Case in point: Copyright in the US is extended to 70 years, and "harmonizing with Europe" is used to support the argument.
Another case: the fight over BT corn. Either the global market accepts BT corn, or the global market rejects it. In that case, it's the US that's pissing off the Europeans. If the US loses than many would regard this as the imposition of a restrictive standard.
Now do you see what I mean about the danger of "one-size-fits-all", and how Free Trade==Monopoly? And no, we don't need "anarchy" to reduce this problem--just sensible negotitations between SOVEREIGN entities.
When cars become too small to drive, the only option will be to gently bend them.:)
That's how ridiculous this business of changing the ergonomics to conform to the implementation sounds.
If I had a Pentium-IV equivalent system the size of a quarter that could be powered by a watch battery, you know what I'd do with it? I'd build it into a full-sized IBM keyboard. Or, for more mobility, how about one of those portable Palm keyboards?
I certainly have no desire to bend anything just because the guts are small. Also, if these things are expensive I don't want them to be too small anyway. Too easy to lose.
When computers become too small to operate, the only option will be to gently bend them, and throw them into the garbage.
It is *you* who do not understand. Rules and regulations are a cost. Systems impose costs (regulations, taxations, interest rates, standards, etc.). If there is no competition between systems, there is a single monopoly system, and nothing to discourage the world government from imposing higher regulatory costs, higher taxes, tight standards, etc. Mark my words.
You'd still need human oversight in case the machine screws up. You might end up with a "review system" as in football. Even if the system is designed to work instantaneously, it will still take time for human beings to review the results. That would slow down an already slow game.
Finally...
They can't shout into the manager's face and throw him out of the game.
Sportswriters can't call them idiots.
I think baseball would be even less entertaining than it already is without those elements.
Of course, don't go by me. I haven't payed much attention to baseball since 1994, when the Orioles were at the top of the standings, looking like Series contendors. And then, we all know what happened...
this is the kind of comment a person makes because they haven't learned what makes free trade work.
OK professor. Monopolies are bad, right? OK then. Explain to me why having just one economic system is good. If Korea wants to subsidize their chip makers and the US wants to tax them, fine. The US and Korea are both sovereigns. If Korean and US chip makers have to compete under the same rules, then they are, in essence, competing under the same system. If you expand this to the entire world, the entire world is under one system. It's a monopoly. Then, there is no competition in the market for economic systems.
I think all these brilliant minds promoting Free Trade have educated themselves so much that they've forgotten chapter 1 in basic economics.
we benefitted the most when our tariffs were the lowest
Tarrifs are just another economic factor that can be adjusted.
Saying "all tarrifs should be zero" is like saying the dollar should be pegged at 100 Yen, or the tax rate should always be 20%, or the interest rate should always be 2%, etc.
There are times when governments will want to control import/export. Tarrifs are just another tool to do that. Would you prefer that we let the dollar sink even further? It would have a broad "sledgehammer" effect on every sector of the world economy, not just the chip sector, or lumber, or whatever people want to complain about.
It's far better to use a nutcracker (tarrif) to crack problems in one particular industry than to use a sledgehammer (money supply) to whack the entire trade balance.
As for "corporate welfare", we're not the ones who subsidized. The best you can do is argue that a tarrif is no different than a subsidy, and that both parties are guilty. There are other reasons why tarrifs are a good thing.
See my other post to this discussion for why Free Trade is utter and complete nonsense.
Free Trade is destined for the dustbin of economic history. It's fashionable now, just like Keynesian "fine tuning" was back in the 60s.
The only way Free Trade could ever be practiced is 1. No country subsidizes anything. 2. No country regulates anything. 3. All countries have the same tax laws...
In other words, in most countries policies that influence trade are so tightly integrated with the legal system that you can't disentangle them.
