, duh, eh?
That was pretty much my response. It's one thing to let people know that if they don't meet your (clearly defined and within the realm of the possible) standards, they won't be kept around for sentimental reasons. But generally, if you want loyalty you have to give it.
I think maybe these people are operating under the false belief that, if their employees think they might be replaced, they'll work harder to try to prove themselves more valuable. But they don't realize that people are much more pessimistic these days than they were during the dot-com boom. If outsourcing is being considered, it comes across as an inevitable death-knell, not a spur to do better.
Did you read the quote you posted? The planning had begun, and people saw the signs... while they were up against an immovable deadline on number portability. No doubt D&T can share the blame generously, but frankly, when you're counting on your employees to complete a very difficult job is not the time to be plotting to fire them all and replace them with cheap knock-offs.
surely people are intelligent enough to realize it's a scam, I mean they are intelligent enough to be allowed into a voting booth, for heaven's sake.
Hm... that gives me an idea...
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
Greetings US Citizen,
I am Dr. Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Politician, Former Governor Abacha Tunde. He was the first African in office when he made a secret campaign to become mayor in 1979. He was on a later cabinet post, Undersecretary to the secret military tribunal in 1989. He was stranded there in 1990 when the Soviet Union was dissolved. Now he is trapped in a Diebold poll booth, and though he is in good humor, he wants to come home.
But have you noticed that the proverb never tells you how the fool gets the money in the first place?
In my family, he inherited it...
After much geneological research, it was determined that the reason my mother's family never became wealthy was because of a long-standing tradition of leaving everything to the dumbest son.
If I understand SCO's current position (which I think is #781), not quite.
Quite. Mr. McBride has said, flat-out, in interviews that the GPL is invalid and therefore all works released under it are in the public domain.
This is without regard to what their current legal claims are... which I believe you have stated correctly. But he still holds the opinion that GPL = PD.
No. Actually it's not about the money. It's all the same. If someone is using Kazaa to steal music/movies, they're just as bad as someone at Microsoft who steals pieces of the Linux kernel to put into Windows.
Uhh...
First of all, it *is* about the money, since that's what all the judgements are based on... the perceived financial harm to the copyright holder. Whether or not there is an out-of-pocket gain or loss is perhaps irrelevant, but the RIAA and MPAA's entire argument is that they are *losing money* because of file sharing... a claim they've presented absolutely no evidence to support, and that several studies have in fact directly contradicted.
The other big difference: if you use GPL code in your software product, this is perfectly legal, *provided* you comply with the terms of the license (distribute the code with your product). For music and movie file sharing, in several cases, there is *no* legal way to do the same thing... there's a whole lot of music out there that online music stores don't carry in their catalog, and so far no major studio has made any effort to market their feature films online.
Furthermore, the RIAA and MPAA are doing their best to prevent people from legally *having* digital copies of works on their computer, regardless of how they are used. They abuse copyright by trying to take away legitimate fair use from people who actually *did* pay for that CD or DVD fair and square. The GPL makes no such attempt; in fact, it makes software *more* usable to licensees (which includes everyone who complies with the terms of the license).
It is perfectly consistent to support upholding the GPL and at the same time decry the RIAA and MPAA's abuse of copyright. There's a difference between using legal tools responsibly and irresponsibly.
>> Under copyright law you have *no* rights to begin with, beyond fair use.
> This is totally incorrect. Your conception of copyright law is backwards, and you don't understand the nature of Fair Use.
Did you hit Submit too early?
Would you care to explain that statement?
Copyright law states that the author of a work retains sole right to distribute and perform a work. Though the author can license that right to others, such license is not assumed by or incorporated into copyright law... the default is, no one (but the author) has any rights. Fair Use allows certain types of limited distribution or performance in spite of those restrictions. How was the parent post wrong?
>> If the GPL is invalid, you're in violation of copyright law.
> I don't think anyone would dispute that.
Darl McBride would. According to him, software released under the GPL is public domain, because the GPL is unenforceable.
There is no argument so stupid that you cannot find someone with something to gain from making it.
The post he made is not a sibling of its parent.
Unless he made it from Arkansas.
