Actually, your missing the point. The marginal cost (the cost to make one additional copy) of almost everything is lower than it's average cost. A Ferrari costs more to make than a low-end Hyundai (or whatever), but the bulk of the difference goes to pay for advertising, design, etc. Similarly, the marginal cost of a single pill of a new drug is almost zero, but you are actually charged enough to pay back it's research costs.
Let me put this in really simple terms: It's stealing to pay the marginal cost of an item if the producer is charging more EVEN IF THE MARGINAL COST IS ZERO. You can't walk up to a Ferrari dealer and pay them how much it cost to make the car (still quite a bit) and then drive off with it. You can't go to Sony Music and pay them what it cost to make a particular copy of the music (zero, if you don't require a physical copy, and only a few cents even if pressed on CD), and then "own" a copy of it. Not legally, anyhow, nor even ethically/morally.
The entire argument about the differences between digital and physical items misses the concept that marginal costs are only ONE component.
You are correct that if there's no lost revenue the company hasn't been hurt, but that's far too much of a slippery slope (not to mention completly subjective) to be relied upon.
No matter how good your intentions, once you have a copy of a song, or game, or book, it's hard to get around to shelling out the cash you would have paid if you hadn't had access to a copy. I'm thought about buying Max Payne, but wasn't sure if I'd like it. I "borrowed" a copy from a friend, played through it, and did like it, and I'm going to buy a copy Real Soon Now(tm). Somehow, I just never get around to it. If I had been unable to find a copy, would I have ended up buying it? I really haven't the slightest idea.
Actually...yes. Car showrooms are a horribly inneficient means of distributing cars. It's bad for the car companies, and bad for the consumers. It was a good idea originally because of problems both in tranporting the product to the consumer, as well as in communicating information about the product to the consumer.
Sound familar? Those same arguments are the ones used by the RIAA to justify their existence. Customers and musicians need the RIAA to make sure they know what CD to buy, and that it's on the shelf at the local store. Or so the RIAA says.:-)
Joy riding and stealing music have nothing to do with the problems either industry faces. Instead it's simply a matter of producers trying to collapse their distribution chain, both to cut costs and to allow more direct communication with the consumers. Musicians would like to know what their fans want (how many bands have released a great album, drawn the wrong conclusion about why it was popular, then released a crap album?). Car companies want to know what their customers want (nothings worse for profits than a lot full of a model nobody wants anymore). It's not just these two industries either - Dell has actually made a profit from selling desktop PC's from doing exactly the same thing.
The RIAA is a broken business model (or more accuratly, it looks like it's becoming one). The technology exists to allow them to be bypassed, and an ever increasing section of the population would like to, but the RIAA is fighting back with lobbying, legislation, courtroom battles, etc. Exactly like the car dealerships, incidentally, who have almost uniformly seen off all threats (although some car companies are making small headway in Europe, where dealership networks aren't quite as protected).
And it's sure suck if a future geoligist accidentally falls into a long-buried septic tank too. Seriously, what's the MAXIMUM possible damage here? A geolgist knocks a few months off his life? While I have the greatest possible sympathy for the poor guy (or women/neuter/android/alien or whatever is digging stuff up 5000 years from now), I don't rank this problem as high as, say, deciding what to have for lunch tomorrow.
Really, you raise one of the WEAKEST arguments against nuclear power. Weigh the benefits against the possible negatives, and it's obvious that the health of future lost geologists (yeah, 5000 years from now and they're not going to use sensors we haven't even DREAMED of yet?) is a small problem.
Actually, as far as I'm concerned, the biggest argument against nuclear power is that it's mostly too damn expensive (yeah, even when you factor in the cost of the damage of burning fossile fuels). I suppose it might be nice to have some capacity on reserve in case foreign oil imports are cut, or something, but it'd probably still be cheaper just to stockpile a few years worth of oil.:-P
Most of what you say I don't exactly disagree with, I just have a different take, so to speak. However...
Talking about MSIE specific code is a bit funny. As long as you don't ever try and save a word document as HTML (seriously, just don't go there!), there really isn't much in the way of IE specific code. I assume we're not talking about marquees?:-P As I said before, I browse the web using a non-IE browser, and I haven't found a page that didn't work right in it. Maybe that's because developers go out of their way to cater to the quirks of Opera, but given Operas market share, I suspect it's because Opera is quite capable of handling code "designed" for IE (which in my experience usually has more to do with making sure your not using Netscape specific code than adding IE specific code).
As for rendering stuff incorrectly, I basically ran across a situation where Opera and IE took a bit of code and did something ugly with it, and Netscape didn't. I don't know where to assign blame, but until I run across a better theory I'm assuming Opera was functioning correctly, therefore so was IE, and Netscape was screwed up. You can interpret the situation the other way, of course.:-)
Doing a google search for "microsoft internet explorer standards" as suggested turned up absolutely nothing about browser specific code or flaws relavent to IE, although it *DID* turn up a couple of sites talking about the flaws of older versions of Netscape!:-) Thinking about it a bit more, I suppose you could be talking about DHTML when you say browser specific code. Then again, I don't use it, and neither do any of the sites I visit. A seem to recall that all the modern browsers support it, but all differently. <shrug> It'll shake out soon enough, or it'll die off like all the other markup language extensions.
Lastly, as far as my problems with java and javascript goes, I still blame netscape (mostly). My exerience is that most JS works in Opera, but some doesn't. I find a slightly higher percentage works in Netscape, but if it doesn't work it'll crash your browser. OTOH, it'll all works in IE. My aportioning of blame is about 5/10 Netscape for bugginess, 3/10 IE for doing silly JScript stuff, and 2/10 Opera because it doesn't quite implement the current DOM right.
What I'd like is an even more stripped down client-side scripting language. Something that can do rollovers and the handful of other cool, useful, things you can do with JS (err..there are some...right? <grin>), and NOTHING else. But that's just a pet peeve, I don't think it'd be worse the hassle and compatability problems. I still get pissed off at Sun on occasion, because I think there were much better solutions than Javascript, even if we're locked in now.
Mozilla and Netscape aren't the same. We can argue over which is a fork of the other, but by this point the codebase has divereged enough that they're hardly the same product.