You'd have to have one world government to make Free Trade work. Thus, the rationale for the paranoia about Free Trade and World Government. I don't think the leaders who promote Free Trade are actually trying to create a world government. I think perhaps they just didn't think it through far enough, or foresee the consequences--something that often happens when some intellectual fashion circulates among the "think tank" class, and then they whisper it in a bunch of influential ears, and those ears whisper it in a whole bunch of other ears, and it gets printed up in certain places and talked about at certain parties and meetings and the next thing you know it's like the Holy Bible and nobody questions it.
I give Free Trade another 10 years before it becomes fashionable for students persuing doctoral theses to do "post mortems" on it. At that point we'll be back to ad-hoc tarrif negotiations.
Either that, or we'll persue this to its logical end: One world government and economic system, followed by a recession where the one-size-fits-all policies fail and there is no "other country" for investors to move their capital. Not pretty. I don't even like to think about it.
Maybe this is a sign that we are in the last phase of the recession, and into the "pre expansion" phase of the business cycle.
I wonder how many of the people writing these games were layed off and decided to pick up on some ideas that weren't worth exploring during the boom.
Here's hoping that some of these guys get into hardware and innovative business ideas too. It could spawn the "next big thing".
I also wonder if these guys are old school shareware authors-- no crippleware (at least not severely*), no spyware, no adware, no nagware. Just "guiltware", which is pretty effective, despite all the crackerz out there. Best of all, traditional shareware was uncrackable because it was already cracked!
*Judgement call. An HTML editor that can't save is crippleware. An HTML editor without the advanced features or a "lite" version is not such a bad thing. For games, having just the first few levels is acceptable. Classic example: Quake.
It also ensures that relatively poor people can't say anything because the labor and/or expense of complying is beyond their means.
I think this is a symptom of a larger problem.
Whenever a situation arises where it becomes possible for "little guys" to compete with the "big guys" the big guys come up with a response to make it difficult or impossible.
Examples:
Situation: Anyone can come up with an invention and file a patent. Response: flood the office with patents so arcane and numerous that the legal costs far exceed the filing costs. Also, come up with nonsense patents to deter small inventors.
Situation: Cheap blogs that are often better news sources than "professional" journalists. Response: Create regulations that make it not worth blogging.
It's rather ironic that you think these rules will take power away from "journalists" which I assume you define as CNN/Enquirer, etc. Instead, it will have minimal impact on them because they have the economies of scale involved with a corporation, and are used to complying with all kinds of regulation. It's joe sixpack blogger who shows up the big boys. He's the one who threatens them; and he's the one that will be regulated out of business.
The Free Software movement isn't about freedom. It isn't about excellence. It's about socialism.
I've been saying it for years. Brett Glass has been saying similar things longer than I have. And, if you try to call us "astroturfers" I will personally KICK YOUR ASS (TM) because we were all saying it years before the Halloween Documents. Some of us were saying it before Windows!
This is just classic. It's classic class warfare. It's a classic conflict of interest; like taxing cigarettes to pay for healthcare. Rush Limbaugh said it best when he said you now have a duty to smoke. Of course the money won't go for healthcare, it'll go for some boondoggle of a beurocracy like all socialist programs do. So. Slashdotters now have a duty to buy MS products if they believe this is a good idea.
I know a lot of people will disagree with me, but if just one person wakes up and realizes what's going on, I'll feel better. I think a lot of people have been fooled because there is technology involved. People think "things are different" when it's tech. It's not different. Welcome to the new new politics of the new new economy.
I thought geeks were more likely to be borderline Asperger's, or (rarely) autistic.
Within the fat part of the Bell curve, the characteristics for Asperger's tendencies have an inverse corrolation with ADHD.
If you want to find adult ADHDers, try an entrepreneur's club or something business related. Yep. That's right. It turns out there are studies indicating that ADHDers (as adults) are more likely to run their own businesses--and hire geeks.
As for the drugs, I think it's just a lot of crap to plump the bottom line of the drug companies. Ain't nothin ritalin does that a little discipline doesn't. Of course that's JMHO and I'm sure a lot of people will disagree...
At least in the Eastern US, anyway. All part of GWB's evil plan. You see, He agreed to import weather from London in order to secure Tony Blair's cooperation in the Iraqi war. Now, the tricky part is when Dr. Evil and his cat involved...