(DISCLAIMER: I have an aunt and several cousins in Arkansas, all with very traditional familial relationships... so this is truly in jest.)
>> That's because the German legal system has the will to stand up to SCO.
> And the US doesn't? How so?
Germany put a gag order on SCO, prohibiting them from spouting massively unsubstantiated statements about their IP rights until they're proven in court.
The US has done no such thing, and doesn't really have any legal basis for doing so... corporations have free speech rights here.
And that one IDE cable easily reaches up to the next 5 1/2 bay up from it. 1 cable is still better than 2.
I simply don't agree. Two cables the size of a CAT-5 ethernet cable are still easier to use than one which is flat and two inches wide (or so).
Sure, that cable *can* reach up to the next bay, and in my computer it does exactly that. But it's a biotch getting the drives in and out, and getting the cable routed up there properly, and so on. And chance forbid your drives should have their IDE ports on different sides, such that the cable has to traverse a *horizontal* direction too....
SATA reduces size of the cable, but increases number of cables. You can put two devices on PATA cable, but only one device on SATA cable.
And two SATA cables are still much nicer than one IDE cable...
For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?
In this case, it seems that the folks who didn't have an interest in supporting SATA optical drives were the SATA controller manufacturers. It's all well and good to say there's no reason for a manufacturer to go to the trouble of making an SATA optical drive, but if they actually do bother, it's pretty lame for the controller manufacturer to say "we're not interested in supporting it."
However, there are a number of things we currently do which can be entirely or partially privatized. Private companies, by virtue of having a profit motive while being (mostly) unable to change the law to suit them, are naturally better suited to the job. People can (barely) control the corporations - controlling the government is a much harder affair.
You've named many things that you believe cannot effectively be privatized (and I completely agree). But you haven't mentioned anything that you believe *can* be effectively privatized.
The biggest problem of privatization of (currently) governmental functions is that a great many of them are simply not profitable. Therefore, the profit motive doesn't actually control corporations if we leave them to provide these things. What we end up doing when we "privatize" such things (such as public transit) is using public funds to subsidize the private operation *and* to pay the company their "profit." The company makes more money if they lower their costs, but they can't really lose money unless they make a serious error in the contract. So there's not really the motivation to lower costs as much as possible. Instead, private companies that secure these contracts tend to see them as safe cash cows that they don't have to try very hard at.
Also, I totally disagree that the government is harder to control than corporations. Heck, I live in a state where we just fired our governor. It was a whole lot easier and quicker than getting Michael Eisner fired as Chairman of the Board at Disney... and, as expensive as the recall was, it probably cost less than Disney & Gold's campaign to unseat Eisner.
If I have to pay 30-50% of my paycheck to see "society", which is, at best, an ambiguous term, benefit in a vague and unmeasurable way...
Then it's good that you live in a country where you pay about 12% of your paycheck in income taxes, and maybe another 10% in various other taxes. If you do your deductions right, it's probably even less than that. Very, very few Americans pay more than a third of their income in all taxes.
How can we determine if society is better by government-funded education? I'd say the easiest, and most logical way is to compare scores in basic skills from publicly-education children to privately-educated children.
There's a very fundamental flaw in that method of measurement: you have to control for many, many factors which are often determinants in both school performance *and* whether a child goes to public or private school. After you've controlled for family income, education of the parents, ethnicity, rural vs. urban setting, and the kid's IQ, you're left with very few comparable cases. This makes it very difficult to examine outcomes of children in private vs. public schools.
Also, if you only measure academic performance, you're only getting part of the picture. Frankly, high school isn't anywhere near as much about what you learn in the classroom as what you learn about living in society (btw, I'm going to keep using that term, because I happen to know that human beings are social animals, and we will literally wither away and die without each other's company). So you'd also have to look at how many form successful relationships, raise happy children, end up in therapy or on drugs... it would be a daunting task.
If I had to put away 15% of my paycheck every month so I could live comfortably 40 years from now when I reture, would I bother? I mean, I wouldn't be able to afford the lifestyle I want now (analogous to being in debt), and I might not even live long enough to retire. See the correlation?
No, not really. Having a lower standard of living now so that you can have a higher one later is not the same as going into debt and putting your life on hold such that you *never* have certain opportunities. Going into debt is expensive. Americans don't really seem to get this.