Netscape 4 was horrible, but Netscape 6 isn't much better. For various reasons, I've had to support it, and that's a major headache. I can't think of a single thing is does better than IE, and a host of things it does worse, from the interface to the directory structure.
As for Opera needing to get distributed by a hardware vendor or go open source, you seem to be missing the entire point - nothing is going to hurt IE because it's "good enough". I don't pretend to know whether Mozilla or Opera will come out ahead in the battle for the crumbs, but my money is on Opera. Either you use what your given (IE), or you use what you like best, and I have more confidence in Opera than the Mozilla dev team. Waaay too many uber-hackers, not enough software engineers and HCI experts.
As for standards compliance, with 93% of the market, whatever IE does IS the standard.:-) On a more serious note, IE happens to be quite standards complient these days. I do a bit of web design, and I haven't run across (nor do I know of anyone who has) an example of IE rendering stuff differently than Opera. On the other hand, Netscape 6 is famous (or infamous) for rendering stuff badly. I was recently the recipient of an extended rant because someone had checked a site layout in IE and Opera, had it render fine, only to find it completly broken in Netscape. Or then there was a javascript rollover. The code LOOKED fine, and it worked in IE and Opera, but Netscape 6 crashed. I rewrote the javascript, and got it working in all three. Who was really at fault? I don't know, and I don't care, but I suspect most people would do what I did: Curse Netscape.:-) Certainly that's what a lot of people are doing over Netscapes inability to render some standards complient CSS pages...
Now, AOL might or might not use Netscape or Mozilla for their legions of subscribers. I don't think it will matter much, because if they introduce a browser that doesn't work EXACTLY like IE does (and thus, renders stuff wrong, crashes, etc.), then they'll all switch to a competitor. This would be a Bad Thing(tm) for AOL, no matter how much of a Good Thing(tm) it would be for Mozilla and open source in general, and so it not gonna happen.
Seriously, you can slam IE for security holes, but what exactly is your problem with IE's standards compliance? Maybe you've been surfing a different web, but I use Opera (which you yourself called the most standards complient browser around), and I haven't noted a single problem. That doesn't sound to me like MS has subverted the web into a Windows-only ghetto.
(Now Sun, they're pissing me off. Browsing with JS off is hard and getting harder, and turning it on is just asking for problems. I don't see the point of a browser war, but why can't we have a bloody decent client side scripting language!?)
Since this is Slashdot, I suspect I'm going to get modded down right quick, but...
Two seperate questions here, I think. For windows desktop users, IE is great (yeah, I know, security, but your average desktop user could care less). Microsoft isn't going to lose their marketshare without a seriously inferior product, and at the moment, it a hell of a lot better than Netscape's offering. I doubt Microsoft is worried about Opera either, and Opera makes a damn fine browser. But as much as some hate to admit it, the browser wars don't really matter. It's a sideshow, a commodity. Why should we really care? (And no, standard compliance isn't a good reason. We have that already.)
On the other hand, once you move to servers and/or *nix platforms, I don't see why anyone cares about Netscape or IE. You've got Opera, Lynx, Mozilla, and a half dozen others.
In fact, why are we using the release of Mozilla to talk about Netscape? To be absolutely blunt, Netscape deserves to die. Face it, their products have always been too little, too late - terminally behind the technology curve, and with horrible UI bugs (which might be better than security holes, but try telling Joe Sixpack that!).
Score 3? Insightful? Moderators on crack again!:-)
Seriously though:
1. The Obvious: "owning" another cell phone.
Huh?
2. Radiation becomes a REAL risk, because the main broadcasting would be done by the phones, not the towers.
Your phone already has to talk to the tower. Other cell phones will likely be CLOSER, requiring, if anything, lower signal strength. And go look up the frequencies involved. Electromagnetic waves are fairly well understood, and radio and microwaves are non-ionizing. Just what do you think your cell phone CAN do to you?
3. Battery life (ok, not so much a danger as a nuisance).
As others have pointed out, your phone is transmitting and receiving fairly constantly anyhow. Plus, battery life is constantly extending. By the time this technology becomes prime time, I suspect phones with it installed will have a batter life measured in days, even while using the tech.
4. Spam (another nuisance).
Did you read the article? How the hell could you get spam? Does your ROUTER get spam?
5. Viruses.
See last point. We're talking about forwarding packets
Honestly, if you're not going to read the article...
This sounds very useful. A bit like the original switch from circuit switching to packet switching for land lines. If done right, this should be cheaper, better, more flexable, and at least as secure. I wonder if we might not be better of with a new cell phone protocal designed from the ground up for packets, though?
I noticed one person already commented about security issues, but given that some phones broadcast to the cell tower "in the clear", these can't be WORSE. Of course, most phones these days are more secure than that, and already split the signal into tiny "packets", and then transmits each on a different frequency. They do this for reasons of efficiency, but it does make for security. Phones using the tech should be similarly secure, even without some elementary encryption (which I hope does get implemented, of course).
This isn't going to be magic though. Only in dense cities you can assume there will enough spare capacity to make this interesting, and even then you'll need towers (although fewer). Out in the country, you'll need just as many towers as always though. On the other hand, the real benefits are going to be from reliability, better signal strength, load sharing, etc., not fewer towers.
Interesting to note some talk just the other day about Wi-Fi networks moving towards a more cell-phone like system, complete with towers. Now cell phones may end up looking more like distributed networks!
Oh good grief. Wind? Solar? These things have been "up and coming" for YEARS and they have never been successful.
The total cost per kWh (counting upfront capital costs) has been dropping for years, and has now come within a hair of hitting the cost of fossil fuels (for wind). Solar is more expensive, but advances already in the pipeline should bring it to less than nuclear within ten years.
There is indeed resistance to building wind turbines. But in case you've been asleep since the 70's, there's a little resistance to building nuclear power plants too (we haven't built a nuclear power plant since Three Mile Island). And while they kill birds, it's is (and would be, even with a massive increase in generation) a handful. Plate glass windows kill 97 million birds in the US alone (and cars kill another 50 million), whereas wind turbines in the US kill 70,000. That means it'd take a 1000-fold increase before the two are even comparable.