Which reminds me of an old joke. How do you make a cat sound like a dog, and a dog sound like a cat?
The real question? Which is older, that joke or this story?
This kind of robot needs only two workers to operate it, instead of 15 workers for a jackhammer
Not that union guys don't do their fair share of shovel leaning, but I think perhaps they mean that the job would require 15 men using jackhammers, not that it takes 15 men to operate a jackhammer.
Nevermind the numbers. Just look at the vehicles at the bottom of the picture. Compare the size of the bus to the size of the rocket in the Chinese picture. In the NASA picture there is a pickup truck there, but you barely even notice it because everything else is so huge.
OK, these guys have the final say. Grep it for "empolyee" and you'll find (if I waded through the legal gook correctly) that having a plan to sell is OK, but selling in response to the information isn't, so my critic is correct.
That doesn't mean your hands are tied though. Obviously, you want to get rid of the stock if you have any. (let's forget about selling short, OK, most people never do that anyway).
How can you legally do that? Answer: sit on your shares and go to the media anonymously with your story, including the name of the company. You will cast suspicion on the entire staff, but what's a little suspicion on top of slavery?
Then, the company will have to either deny or confirm your story. If they confirm it, the stock goes down but there was nothing you could do about that anyway. If they deny it, that leaves a lot of interesting questions. Actually, if they deny it, you are in the same position as Enron employees were, except you aren't "locked out". I'd have no qualms about selling in that case, since the people doing the denying are the real criminals.
I think the most likely way this plays out is that the company has to hire and/or contract more people to do the job. Of course we all know that throwing more developers at a job won't get it done any faster. Does Wall Street know that? Maybe not. They may look at "company X is hiring" as a good sign. You know better, and all the information has now been publicly disclosed; so sell, Sell, SELL.
I'm not an expert either, but AFAIK it's not illegal for an insider to trade based on inside information. High ranking corporate officers are required to file forms when they do it. Failing to file in a timely manner (and soon, failing to file on line) is illegal; but the trade itself is not.
At my last gig, I opted to have my 401k match go into a mutual fund rather than company stock because I knew the company was a POS. Granted, that's far more subtle than shorting, but technicly I was using inside information to guide my actions in the market.
Shorting a company while trashing their product from inside is an obvious conflict of interest, and possibly against company rules and likely to get you fired (consult your employee handbook), but as far as the SEC is concerned I think what they are really going after is people who sell inside information to brokers and/or brokers who act on that information.
In other words, inside information is OK if you're inside and you don't leak it improperly.
Is The Company Publicly Traded? Is the project going to form a major percentage of their revenue?
Short the company's stock.
One thing is certain: The contractors will figure out a way to keep the contract going, wasting more money, and all the code written by your group will look something like this:
void main() { fprintf("hwlla wirld;jkkldddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd dddddddddddddddd... oh... I fell asleeep on the d key again... hope this compiles."); }
Food fight? (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). No, I said "Who's right?". (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). Good night?! It's not even 5 pm. (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). NO!!! I SAID "WHO'S RIGHT" (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). Ohhhhh.... Who's riiiight. Ummm... I dunno. (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). Shovel snow? In June?
The minute you take choice out of the hands of individuals, and place it in the hands of an organization, even a democratic organization, you oppress the minority who would have made some other choice.
Sometimes you have to put choice in org hands for practical matters (e.g., standard wall sockets, railroad gauge, time zones, etc.) but I don't think this is one of those cases. As you might gather from the examples I just gave, I think mandating open standards for file formats would be a good idea, but not the implementations.
I hope we get a chance to see the downside of this in Brazil and other countries before somebody gets the bright idea to try it here.
Slashdot Mirror
Case in point: Copyright in the US is extended to 70 years, and "harmonizing with Europe" is used to support the argument.
Another case: the fight over BT corn. Either the global market accepts BT corn, or the global market rejects it. In that case, it's the US that's pissing off the Europeans. If the US loses than many would regard this as the imposition of a restrictive standard.
