I'm confused here. Is Sterling proposing that the Internet be regulated to carry only the lowest common denominator of traffic? No political dissent, because China vetos it on the Security Council? No pr0n because a coalition of Moslem states raise a motion forbidding it, then use their block vote and the implicit threat of terrorism to force it through? RIAA and MPAA running hog wild because the US ties humanitarian assistance to acceptance of its IP agenda?
Sterling really ought to stick to the novels, tho' having said that, apart from Difference Engine I haven't been impressed by any of his work.
It seems that no matter what happens it is the cause of global warming.
Y'know, in the 1970s, the "green" movement was most worried about global cooling and the onset of a new ice age? Their prescription then was to reduce economic and industrial activity. Now they're worried about warming and you know what their prescription for that is? Exactly the same.
To me, it looks an awful lot like they've already decided what they wanted, and are constantly casting about finding a way to justify it. No-one should comment on environmental issue who hasn't at least read Bjorn Lomborg's book.
Ermm, no. For example, in China, the "conservatives" are hard-left, as they were in the USSR. Conservative merely means in favour of "traditional" values or the status quo. The opposite of conservative is radical. Comparing "conservative" and "left wing" is like comparing apples and oranges. Conservative left-wing would be an accurate description of, say, Germany's Christian Democrat party.
However, I agree that "L" vs "l" is important for the politically literate.
L vs l (like statist vs Statist) is only important to people for whom politics is a matter of academic study. People who want their political arguments to carry weight in the real world avoid the use of terms that can only be correctly interpreted on paper - and even then, the entire point of the argument could be lost because of a mere typo.
Imagine a hundred thousand people armed with such cameras, feeding images to, say, The Drudge Report, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, Move On dot Org, politics.slashdot.org, and the rest of the political blogosphere.
Actually, a hundred thousand would be fine. No-one's going to be shifting that much data wirelessly from the limited geographical area of a street riot in a hurry. The cops will have done their work and gone home by the time the collisions have cleared from the network!
I'm not a professional photographer, so I'm sure they have their reasons for needing an $8,000 digital camera
I'm not a professional photographer, but I can tell you, the people who're buying this camera will get ROI in months or in some cases weeks. Custom photography is stunningly expensive. Any image you see in an ad will have cost thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to create. How many ads with slick photos are there in the average magazine? The photographer, his assistant(s), the location/studio, the model(s), the props/clothes/jewellery hire, the lighting people and their equipment, the hair and makeup people, the caterers, the insurance, etc etc. You could pay off a thousand bucks of the cost of this camera on every shoot and no-one would even notice. A serious advertising pro will be doing between 1 and 3 of these shoots a week. Previously, such a photographer might have been using something like a Mamiya RB67, itself a fairly serious piece of film kit. The 1Ds gets you faster workflow, which means you can shoot more often, which means you can make more money.
Having a 35mm CMOS has nothing to do with the image quality.
Err, yes it does. The bigger the sensor, the bigger each individual photosite, the more light it can gather, the less amplification needs to be done on the signal, the lower the noise. That's why even expensive digicams like the 8MP Sony F828 are crap compared with DSLRs, Sony are using a physically small sensor. Hell my old 3MP D30 beats that camera hands down for real quality, no noise and faithful colour with no chromatic aberration!
sure, you can smash the camera, but the images are instantly stored elsewhere, preferably someplace secret and safe.
Heh, 16MP images aren't going *anywhere* particularly fast, especially if you are shooting a sequences of police officers beating Rodney King. Especially not if at some point their have to go over congested community Wifi (imagine a dozen of these all trying to transmit at once) and/or ADSL.
The application for this is studio work, advertising and fashion, so you can get the images straight into workflow without having to send a CD by bike courier. That's what the "s" in "1Ds" is for, studio.
There is a common measure of unemployment across Europe, the Labour Force Survey.
It's still open to manipulation. The present UK government massages the figures by a) creating non-jobs in the public sector b) creating made-up courses for universities.
Everyone who's a "coordinator" or a "facilitator" in the civil service, or a "media studies" student at college would otherwise be unemployed. It's just a more expensive form of welfare, that's all. The true unemployment figure in the UK ought to count systematic state-sponsored underemployment too.