Also, comparing the output of a single wind turbine to a single nuclear power plant is stupid. The question is, how many kWh of production capacity does a given dollar buy you when spent on Nuclear versus Wind? And the answer is, Wind, because the turbines are dirt cheap (compared to a nuclear power plant!).
As for solar panels, they do stop producing when it's cloudy and dark (much like wind turbines stop on calm days). There are two solutions. Large storage batteries, and nuclear plants to help keep them topped up during dark, overcast, calm periods.
Your figure for solar power density isn't completly correct. That's appears to be an average figure, but solar power density depends on your latitude, and ranges from 250 to 100 betweeen the equator and the poles. That means it would only take a square 500km on a side to supply the entire Earth's energy needs if built on the equator. Of course, shipping power from the equator isn't a great idea, but the US's power needs could be met several times over by coverering half of Texas in panels.:-)
That solution isn't cheaper than nuclear (not at the moment), but solar panels have been halving in price every decade since their inception, and it looks like this will continue to around 2030 (at least). Around 2010, both wind and solar will be cheaper than nuclear, and by some estimates wind will cheaper than fossil. And don't forget, fossil fuel generation can't really get any more efficient due to the laws of thermodynamics. The only way fossil fuel generated energy prices are going is up.
Guess again. What is a "safe" exposure to microwaves? Answer: Anything that doesn't cook you. Microwave radiation is non-ionizing. All it does is heat water (and a couple of other molecules, but if your a carbon based lifeform, that's all you have to worry about), and generate electric currents in metal.
In other words you can't get cancer, and the only way it'll sterilize your sperm is by boiling (trust me, at that point, your ability to have kids is the LAST thing you'll worry about).
(And what about the cellphones cooking your brain scare? Studies have turned up mixed results, but the balance of evidence is firmly on the side of cellphones being harmless.)
Wind is cheaper than nuclear, actually. But best case, wind can't supply more than maybe 50% of current needs, and it has other problems. Solar looks like the up and coming thing, expect to see prices fall below nuclear over the coming decade. It too has problems though, and so nuclear is still a good idea. If nothing else, nuclear power plants work even during calm, overcast days.:-) But it's too expensive to supply all our power, and unlike wind and solar, doesn't look to be getting cheaper.
Also, with breeder reactors, you're not going to run out of fuel, ever (more or less).
You're right that nuclear waste storage is more or less a non-issue though. Just stick is somewhere. Yeah, it'll leak. But so what? We've got plenty of room (note for the geographically impaired: this isn't sarcasm).
Perhaps I overestimate the difference, but there is a large difference nonetheless. You say that people forced by hunger to work in a sweatshop might as well be slaves, but if they truly were slaves, they and their decendents would never have any other choice. That's completly different than with sweatshops, because when choices do become available, people stop working at sweatshops, and get real jobs. The sweatshops move on to the next country full of starving peasents, and our supply of cheap soccer balls (or whatever) continues.
The thing to keep in mind is that there is a constant improvement in conditions. The sweatshops keep moving (it wasn't long ago you could find them in New York). Eventually they'll run out of a soure of cheap labor (GDP per capita is increasing, food per capita is increasing, polulation growth is decreasing, poverty as both an absolute and a percentage is decreasing, and these trends look certain to continue).
In the meantime, they very sweatashops you decry are contributing greatly to their own eventual end. Unlike slavery, they are actually paying wages (20-40 cents an hour, usually) and in the countries they operate in, that can be a lot. GDP/per head/per day in Pakistan is $1.20 (compared to the $0.26 an hour they get paid), meaning they're making more than the average Pakistani after 5 hours of work.
The biggest difference between slavery and sweatshops is that slavery did not seem ready to go away on it's own, because people could and would use violence to force people to remain slaves. The quickest and easiest way to get rid of sweatshops is simply to increase the prosperity of the country they reside in.
In the meantime, the louder people call sweatshops "slavery", and demand a boycot, the less attention will be focused on actually improving conditions for the workers, eliminating *real* slavery, and ultimatly...getting rid of the sweatshops. As always, the real world does not lend itself to simple distinctions and easy answers.
Only if your an auto company.:-) What he means is, if you want to build a $15,000 car, you'd have to buy $30,000 worth of parts, and that's not even counting labor.
Similarly, a computer with an OS costs less than a computer and an OS (each sold seperatly), not even counting the labor required to install it.
Now, some companies think they have some "rights" to a package of parts they sell you, and have some say over what you can do with it, above and beyond any laws that might govern your use of it. With a car, you can do anything you like with the car OR the parts, as long as you don't break laws. But some computer companies are attemting to restrict what you can do with the bundled parts they give you, even when you aren't breaking any laws: i.e. installing an old OS on a new computer.
Common sense says this ain't going to fly. Unfortunatly, it may take a while before that becomes the case.
Please tell me your kidding. Comparing sweatshops to slavery is ludicrous (and to think I've seen people complaing that calling copyright violation "piracy" was bad...).
People in sweatshops are there by choice (unless they are actually slaves, which does happen (rarely) but then the problem is the slavery, not the sweatshops). The reason people choose to work in sweatshops is because the alternatives are WORSE. Is it a awful thing for a 13 year old kid to be working 12 hours a day for a few cents? Yeah. Would it be better if he was starving on the street instead? Not really.
Also, don't make the mistake of judging wages in terms of the price of a cup of Starbucks Super Mocha Java. In China, it's common for young women from the interior to go work in sweatshops on the coast for a few months, then go back home to the village, where they're now quite well off (yes, even at sweatshop wages), and can easily find a husband.
What is your boycot going to do? Well, actually, you'll probably just get ignored, but if you do have an impact, it'll probably be that Walmart's suppliers shift production to automated factories in Mexico. Yeah, that'll sure help the starving kids in Myanmar...
If you want to have an impact, calculate the difference in price between everything you buy that was made in a sweatshop, and it's factory-made equivalent, then donate that money to a charity. You'll do far more good.
No, seriously. There is, at the moment, a lot of bad data being used by the goverment. Often it was originally thought to be correct, but then the scientists realized they'd made an error or a mistake, or hadn't taken something into account, and they changed their minds. It happens a lot, and is the corner stone of the scientific process.