Now do you see what I mean about the danger of "one-size-fits-all", and how Free Trade==Monopoly? And no, we don't need "anarchy" to reduce this problem--just sensible negotitations between SOVEREIGN entities.
When cars become too small to drive, the only option will be to gently bend them. :)
That's how ridiculous this business of changing the ergonomics to conform to the implementation sounds.
If I had a Pentium-IV equivalent system the size of a quarter that could be powered by a watch battery, you know what I'd do with it? I'd build it into a full-sized IBM keyboard. Or, for more mobility, how about one of those portable Palm keyboards?
I certainly have no desire to bend anything just because the guts are small. Also, if these things are expensive I don't want them to be too small anyway. Too easy to lose.
When computers become too small to operate, the only option will be to gently bend them, and throw them into the garbage.
It is *you* who do not understand. Rules and regulations are a cost. Systems impose costs (regulations, taxations, interest rates, standards, etc.). If there is no competition between systems, there is a single monopoly system, and nothing to discourage the world government from imposing higher regulatory costs, higher taxes, tight standards, etc. Mark my words.
Oh, wait... I am a tea drinker...
Just stay where you are. We will be with you shortly. Don't try to escape. It will only make things more difficult.
You'd still need human oversight in case the machine screws up. You might end up with a "review system" as in football. Even if the system is designed to work instantaneously, it will still take time for human beings to review the results. That would slow down an already slow game.
Finally...
They can't shout into the manager's face and throw him out of the game.
Sportswriters can't call them idiots.
I think baseball would be even less entertaining than it already is without those elements.
Of course, don't go by me. I haven't payed much attention to baseball since 1994, when the Orioles were at the top of the standings, looking like Series contendors. And then, we all know what happened...
this is the kind of comment a person makes because they haven't learned what makes free trade work.
OK professor. Monopolies are bad, right? OK then. Explain to me why having just one economic system is good. If Korea wants to subsidize their chip makers and the US wants to tax them, fine. The US and Korea are both sovereigns. If Korean and US chip makers have to compete under the same rules, then they are, in essence, competing under the same system. If you expand this to the entire world, the entire world is under one system. It's a monopoly. Then, there is no competition in the market for economic systems.
I think all these brilliant minds promoting Free Trade have educated themselves so much that they've forgotten chapter 1 in basic economics.
we benefitted the most when our tariffs were the lowest
Correlation!=causation.
Tarrifs are just another economic factor that can be adjusted.
Saying "all tarrifs should be zero" is like saying the dollar should be pegged at 100 Yen, or the tax rate should always be 20%, or the interest rate should always be 2%, etc.
There are times when governments will want to control import/export. Tarrifs are just another tool to do that. Would you prefer that we let the dollar sink even further? It would have a broad "sledgehammer" effect on every sector of the world economy, not just the chip sector, or lumber, or whatever people want to complain about.
It's far better to use a nutcracker (tarrif) to crack problems in one particular industry than to use a sledgehammer (money supply) to whack the entire trade balance.
As for "corporate welfare", we're not the ones who subsidized. The best you can do is argue that a tarrif is no different than a subsidy, and that both parties are guilty. There are other reasons why tarrifs are a good thing.
See my other post to this discussion for why Free Trade is utter and complete nonsense.
This will happen no matter who is president.
Free Trade is destined for the dustbin of economic history. It's fashionable now, just like Keynesian "fine tuning" was back in the 60s.
The only way Free Trade could ever be practiced is 1. No country subsidizes anything. 2. No country regulates anything. 3. All countries have the same tax laws...
In other words, in most countries policies that influence trade are so tightly integrated with the legal system that you can't disentangle them.
You'd have to have one world government to make Free Trade work. Thus, the rationale for the paranoia about Free Trade and World Government. I don't think the leaders who promote Free Trade are actually trying to create a world government. I think perhaps they just didn't think it through far enough, or foresee the consequences--something that often happens when some intellectual fashion circulates among the "think tank" class, and then they whisper it in a bunch of influential ears, and those ears whisper it in a whole bunch of other ears, and it gets printed up in certain places and talked about at certain parties and meetings and the next thing you know it's like the Holy Bible and nobody questions it.