...which is exactly why many people hate or fear corporations.
Hating a corporation makes no more sense than hating a hammer. Sure it can be used to bash people's skulls in, but it can also be used to make houses and works of art.
A corporation is a TECHNOLOGY. It's a mechanism - comprising physical infrastructure and human operators - for getting stuff done. Money is simply a measure; if a corporation makes more money than it costs to operate that's a clear sign that it's operating as it should, i.e. that it is making products and performing services that people want it to do. A corporation that doesn't do what the MARKET (i.e. you and me and everyone else who wants to trade money for stuff) wants, quickly implodes. A corporation is as amoral as any tool; morality rests with the owners (i.e. the shareholders).
if China gets uninhibited access to the benefits of 'free' markets, including the participation of western companies, what incentive do they have to reform their human rights abuses?
That's nothing to do with corporations and everything to do with governments. A corporation operates within the framework of laws created and enforced by governments (if it doesn't it is quickly destroyed, like Arthur Andersen). There is no moral decision to make if you are a corporation - that decision rests with the governments.
After war, money is the most effective way to change another country's behaviour.
Probably money is MORE effective. War can coerce, money can make people WANT to do what you want. That's one reason that the terrorists won't win; given the choice the average Arab doesn't want to come home after a day's work and read the Qu'ran, he wants to watch Baywatch!
Australia and many European countries holding this kind of reverse auction for pay rates is illegal. The reason is quite simple - in occupations like nursing where there's an oversupply of willing workers
I don't know what you're smoking in Australia, but here in the UK we have a chronic shortage of nurses. In fact Commonwealth countries are getting upset because their nurses are being hired away by our NHS.
In a free market, wages for nurses would increase until supply met demand, until the financial inducements were enough to make it a viable career. Don't even start that nurses shouldn't be in it for the money. The problem is that people start out as nurses, realize they can't afford a reasonable standard of living doing the job they want to do, then quit and do something else to make ends meet. It's crazy, we pay to train nurses, then don't pay them when they're working. But there's no way round it 'til the NHS is massively deregulated.
This isn't so different from what we see today in patent laws
But it is completely different. To get a patent requires that you fully disclose the workings of your innovation. Then, if your patent is worthwhile, you will be able to license it out and make way more money from it than you could personally. The point of patents is to foster innovation by making it possible to profit from it more than if you kept it a secret. That the patent system is poorly administered in the US at present is neither here nor there.
I agree with everything you say, but there seems to be an underlying hostility. Maybe I'm imagining it
Oh, no, not at all. I've no particular hostility to IBM, other than a general low level annoyance at Global Services being clueless monkeys who couldn't host their way out of a wet paper bag. My point is simply that IBM is in this for IBM; it's a mistake to think of them as "friendly" in any way to open source.
"the fiends, how dare they want to save costs!".
It's funny, the general feeling on Slashdot (tho' maybe not your view personally) is that when companies save money by switching to Linux (at the expense of Western commercial software companies) that's a good thing, yet when those same companies save money by sending work to India, that's a bad thing.
If you are in charge of a multi-million dollar super computer, I would hope that you wouldn't say, "Well, I can get better performance out of this commerical compiler, but I disagree with commercial software, so I'll use open source"
Exactly. If it costs $x for a commercial compiler that gives better performance and $y for extra hardware to match that performance using the binary from the free compiler, then the ONLY thing on your mind should be "is $x $y?".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm confused here. Is Sterling proposing that the Internet be regulated to carry only the lowest common denominator of traffic? No political dissent, because China vetos it on the Security Council? No pr0n because a coalition of Moslem states raise a motion forbidding it, then use their block vote and the implicit threat of terrorism to force it through? RIAA and MPAA running hog wild because the US ties humanitarian assistance to acceptance of its IP agenda?
Sterling really ought to stick to the novels, tho' having said that, apart from Difference Engine I haven't been impressed by any of his work.
It seems that no matter what happens it is the cause of global warming.
Y'know, in the 1970s, the "green" movement was most worried about global cooling and the onset of a new ice age? Their prescription then was to reduce economic and industrial activity. Now they're worried about warming and you know what their prescription for that is? Exactly the same.