Goverment, however, (especially big ones like ours) don't change to well. The US is *STILL* using some enviromental models that turned out to be less accurate than a table of random numbers. The rest of the world has moved on, and the IPCC's new models are pretty good, but the US hasn't, which means it's worrying about the wrong things in the wrong places. This is bad. If you live near a river than flooded a lot, and the goverment could afford to build ONE dyke, wouldn't you want to make sure they built it on the correct river?
Yes, people will try and abuse the act, and some will even suceed, but you can then turn around and challenge the NEW data. At the moment any lobyist who suceeds in getting bad data entered into the record has won.
Oh, SUUUURE. That explains why nobody owns their own house in the US. Oh, wait they do... See, one of the better analogies of the spectrum is land. It too is a valuable comodity, there's a fixed supply, although we can use less of it if neccesary (high-rises), and only one person can use it at a time (in any given location, that is).
Now, what your arguing is that the goverment should own ALL land in the US, because only that would stop corporations from owning all the land. It hasn't worked that way--nor have experiments where the goverment HAS owned all the land...
Or to put it another way, the reasons that a mythical "Land Corporation" doesn't own every scrap of real estate in the US is the same has why a mythical "Broadcast Corporation" won't own every scrap of airwaves.
Oh, and recall that the profits to be made from land are MUCH higher than airwaves, since housing is a much more vital need than wireless networks. Just look at housing prices in Silicon Valley.
Honestly, do you corporate conspiracy people even put your brains in gear? And as for the poor deluded fools who think the GOVERMENT is a good "steward"... Heh. Just look at who the FCC has divied up all the current bandwidth to! At least privatization would put bandwidth in the hands of them that have something to DO with it (and thus will pay money for it). It might not help you and me get any bandwidth (although it might) but it'd certainly help. And if the privatization was smart, they'd leave the current public use sections OUT of the mix, and sell bandwith in TINY TINY chunks.
And in any case, my vote is that wireless networks will ALWAYS be a side show. They might cover the "last 5 feet" from your comp to the nearest ground station on the fibre optic network...but that's probably it. There just isn't enough bandwidth for anything more, even if the spectrum IS privatized. You think any reasonable chunk of spectrum can cover a whole cities demand for Britney Spears music video clips?:-)
No! No no no! You've completly missed (or forgoten) what's wrong with discrimination.
As an example, my mother is very smart (easily the smartest person I've ever met). When she went to university, it was assumed by the faculty that women just couldn't handle the "hard sciences", and she was very activly discouraged from taking physics and chemistry. After all, she was female--calculus would just confuse her, right?
That's an example of "bad" discrimination--people making a judgement about intelligence based on sex.
On the other hand, there would be nothing wrong with "discriminating" against stupid people because they're stupid, or even against females because they're female. Not hiring a guy to be a wet nurse isn't discrimination, it's common sense--just like not hiring an idiot to work in a nuclear power plant is common sense.
On the other hand, not hiring someone to a job that requires inteligence because of something other than inteligence (such as race or sex) *IS* bad discrimination.
That's why racism and sexism are bad. Not because they involve people not ignoring skin color or sex (ignoring stuff like that would be silly), but because they're using those attributes to make decisions that have nothing to do with the atributes in question. Prejudice (that is, the belief attributes with no correlation really are linked) is bad, but discrimination is not (unless coupled with prejudice).
As a matter of fact, it *IS* right to take into account someones risk of frostbite when hiring for a job involving work in cold weather. It would be lunacy to do otherwise. It would ALSO be lunacy to take into account someones skin color when hiring, EXCEPT to the extent that skin color effects the risk of frost bite (and ONLY to that extent).
Well...actually, it isn't. But the alternative is worse. Let me lay some facts out for you:
Soon, everyone will be able to get a test to see what genetic problems they have.
The healthy ones will have little or no interest in many types of insurance.
The unhealthy ones will have a great interest in many types of insurance.
Now, insurance already has many problems, because it's a transaction where one party (the people buying insurance) have more knowledge than the other party. This is always a bad thing from a standpoint of "fairness". Given the above mentioned facts, if insurance companies are denied knowledge of genetic tests, the situation will get a WHOLE lot worse.
See, all of a sudden, anyone who wanted insurance would be someone no insurance company would want to insure...and the only people who an insurance company could insure wouldn't want to purchase insurance. Insurance only works by spreading risks, so that the unhealthy are in the same "pool" as the healthy. If you remove the healthy (and genetic tests WILL do this), then the life and health insurance will no longer be functional. There will BE no insurance. At all.
Now, the alternative is to make the information available to everyone. That will have the effect of making a lot of people uninsurable (at least for an affordable amount of money), but at least SOME people will still be able to get insurance.
So essentially, you have a choice. Keep genetic tests private (and thus end all insurance), or don't (and only end some). Or, the goverment could offer universal health (and/or life) insurance, paid for by tax dollars. This would be the "fairest" solution, but I doubt anyone would really welcome the added tax burden.
Either insurance must be universal, or the knowledge has to be shared equally, or there will be no insurance. Choose.
Hey, your not the standard foaming demagogue! I'm impressed. Now:
Point 1: Your right.
Point 2: Perceived, yes. In actual fact, it's kind of cool if an inept bureacrat decides to subsidize the production of my new stick of RAM...or the steel that goes into my new car. Of course, those resources probably would have gone somewhere more important (education, maybe), but I can't help that. *IF* we want to treat this as a "race between countries", then subsidizing exports is an own goal. If we want to look at total human suffering, it's pretty bad, but not buying it isn't the way to fix it.
Point 3: Not strictly speaking relavent. We are discussing ways and organizations to enforce and defend intellectual property rights. Perhaps it's more important to discuss what those rights are (or should be), but that's a very seperate issue.
Point 4: Yes, but... Yeah it does cause a lot of ill-will that the big and powerful set the rules to help themselves. The developing countries are not happy that the big countries try and force reforms on them, while refusing to swallow that medicine themselves. The protests in Seattle suited a lot of powerful people in suits. It didn't suit the WTO...or the developing countries, although they were fed up before then. No matter how you look at it, it's not good. If the protesters had the best interests of the powerless at heart (and knew what they were doing) they'd be arguing for complete and unilateral removal of all tarrifs, quotas, and subsidies. The US corporations would never agree of course--which tells you all you need to know about both the effects and the possability of it happening.