I give Free Trade another 10 years before it becomes fashionable for students persuing doctoral theses to do "post mortems" on it. At that point we'll be back to ad-hoc tarrif negotiations.
Either that, or we'll persue this to its logical end: One world government and economic system, followed by a recession where the one-size-fits-all policies fail and there is no "other country" for investors to move their capital. Not pretty. I don't even like to think about it.
Maybe this is a sign that we are in the last phase of the recession, and into the "pre expansion" phase of the business cycle.
I wonder how many of the people writing these games were layed off and decided to pick up on some ideas that weren't worth exploring during the boom.
Here's hoping that some of these guys get into hardware and innovative business ideas too. It could spawn the "next big thing".
I also wonder if these guys are old school shareware authors-- no crippleware (at least not severely*), no spyware, no adware, no nagware. Just "guiltware", which is pretty effective, despite all the crackerz out there. Best of all, traditional shareware was uncrackable because it was already cracked!
*Judgement call. An HTML editor that can't save is crippleware. An HTML editor without the advanced features or a "lite" version is not such a bad thing. For games, having just the first few levels is acceptable. Classic example: Quake.
It also ensures that relatively poor people can't say anything because the labor and/or expense of complying is beyond their means.
I think this is a symptom of a larger problem.
Whenever a situation arises where it becomes possible for "little guys" to compete with the "big guys" the big guys come up with a response to make it difficult or impossible.
Examples:
Situation: Anyone can come up with an invention and file a patent. Response: flood the office with patents so arcane and numerous that the legal costs far exceed the filing costs. Also, come up with nonsense patents to deter small inventors.
Situation: Cheap blogs that are often better news sources than "professional" journalists. Response: Create regulations that make it not worth blogging.
It's rather ironic that you think these rules will take power away from "journalists" which I assume you define as CNN/Enquirer, etc. Instead, it will have minimal impact on them because they have the economies of scale involved with a corporation, and are used to complying with all kinds of regulation. It's joe sixpack blogger who shows up the big boys. He's the one who threatens them; and he's the one that will be regulated out of business.
The Free Software movement isn't about freedom. It isn't about excellence. It's about socialism.
I've been saying it for years. Brett Glass has been saying similar things longer than I have. And, if you try to call us "astroturfers" I will personally KICK YOUR ASS (TM) because we were all saying it years before the Halloween Documents. Some of us were saying it before Windows!
This is just classic. It's classic class warfare. It's a classic conflict of interest; like taxing cigarettes to pay for healthcare. Rush Limbaugh said it best when he said you now have a duty to smoke. Of course the money won't go for healthcare, it'll go for some boondoggle of a beurocracy like all socialist programs do. So. Slashdotters now have a duty to buy MS products if they believe this is a good idea.
I know a lot of people will disagree with me, but if just one person wakes up and realizes what's going on, I'll feel better. I think a lot of people have been fooled because there is technology involved. People think "things are different" when it's tech. It's not different. Welcome to the new new politics of the new new economy.
Wow! Every player on my highschool's football team had ADHD. What are the odds? :)
I thought geeks were more likely to be borderline Asperger's, or (rarely) autistic.
Within the fat part of the Bell curve, the characteristics for Asperger's tendencies have an inverse corrolation with ADHD.
If you want to find adult ADHDers, try an entrepreneur's club or something business related. Yep. That's right. It turns out there are studies indicating that ADHDers (as adults) are more likely to run their own businesses--and hire geeks.
As for the drugs, I think it's just a lot of crap to plump the bottom line of the drug companies. Ain't nothin ritalin does that a little discipline doesn't. Of course that's JMHO and I'm sure a lot of people will disagree...
Every once in a while a story comes along that restores my lack of faith in humanity. Thank-you (sob) Slashdot.
Now... Where can I get a copy of filter_destruct_packet.exe?
Have you noticed that more and more technology is more ingenious than useful?