To me, it looks an awful lot like they've already decided what they wanted, and are constantly casting about finding a way to justify it. No-one should comment on environmental issue who hasn't at least read Bjorn Lomborg's book.
Does/Should the X-Prize Foundation get federal funding for the efforts they are making towards space travel?
Err, do you actually want to get into space or not?
We wish to practice futility at the cost of other families' livelihood?
Yes, that is the usual definition of left-wing politics.
"CONSERVATIVE" and "LEFT WING" are antithetical.
Ermm, no. For example, in China, the "conservatives" are hard-left, as they were in the USSR. Conservative merely means in favour of "traditional" values or the status quo. The opposite of conservative is radical. Comparing "conservative" and "left wing" is like comparing apples and oranges. Conservative left-wing would be an accurate description of, say, Germany's Christian Democrat party.
However, I agree that "L" vs "l" is important for the politically literate.
L vs l (like statist vs Statist) is only important to people for whom politics is a matter of academic study. People who want their political arguments to carry weight in the real world avoid the use of terms that can only be correctly interpreted on paper - and even then, the entire point of the argument could be lost because of a mere typo.
Read the ladder theory first
Also see The Game.
Imagine a hundred thousand people armed with such cameras, feeding images to, say, The Drudge Report, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, Move On dot Org, politics.slashdot.org, and the rest of the political blogosphere.
Actually, a hundred thousand would be fine. No-one's going to be shifting that much data wirelessly from the limited geographical area of a street riot in a hurry. The cops will have done their work and gone home by the time the collisions have cleared from the network!
I'm not a professional photographer, so I'm sure they have their reasons for needing an $8,000 digital camera
I'm not a professional photographer, but I can tell you, the people who're buying this camera will get ROI in months or in some cases weeks. Custom photography is stunningly expensive. Any image you see in an ad will have cost thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to create. How many ads with slick photos are there in the average magazine? The photographer, his assistant(s), the location/studio, the model(s), the props/clothes/jewellery hire, the lighting people and their equipment, the hair and makeup people, the caterers, the insurance, etc etc. You could pay off a thousand bucks of the cost of this camera on every shoot and no-one would even notice. A serious advertising pro will be doing between 1 and 3 of these shoots a week. Previously, such a photographer might have been using something like a Mamiya RB67, itself a fairly serious piece of film kit. The 1Ds gets you faster workflow, which means you can shoot more often, which means you can make more money.
Having a 35mm CMOS has nothing to do with the image quality.
Err, yes it does. The bigger the sensor, the bigger each individual photosite, the more light it can gather, the less amplification needs to be done on the signal, the lower the noise. That's why even expensive digicams like the 8MP Sony F828 are crap compared with DSLRs, Sony are using a physically small sensor. Hell my old 3MP D30 beats that camera hands down for real quality, no noise and faithful colour with no chromatic aberration!
sure, you can smash the camera, but the images are instantly stored elsewhere, preferably someplace secret and safe.
Heh, 16MP images aren't going *anywhere* particularly fast, especially if you are shooting a sequences of police officers beating Rodney King. Especially not if at some point their have to go over congested community Wifi (imagine a dozen of these all trying to transmit at once) and/or ADSL.
The application for this is studio work, advertising and fashion, so you can get the images straight into workflow without having to send a CD by bike courier. That's what the "s" in "1Ds" is for, studio.
Are European governments equally as wasteful? I haven't seen much data on that.
Our Gordon Brown makes your US Govt. look like mere amateurs when it comes to waste, corruption and inefficiency...
consider stuff like GCJ, Kaffe, Pizza
None of which call themselves "Java(tm)".
if governments couldn't get it right with Beagle then private orgs are certainly going to face some very difficult work to make this happen.
Ha ha ha, have you any evidence to suggest that "government" scientists are any smarter or more efficient than those in the private sector?
They have bigger budgets, usually, that's true. But they need 'em when they're spending $800 on a hammer or a toilet seat...
There is a common measure of unemployment across Europe, the Labour Force Survey.
It's still open to manipulation. The present UK government massages the figures by a) creating non-jobs in the public sector b) creating made-up courses for universities.