Point 5: Change hurts, yeah.
As for the benefits being nebulous, and the costs concrete... Agreed. But that's not REALLY the question. The question is, are the benefits bigger than the costs? And the answer is yes, by a great deal. A lot of economists have spent a lot of time answering this question (and others like it), and you can take it or not, as your opinion of economists and economics dictate. The fact is, lowering barriers to imports helps a country (and by more than it helps the trading partners, regardless of balance of trade). Similarly, export subsidies are bad for a country, although they do help the trading partners. Of course, in a democracy, more than a few politicians have found the political risks to be the inverse of the economic benefits...but that's a seperate issue.
You lose it when you come to taxation though. Don't forget where the benefits are--not with the corporation. The megacorps, by and large, LOSE from globalization. Subsidies in whatever form (and tariffs are a common form) act as a redistribution of wealth from the consumers (that is, the Average Joe) to the corporations (why do you think it's always the industrialists that lobby for protection? The steel mills that ask for protection from "dumping"?). Remove those barriers, and it's the consumers that benefit--and they can't dodge taxes by moving offshore without losing the benefits. Yeah, it's DAMN tough to see it--especially when those 100 factory workers are picketing and the 100,000 benefitting from the slightly cheaper goods (and the 100 million benefitting from the slightly springier economy) aren't... The corporations are a sideshow--not least because while they can indeed move, the shareholders can't.:-) Indeed, why have corporation tax at all? A corporation is nothing more than shareholders and employees, and you can tax them however you choose.
By the way, I still don't know what the supposed benefits of a nation joining the W.T.O. are, or what the drawbacks to not joining are supposed to be.
That's simple. The point of the WTO is a mechanism for "bargaining" down trade barriers--and enforcing the bargains, once struck. The US says that it will drop tarrifs on wine, if the EU drops tarrifs on beef, let's say. The US could unilterally drop tarrifs on wine and be done with it--but the WTO exists to allow the US to trade that drop for another one.
That's the main reason why countries want to be in--particularly developing countries, which are desperate for lower tarrifs on agricultural products and textiles. They know that the EU would never let their hugely pampered farmers suffer without good cause--the WTO is therefore their best best: If they're lucky, they can trade something unimportant to them (removal of restrictions on foreign ownership of telecoms, let's say) for something vastly beneficial--lowered tarrifs on those goods they export. It's not easy, even with the WTO--witness the current breakdowns (which have little to do with protests--rather, the developing countries are sore that the 1st world hasn't done what it promised last round yet). That's the choice a lot of countries are having to make--stay out in the cold, with no chance of ever having enough clout to get any important barriers lowered...or enter, and have a much better chance.
Finally, the WTO is there to enforce agreements, once struck (but don't forget it was YOUR politicians that first have to agree). Once the US has agreed not to ban tuna imports, it can't then turn around and ban them, however popular or worthy the cause now is. The fault is that of shortsighted politicians, not the WTO.
As an example, China has been working very hard to get into the WTO--despite the fact that it entails a massive shake up of their entire economy, and a real chance of political instability. Why are they so keen? Easy--it's the best, maybe even the only way, they can manage to remove the massive barriers that have been set in front of them--and China needs them removed very badly. China has a massivly growing population--either the economy at least matches it, or a nuclear power with the worlds largest standing army, several territorial disputes with other nuclear powers, and several rebellious provinces (one of which is ALSO nuclear armed, probably)...goes BOOM! No, I think we need to keep those peasents in poverty myself--fatter subsidies for the steel workers! What's that you say? Let them eat cake? I couldn't agree more!
Yeah right... You'll notice that the protestors wearn't Chinese. For that matter, the current head of the WTO is from NZ, population 3.5 million, heavily dependent on agricultural products, mostly wool, cheese, butter, and so forth. Not a particularly important country--which is why NZ is such a strong proponent of free trade. We don't ask for an advantage, we just want a fair go...which is why all my friends are as puzzled as I am about the protesters in Seattle. Fair trade? That's what the WTO is DOING.
Sounds fair enough to me. What he said was, in essence: "These people are complaining that the WTO is not transparent (true). Not only is the WTO transparent (also true), the form of these complaints harms transparency (very definetly true)."
On the other hand, it wouldn't even be an abuse of the law (although the law probably should be changed--but that's a seperate issue) to do the "standard" thing, and sic a bunch of lawyers, writs, restraining orders, court orders, and so forth on those responsible. Other organizations have done it with less grounds--and sone so succesfully, over a more important issue, and with less public outcry than I judge they would get here.
All in all, I'd say the fact that the WTO disagrees with their critics is hardly surprising, or proof of anything. If they didn't disagree with them, they wouldn't be critics would they? But note that instead of sending in the heavies, they're talking about it. No, they don't like it (who would?), but I'm at a loss to think of anything BETTER they could do.
I've got mixed feelings, to tell the truth. On the one hand, I deeply dislike organizations that try and bully all and sundry (remember eToys?) about domain names. And as an added bonus, the message of their victims (if any) is usually cool. Nobody LIKES to see someone making jokes about corporate stupidity get shut down by the corporation in question--you lose access to the jokes.
In this case, it seems the WTO is being cool about this website--which they can be congratulated on. This is, after all, the way it's supposed to work. On the other hand that website is getting close to crossing the very fine line between satire (one of the highest forms of humour) and libel, which is just lying about people.
I looked through the site, and these people aren't saying anything informed or intelligent...or even funny. There are legitament criticizism of many of the things the WTO has done...but these people don't seem to know what they are. There are funny jokes that could be made...but these people aren't making them. The WTO has done stupid things...but these people don't know what they are. There are flaws in some bits of the economic reasoning you could drive a truck through...but these people have no clue. The entire point of the site seems to be to confuse and mislead--NOT to entertain or convince.
As it happens, I agree with much (not all) of WTO policy. But I ALSO agree with the right for people to disagree. These people may or may not have the right message--that doesn't matter. But they aren't using the right method. I have a right to tell you what I think of Bush--I don't have the right to tell you I *AM* Bush.
How come it's always the cool sites that get slapped down?