We're reading Slashdot. How could we not notice?
At least in the Eastern US, anyway. All part of GWB's evil plan. You see, He agreed to import weather from London in order to secure Tony Blair's cooperation in the Iraqi war. Now, the tricky part is when Dr. Evil and his cat involved...
Which reminds me of an old joke. How do you make a cat sound like a dog, and a dog sound like a cat?
The real question? Which is older, that joke or this story?
This kind of robot needs only two workers to operate it, instead of 15 workers for a jackhammer
Not that union guys don't do their fair share of shovel leaning, but I think perhaps they mean that the job would require 15 men using jackhammers, not that it takes 15 men to operate a jackhammer.
Nevermind the numbers. Just look at the vehicles at the bottom of the picture. Compare the size of the bus to the size of the rocket in the Chinese picture. In the NASA picture there is a pickup truck there, but you barely even notice it because everything else is so huge.
OK, these guys have the final say. Grep it for "empolyee" and you'll find (if I waded through the legal gook correctly) that having a plan to sell is OK, but selling in response to the information isn't, so my critic is correct.
That doesn't mean your hands are tied though. Obviously, you want to get rid of the stock if you have any. (let's forget about selling short, OK, most people never do that anyway).
How can you legally do that? Answer: sit on your shares and go to the media anonymously with your story, including the name of the company. You will cast suspicion on the entire staff, but what's a little suspicion on top of slavery?
Then, the company will have to either deny or confirm your story. If they confirm it, the stock goes down but there was nothing you could do about that anyway. If they deny it, that leaves a lot of interesting questions. Actually, if they deny it, you are in the same position as Enron employees were, except you aren't "locked out". I'd have no qualms about selling in that case, since the people doing the denying are the real criminals.
I think the most likely way this plays out is that the company has to hire and/or contract more people to do the job. Of course we all know that throwing more developers at a job won't get it done any faster. Does Wall Street know that? Maybe not. They may look at "company X is hiring" as a good sign. You know better, and all the information has now been publicly disclosed; so sell, Sell, SELL.
I'm not an expert either, but AFAIK it's not illegal for an insider to trade based on inside information. High ranking corporate officers are required to file forms when they do it. Failing to file in a timely manner (and soon, failing to file on line) is illegal; but the trade itself is not.
At my last gig, I opted to have my 401k match go into a mutual fund rather than company stock because I knew the company was a POS. Granted, that's far more subtle than shorting, but technicly I was using inside information to guide my actions in the market.
Shorting a company while trashing their product from inside is an obvious conflict of interest, and possibly against company rules and likely to get you fired (consult your employee handbook), but as far as the SEC is concerned I think what they are really going after is people who sell inside information to brokers and/or brokers who act on that information.
In other words, inside information is OK if you're inside and you don't leak it improperly.
Of course, IANAL, IANTSEC, etc...
Is The Company Publicly Traded? Is the project going to form a major percentage of their revenue?
Short the company's stock.
One thing is certain: The contractors will figure out a way to keep the contract going, wasting more money, and all the code written by your group will look something like this:
defile a golf course
Isn't that redundant? :*)
Food fight? (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). No, I said "Who's right?". (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). Good night?! It's not even 5 pm. (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). NO!!! I SAID "WHO'S RIGHT" (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). Ohhhhh.... Who's riiiight. Ummm... I dunno. (WHOOSH, WHHOOSH, WHOOSH...). Shovel snow? In June?
The minute you take choice out of the hands of individuals, and place it in the hands of an organization, even a democratic organization, you oppress the minority who would have made some other choice.
Sometimes you have to put choice in org hands for practical matters (e.g., standard wall sockets, railroad gauge, time zones, etc.) but I don't think this is one of those cases. As you might gather from the examples I just gave, I think mandating open standards for file formats would be a good idea, but not the implementations.
I hope we get a chance to see the downside of this in Brazil and other countries before somebody gets the bright idea to try it here.
I wonder if the release of these documents will deter the conspiracy theorists?
Can't you see? They only released these documents to deter us!!! :)