Something many, many people in this country don't seem to understand is that while going to college may be important, it's more important to learn skills that will help you make money.
Actually, for a lot of people, it's most important to study something that will make you *happy*. For some people, that happens to be whatever will make them the most money... their happiness is tied to their financial status. For most, though, they can make tons of money and be perfectly miserable.
Here is where our philosophies differ. Your concern is society, while mine is myself. Some may call me selfish. I prefer to think of it as practical. I can only control what I do, not what society does. Therefore, I try to make myself as successful as possible, and benefit those around me as much as possible.
That part about benefiting those around you... where does it come from? Why would you do that? How does that serve your "selfish" ends?
Your view is centralized around "society". Let me make this comparison -- If you live the kind of life you think would be most beneficial to society, how will you be able to measure your success on your deathbed 70 years from now?
Ever seen the movie "It's a Wonderful Life"? Ok, a bit of an extreme example. But you can tell on your deathbed how well you've contributed to society by who is around you and sorry to see you go.
To measure that kind of success, each person has to use differing standards. Therefore, it is practically impossible to measure your success.
It is practically impossible for *you* to measure *my* personal feeling of success. It is entirely possible for me to measure my own success, in my own terms
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Converted+by+Mat hematica%22
google returns 10,000+ results for that phrase...
But if you search on what the parent poster actually repeated, you only get 856 hits (in English, anyway).
wouldn't a common circular wheel, while going over a steep hill both be circular shapes?
Well, maybe some naturally-occuring hills, but not any roads going over hills. Vertical curves (any road or rail section which joins two different grades) are always parabolic. Horizontal curves are circular.
Which they only had to tell me once before I got it. Apparently this is very, very hard to teach to Civil Engineering students, though (I was visiting from the Transportation Planning program), because we spent about two weeks on this single topic.
The difference is between free choice and government mandated donations to charity.
The difference is between public goods that are under-provided because, when given a choice, people will usually understate their desire for a public good in hopes that it will be provided by someone else... and a society where we jointly decide what the priorities are and fund them equitably.
The problem is that the government forces you to donate where someone else has decided it's more important.
That "someone else" is society at large. You're a participating member. We have a majority-rules system (except for many weirdnesses like the Electoral College) with representatives making a lot of the day-to-day decisions. If more than half of the voters in the US don't agree with you, chances are, you won't get your way.
Boo hoo. I don't get my way a whole lot of the time, but I generally lay the blame on lack of information and education on the part of the folks I'm *jointly* making the decision with, rather than pretending there's no system and someone's just handed down an edict.
I think it's even worse than being expected, as an able-bodied sane adult, to pay your own rent and buy your own food.
And what about all the folks who don't fall into that category? Not able-bodied, not sane, not adult? A really huge proportion of the homeless population falls into these categories.
So what about "the rest"? You know Wal-Mart, the country's largest employer, pays an average wage of $7.50. Most of their employees are part-time, and can't afford to buy into the company health insurance plan. The kind human resources folks at Wal-Mart actually hand out instructions on applying for food stamps, because so many of their employees are eligible. They should starve, I suppose, because they should have been able to get a better job?
The Federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. That's $10,712 a year, for someone with 100% full-time employment. There are a few places you can live on that, but not many. Reflecting this, the 2003 Department of Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines set the poverty line at $12,120 for a family of two. So if you're a single parent working full-time at minimum wage, you're below the poverty line, which is based on the cost of the "emergency temporary diet" -- a construction that has nothing to do with three squares a day or the USRDA of any nutrient -- multiplied by three, since the average family spends a third of their budget on food.
So, no, I don't generally think that in the American labor market we can expect everyone to pay their own rent and buy their own food, given that you can be employed full-time and not be able to do these things.
First, why should the government pay for your education?
;-) and I hope that we won't be trying to raise them in an apartment for that long.
To answer that question, ask this: how does society benefit from having well-educated people from diverse backgrounds?