Actually, military stuff is very vulnerable to EMP--much more than it commonly supposed. The Russians made an attempt at preparing for EMP attacks, but didn't get very far. China doesn't really need to (you'd be surprised how many tube manufactuers the Chinese army keeps in business--or, since this is China, runs). The US, OTOH, uses very vulnerable electronics, and hasn't done much about it. The US used to run wargames of Word War 3, and they always started by the Red team detonating an EMP over the US, and then everyone would go get some coffee while the umpires removed half the US's forces.:-)
The reason is obvious enough--people glibly assume that there's some way to shield electronics from Bad Things(tm) like EMP blasts, particle beams, X-ray lasers, and so forth. In reality (and I'm not an electrician, so this is only roughly accurate) you can either completly isolate it from EVERYTHING (effectivly impossible), or enclose it in active shielding, like an electrified cage (sometimes called a Faraday shield, IIRC). Neither is perfect, and neither works well for systems in planes, missiles, or handheld devices, many of which are, from an EMP point of view, just like your Palm, except MUCH MORE VALUABLE.
In any case, vulnerable is relative. Your Palm has tiny wires, so it's difficult for any major potential difference to be set up. What's vulnerable is big long wires. Power lines, telephone cables, networks, and anything connected to them, including telephone exchanges and sub-stations. The old sub-orbital EMP burst is crippling because it turns all of your power liness into antennas--thereby frying everthing connected to them. In theory, an EMP burst might cause a poorly run/designed nuclear power plant to go boom--not by messing with the electronics in the control room, but by inducting big currents in the outgoing power lines. These EMP shells work on a different scale, but the principle is similar.
The short of it is, magnetic memory is probably going to be toast, and anything connected to power lines without a surge protector is toast. Anything connected to a copper network is also likely toast. But solid state electronics are (mostly) only as vulnerable as the power supply (that is, they can be toasted by stuff that is vulnerable to EMP, but are not themselves directly vulnerable), unless the flux levels reach a level so high that metal starts melting, in which case your probably going to be more concerned about your fillings, not your computer.
Or to be blunt: Of course the military is vulnerable. No, there's nothing anyone can do. But no, these shells aren't really that useful, since the area of effect will be so much smaller.
You think spelling and grammar have some vital importance. I'm happy for you--but not happy enough to try and emulate you, as I'm not quite that anal retentive.
You miss the point that the kid probably IS enjoying his childhood, and probably wouldn't want to interact with anyone that wasn't as smart as him (I know *MY* opinion of other nine year olds when I was that age). You also fail to grasp that you can be bright AND decent.
Also, you seem to have some bitterness about school. I enjoyed high school immensely myself. Does the reference to "jerkoffs who made fun of you...and... [pump] your gas" have some personal meaning to you? I detect a note of bitterness...
And finally, you completly fail to grasp that those same losers pumping gas are the "decent people" you think so highly of. Sure they have girlfriends. But you and others seem to think that you have to choose between being "decent", having a girl friend, and pumping gas for a living, or being "bright", an anti-social reject, and a geek. It ain't so.
It's about ten years too early to say where the prodigy in question will end up ten years from now, but nothing mentioned so far indicates any reason why he might not end up well adjusted and "decent", as well as "bright". The key, as always, is good parenting--but that's true regardless of the childs intelligence. Of course, good parenting can't make up for stunting the kid...
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Actually, your missing the point. The marginal cost (the cost to make one additional copy) of almost everything is lower than it's average cost. A Ferrari costs more to make than a low-end Hyundai (or whatever), but the bulk of the difference goes to pay for advertising, design, etc. Similarly, the marginal cost of a single pill of a new drug is almost zero, but you are actually charged enough to pay back it's research costs.
Let me put this in really simple terms: It's stealing to pay the marginal cost of an item if the producer is charging more EVEN IF THE MARGINAL COST IS ZERO. You can't walk up to a Ferrari dealer and pay them how much it cost to make the car (still quite a bit) and then drive off with it. You can't go to Sony Music and pay them what it cost to make a particular copy of the music (zero, if you don't require a physical copy, and only a few cents even if pressed on CD), and then "own" a copy of it. Not legally, anyhow, nor even ethically/morally.
The entire argument about the differences between digital and physical items misses the concept that marginal costs are only ONE component.
You are correct that if there's no lost revenue the company hasn't been hurt, but that's far too much of a slippery slope (not to mention completly subjective) to be relied upon.
No matter how good your intentions, once you have a copy of a song, or game, or book, it's hard to get around to shelling out the cash you would have paid if you hadn't had access to a copy. I'm thought about buying Max Payne, but wasn't sure if I'd like it. I "borrowed" a copy from a friend, played through it, and did like it, and I'm going to buy a copy Real Soon Now(tm). Somehow, I just never get around to it. If I had been unable to find a copy, would I have ended up buying it? I really haven't the slightest idea.
Actually...yes. Car showrooms are a horribly inneficient means of distributing cars. It's bad for the car companies, and bad for the consumers. It was a good idea originally because of problems both in tranporting the product to the consumer, as well as in communicating information about the product to the consumer.
:-)
Sound familar? Those same arguments are the ones used by the RIAA to justify their existence. Customers and musicians need the RIAA to make sure they know what CD to buy, and that it's on the shelf at the local store. Or so the RIAA says.
Joy riding and stealing music have nothing to do with the problems either industry faces. Instead it's simply a matter of producers trying to collapse their distribution chain, both to cut costs and to allow more direct communication with the consumers. Musicians would like to know what their fans want (how many bands have released a great album, drawn the wrong conclusion about why it was popular, then released a crap album?). Car companies want to know what their customers want (nothings worse for profits than a lot full of a model nobody wants anymore). It's not just these two industries either - Dell has actually made a profit from selling desktop PC's from doing exactly the same thing.
The RIAA is a broken business model (or more accuratly, it looks like it's becoming one). The technology exists to allow them to be bypassed, and an ever increasing section of the population would like to, but the RIAA is fighting back with lobbying, legislation, courtroom battles, etc. Exactly like the car dealerships, incidentally, who have almost uniformly seen off all threats (although some car companies are making small headway in Europe, where dealership networks aren't quite as protected).