Everyone who's a "coordinator" or a "facilitator" in the civil service, or a "media studies" student at college would otherwise be unemployed. It's just a more expensive form of welfare, that's all. The true unemployment figure in the UK ought to count systematic state-sponsored underemployment too.
The US government is actively supporting outsourcing
As is the owner of Slashdot. Kinda hypocritical for them to run this kinda story.
So New Yorkers are dim-witted shallow-minded pretentious posers?
This is NEWS?!
...which is exactly why many people hate or fear corporations.
Hating a corporation makes no more sense than hating a hammer. Sure it can be used to bash people's skulls in, but it can also be used to make houses and works of art.
A corporation is a TECHNOLOGY. It's a mechanism - comprising physical infrastructure and human operators - for getting stuff done. Money is simply a measure; if a corporation makes more money than it costs to operate that's a clear sign that it's operating as it should, i.e. that it is making products and performing services that people want it to do. A corporation that doesn't do what the MARKET (i.e. you and me and everyone else who wants to trade money for stuff) wants, quickly implodes. A corporation is as amoral as any tool; morality rests with the owners (i.e. the shareholders).
if China gets uninhibited access to the benefits of 'free' markets, including the participation of western companies, what incentive do they have to reform their human rights abuses?
That's nothing to do with corporations and everything to do with governments. A corporation operates within the framework of laws created and enforced by governments (if it doesn't it is quickly destroyed, like Arthur Andersen). There is no moral decision to make if you are a corporation - that decision rests with the governments.
After war, money is the most effective way to change another country's behaviour.
Probably money is MORE effective. War can coerce, money can make people WANT to do what you want. That's one reason that the terrorists won't win; given the choice the average Arab doesn't want to come home after a day's work and read the Qu'ran, he wants to watch Baywatch!
Australia and many European countries holding this kind of reverse auction for pay rates is illegal. The reason is quite simple - in occupations like nursing where there's an oversupply of willing workers
I don't know what you're smoking in Australia, but here in the UK we have a chronic shortage of nurses. In fact Commonwealth countries are getting upset because their nurses are being hired away by our NHS.
In a free market, wages for nurses would increase until supply met demand, until the financial inducements were enough to make it a viable career. Don't even start that nurses shouldn't be in it for the money. The problem is that people start out as nurses, realize they can't afford a reasonable standard of living doing the job they want to do, then quit and do something else to make ends meet. It's crazy, we pay to train nurses, then don't pay them when they're working. But there's no way round it 'til the NHS is massively deregulated.
Somebody gets it. Capitalism says nothing about restricting criminal intent. In fact, it encourages it.
Somebody DOESN'T get it. Have you even read any Ayn Rand? This is all addressed.
I'm going to collapse on the floor instead.
Make sure you remember to keep breathing!
This isn't so different from what we see today in patent laws
But it is completely different. To get a patent requires that you fully disclose the workings of your innovation. Then, if your patent is worthwhile, you will be able to license it out and make way more money from it than you could personally. The point of patents is to foster innovation by making it possible to profit from it more than if you kept it a secret. That the patent system is poorly administered in the US at present is neither here nor there.
Hardware and services are things with tangible value. Software is just a bunch of bits
A large chunk of "services" is custom software development.
I agree with everything you say, but there seems to be an underlying hostility. Maybe I'm imagining it
Oh, no, not at all. I've no particular hostility to IBM, other than a general low level annoyance at Global Services being clueless monkeys who couldn't host their way out of a wet paper bag. My point is simply that IBM is in this for IBM; it's a mistake to think of them as "friendly" in any way to open source.
"the fiends, how dare they want to save costs!".
It's funny, the general feeling on Slashdot (tho' maybe not your view personally) is that when companies save money by switching to Linux (at the expense of Western commercial software companies) that's a good thing, yet when those same companies save money by sending work to India, that's a bad thing.
If you are in charge of a multi-million dollar super computer, I would hope that you wouldn't say, "Well, I can get better performance out of this commerical compiler, but I disagree with commercial software, so I'll use open source"
Exactly. If it costs $x for a commercial compiler that gives better performance and $y for extra hardware to match that performance using the binary from the free compiler, then the ONLY thing on your mind should be "is $x $y?".