Currently, Southern California's economy is at a very strange place. While we seem to be going "downhill" in many respects, we command extremely strong positions in many industries. A critical place where we fall down is on an educated workforce. We're not even necessarily talking about college-level education; even our working class doesn't get the skills they need to fill the jobs that are available. Southern California survives by importing skilled and educated workers, and has for some time. By strengthening all levels of our educational system, we can offer companies a place to do their business where they know they'll be able to hire the people they need, without paying relocation.
Education is not something that responds well to market forces. How many kids *want* to go to school? Their parents want them to, sure, but what do the parents ultimately want: a well-rounded education that allows their child to achieve their maximum potential in the area they have the greatest affinity for, or the cheapest route to prosperity? And then what about the really huge numbers of people who simply can't afford to go to school if it's not subsidized?
I'm in a full-time graduate program which this year costs $6,100 in fees, plus about $600 worth of books and another $300 or so of miscellaneous materials, lab fees, etc. So I'm costing my household $7,000 to go to school full-time, and can't even bring in a full-time income (it's actually "against the rules" in the program I'm attending to work full-time, though some people "get away with it"). I have a fieldwork requirement of 300 hours, so I have a part-time internship that pays $12/hour. In my last full-time permanent job before I started school, I was making $17.30/hour.
Do the math. If I had to pay the full cost of my education, would I bother? I'd be in debt for the next ten years or so, precluding buying a house. At the age of 30, putting off stuff like that starts to look really ooky... we're finally having our first child in June (right after graduation... glad those gowns are nice and flowy
But does society as a whole benefit from me getting a degree in Transportation Planning? Probably so. Maybe they wouldn't so much if it was in Business, but since I'll probably be going into the public sector, getting well-trained, well-educated people who actually *want* to do this work is definitely going to have a positive impact on everyone. I tend to think it's a very good sign that many of the people who work in the planning department I'm interning at live their personal lives according to the same principles they practice at work: using transit, reducing driving, walking places, living in higher-density areas, investing in small businesses.
So maybe it still doesn't make sense to you that my education is subsidized. But that's a snapshot of why I don't feel particularly guilty about it.
Why should the government be responsible for providing glasses to the elderly? Glasses don't cost much, maybe $250 for a very, very good pair
Heh. If anyone living on a social security check read that, they probably burst out laughing. $250 is about half of a month's stipend for a lot of these folks.
Granted, $250 is more than most people pay for glasses. But even $100 for the exam and prescription is a huge chunk for a lot of people.
Keep in mind a few other things: many of the folks we're talking about didn't ever worry about stuff like this when they were our age, because either they didn't expect to live that long, or they expected their children to be able to take care of them, or whatever. IRAs weren't even invented until 1974; someone who is now 75 was already middle-aged by that time. 401
First of all, if you get mugged, would you rather have a gun or a cell phone? Choose carefully; one will help, one will not.
Let's see... if I have a gun, at 5'2" and female, it won't probably stay in my hand very long, especially if I'm surprised... so it's a lot more likely to kill me than I am to kill my assailant with it. If I have a cell phone, it can't kill me, and might summon aid fast enough to catch the guy. Certainly it can help me cancel my credit cards so fast that they do him no good.
Secondly, it does not follow that since government has for the most part, replaced volunteer fire departments with state employees, that the VFD's didn't do at least as good a job.
It doesn't follow that they did or didn't. One needs a whole lot more information about the subject to know why it was done.
However, any public good is likely to be under-provided without a coercive method like taxation to force compliance. A volunteer FD is in many cases only going to provide sufficient firefighters if people are in essence "required" to serve, which then eliminates the volunteer nature. Also, communities' firefighting forces will be drastically different based on a number of socioeconomic characteristics, whereas government-funded and provided FDs can be distributed more equally among different regions.
Thirdly, when it comes to accountability for government spending, who exactly are you trying to kid?
Apparently, you're still kidding yourself.
The information is all public record, and most of it is online. Check out the OMB's website sometime. Now try getting that much information about the spending of any given company you own stock in.
Just because people don't use the information doesn't mean it's not there. Usually, it means they want a scapegoat for their own laziness and lack of responsibility. The government we have is the government we want, ultimately. If you personally want something different, you've either been outvoted or you're part of the apathetic majority who would rather complain than actually write your congresscritter or participate in a campaign.