If I had any mod points left... :-P
And it's sure suck if a future geoligist accidentally falls into a long-buried septic tank too. Seriously, what's the MAXIMUM possible damage here? A geolgist knocks a few months off his life? While I have the greatest possible sympathy for the poor guy (or women/neuter/android/alien or whatever is digging stuff up 5000 years from now), I don't rank this problem as high as, say, deciding what to have for lunch tomorrow.
:-P
Really, you raise one of the WEAKEST arguments against nuclear power. Weigh the benefits against the possible negatives, and it's obvious that the health of future lost geologists (yeah, 5000 years from now and they're not going to use sensors we haven't even DREAMED of yet?) is a small problem.
Actually, as far as I'm concerned, the biggest argument against nuclear power is that it's mostly too damn expensive (yeah, even when you factor in the cost of the damage of burning fossile fuels). I suppose it might be nice to have some capacity on reserve in case foreign oil imports are cut, or something, but it'd probably still be cheaper just to stockpile a few years worth of oil.
Most of what you say I don't exactly disagree with, I just have a different take, so to speak. However...
:-P As I said before, I browse the web using a non-IE browser, and I haven't found a page that didn't work right in it. Maybe that's because developers go out of their way to cater to the quirks of Opera, but given Operas market share, I suspect it's because Opera is quite capable of handling code "designed" for IE (which in my experience usually has more to do with making sure your not using Netscape specific code than adding IE specific code).
:-)
:-) Thinking about it a bit more, I suppose you could be talking about DHTML when you say browser specific code. Then again, I don't use it, and neither do any of the sites I visit. A seem to recall that all the modern browsers support it, but all differently. <shrug> It'll shake out soon enough, or it'll die off like all the other markup language extensions.
Talking about MSIE specific code is a bit funny. As long as you don't ever try and save a word document as HTML (seriously, just don't go there!), there really isn't much in the way of IE specific code. I assume we're not talking about marquees?
As for rendering stuff incorrectly, I basically ran across a situation where Opera and IE took a bit of code and did something ugly with it, and Netscape didn't. I don't know where to assign blame, but until I run across a better theory I'm assuming Opera was functioning correctly, therefore so was IE, and Netscape was screwed up. You can interpret the situation the other way, of course.
Doing a google search for "microsoft internet explorer standards" as suggested turned up absolutely nothing about browser specific code or flaws relavent to IE, although it *DID* turn up a couple of sites talking about the flaws of older versions of Netscape!
Lastly, as far as my problems with java and javascript goes, I still blame netscape (mostly). My exerience is that most JS works in Opera, but some doesn't. I find a slightly higher percentage works in Netscape, but if it doesn't work it'll crash your browser. OTOH, it'll all works in IE. My aportioning of blame is about 5/10 Netscape for bugginess, 3/10 IE for doing silly JScript stuff, and 2/10 Opera because it doesn't quite implement the current DOM right.
What I'd like is an even more stripped down client-side scripting language. Something that can do rollovers and the handful of other cool, useful, things you can do with JS (err..there are some...right? <grin>), and NOTHING else. But that's just a pet peeve, I don't think it'd be worse the hassle and compatability problems. I still get pissed off at Sun on occasion, because I think there were much better solutions than Javascript, even if we're locked in now.
Mozilla and Netscape aren't the same. We can argue over which is a fork of the other, but by this point the codebase has divereged enough that they're hardly the same product.
:-) On a more serious note, IE happens to be quite standards complient these days. I do a bit of web design, and I haven't run across (nor do I know of anyone who has) an example of IE rendering stuff differently than Opera. On the other hand, Netscape 6 is famous (or infamous) for rendering stuff badly. I was recently the recipient of an extended rant because someone had checked a site layout in IE and Opera, had it render fine, only to find it completly broken in Netscape. Or then there was a javascript rollover. The code LOOKED fine, and it worked in IE and Opera, but Netscape 6 crashed. I rewrote the javascript, and got it working in all three. Who was really at fault? I don't know, and I don't care, but I suspect most people would do what I did: Curse Netscape. :-) Certainly that's what a lot of people are doing over Netscapes inability to render some standards complient CSS pages...
Netscape 4 was horrible, but Netscape 6 isn't much better. For various reasons, I've had to support it, and that's a major headache. I can't think of a single thing is does better than IE, and a host of things it does worse, from the interface to the directory structure.
As for Opera needing to get distributed by a hardware vendor or go open source, you seem to be missing the entire point - nothing is going to hurt IE because it's "good enough". I don't pretend to know whether Mozilla or Opera will come out ahead in the battle for the crumbs, but my money is on Opera. Either you use what your given (IE), or you use what you like best, and I have more confidence in Opera than the Mozilla dev team. Waaay too many uber-hackers, not enough software engineers and HCI experts.
As for standards compliance, with 93% of the market, whatever IE does IS the standard.
Now, AOL might or might not use Netscape or Mozilla for their legions of subscribers. I don't think it will matter much, because if they introduce a browser that doesn't work EXACTLY like IE does (and thus, renders stuff wrong, crashes, etc.), then they'll all switch to a competitor. This would be a Bad Thing(tm) for AOL, no matter how much of a Good Thing(tm) it would be for Mozilla and open source in general, and so it not gonna happen.
Seriously, you can slam IE for security holes, but what exactly is your problem with IE's standards compliance? Maybe you've been surfing a different web, but I use Opera (which you yourself called the most standards complient browser around), and I haven't noted a single problem. That doesn't sound to me like MS has subverted the web into a Windows-only ghetto.
(Now Sun, they're pissing me off. Browsing with JS off is hard and getting harder, and turning it on is just asking for problems. I don't see the point of a browser war, but why can't we have a bloody decent client side scripting language!?)
Since this is Slashdot, I suspect I'm going to get modded down right quick, but...
Two seperate questions here, I think. For windows desktop users, IE is great (yeah, I know, security, but your average desktop user could care less). Microsoft isn't going to lose their marketshare without a seriously inferior product, and at the moment, it a hell of a lot better than Netscape's offering. I doubt Microsoft is worried about Opera either, and Opera makes a damn fine browser. But as much as some hate to admit it, the browser wars don't really matter. It's a sideshow, a commodity. Why should we really care? (And no, standard compliance isn't a good reason. We have that already.)
On the other hand, once you move to servers and/or *nix platforms, I don't see why anyone cares about Netscape or IE. You've got Opera, Lynx, Mozilla, and a half dozen others.
In fact, why are we using the release of Mozilla to talk about Netscape? To be absolutely blunt, Netscape deserves to die. Face it, their products have always been too little, too late - terminally behind the technology curve, and with horrible UI bugs (which might be better than security holes, but try telling Joe Sixpack that!).
Score 3? Insightful? Moderators on crack again! :-)
Seriously though:
1. The Obvious: "owning" another cell phone.
Huh?
2. Radiation becomes a REAL risk, because the main broadcasting would be done by the phones, not the towers.
Your phone already has to talk to the tower. Other cell phones will likely be CLOSER, requiring, if anything, lower signal strength. And go look up the frequencies involved. Electromagnetic waves are fairly well understood, and radio and microwaves are non-ionizing. Just what do you think your cell phone CAN do to you?
3. Battery life (ok, not so much a danger as a nuisance).
As others have pointed out, your phone is transmitting and receiving fairly constantly anyhow. Plus, battery life is constantly extending. By the time this technology becomes prime time, I suspect phones with it installed will have a batter life measured in days, even while using the tech.
4. Spam (another nuisance).
Did you read the article? How the hell could you get spam? Does your ROUTER get spam?
5. Viruses.
See last point. We're talking about forwarding packets
Honestly, if you're not going to read the article...
This sounds very useful. A bit like the original switch from circuit switching to packet switching for land lines. If done right, this should be cheaper, better, more flexable, and at least as secure. I wonder if we might not be better of with a new cell phone protocal designed from the ground up for packets, though?
I noticed one person already commented about security issues, but given that some phones broadcast to the cell tower "in the clear", these can't be WORSE. Of course, most phones these days are more secure than that, and already split the signal into tiny "packets", and then transmits each on a different frequency. They do this for reasons of efficiency, but it does make for security. Phones using the tech should be similarly secure, even without some elementary encryption (which I hope does get implemented, of course).
This isn't going to be magic though. Only in dense cities you can assume there will enough spare capacity to make this interesting, and even then you'll need towers (although fewer). Out in the country, you'll need just as many towers as always though. On the other hand, the real benefits are going to be from reliability, better signal strength, load sharing, etc., not fewer towers.
Interesting to note some talk just the other day about Wi-Fi networks moving towards a more cell-phone like system, complete with towers. Now cell phones may end up looking more like distributed networks!
The total cost per kWh (counting upfront capital costs) has been dropping for years, and has now come within a hair of hitting the cost of fossil fuels (for wind). Solar is more expensive, but advances already in the pipeline should bring it to less than nuclear within ten years.
There is indeed resistance to building wind turbines. But in case you've been asleep since the 70's, there's a little resistance to building nuclear power plants too (we haven't built a nuclear power plant since Three Mile Island). And while they kill birds, it's is (and would be, even with a massive increase in generation) a handful. Plate glass windows kill 97 million birds in the US alone (and cars kill another 50 million), whereas wind turbines in the US kill 70,000. That means it'd take a 1000-fold increase before the two are even comparable.
Also, comparing the output of a single wind turbine to a single nuclear power plant is stupid. The question is, how many kWh of production capacity does a given dollar buy you when spent on Nuclear versus Wind? And the answer is, Wind, because the turbines are dirt cheap (compared to a nuclear power plant!).
As for solar panels, they do stop producing when it's cloudy and dark (much like wind turbines stop on calm days). There are two solutions. Large storage batteries, and nuclear plants to help keep them topped up during dark, overcast, calm periods.
Your figure for solar power density isn't completly correct. That's appears to be an average figure, but solar power density depends on your latitude, and ranges from 250 to 100 betweeen the equator and the poles. That means it would only take a square 500km on a side to supply the entire Earth's energy needs if built on the equator. Of course, shipping power from the equator isn't a great idea, but the US's power needs could be met several times over by coverering half of Texas in panels. :-)
That solution isn't cheaper than nuclear (not at the moment), but solar panels have been halving in price every decade since their inception, and it looks like this will continue to around 2030 (at least). Around 2010, both wind and solar will be cheaper than nuclear, and by some estimates wind will cheaper than fossil. And don't forget, fossil fuel generation can't really get any more efficient due to the laws of thermodynamics. The only way fossil fuel generated energy prices are going is up.
Guess again. What is a "safe" exposure to microwaves? Answer: Anything that doesn't cook you. Microwave radiation is non-ionizing. All it does is heat water (and a couple of other molecules, but if your a carbon based lifeform, that's all you have to worry about), and generate electric currents in metal.
In other words you can't get cancer, and the only way it'll sterilize your sperm is by boiling (trust me, at that point, your ability to have kids is the LAST thing you'll worry about).
(And what about the cellphones cooking your brain scare? Studies have turned up mixed results, but the balance of evidence is firmly on the side of cellphones being harmless.)
Wind is cheaper than nuclear, actually. But best case, wind can't supply more than maybe 50% of current needs, and it has other problems. Solar looks like the up and coming thing, expect to see prices fall below nuclear over the coming decade. It too has problems though, and so nuclear is still a good idea. If nothing else, nuclear power plants work even during calm, overcast days. :-) But it's too expensive to supply all our power, and unlike wind and solar, doesn't look to be getting cheaper.
Also, with breeder reactors, you're not going to run out of fuel, ever (more or less).
You're right that nuclear waste storage is more or less a non-issue though. Just stick is somewhere. Yeah, it'll leak. But so what? We've got plenty of room (note for the geographically impaired: this isn't sarcasm).
Perhaps I overestimate the difference, but there is a large difference nonetheless. You say that people forced by hunger to work in a sweatshop might as well be slaves, but if they truly were slaves, they and their decendents would never have any other choice. That's completly different than with sweatshops, because when choices do become available, people stop working at sweatshops, and get real jobs. The sweatshops move on to the next country full of starving peasents, and our supply of cheap soccer balls (or whatever) continues.
The thing to keep in mind is that there is a constant improvement in conditions. The sweatshops keep moving (it wasn't long ago you could find them in New York). Eventually they'll run out of a soure of cheap labor (GDP per capita is increasing, food per capita is increasing, polulation growth is decreasing, poverty as both an absolute and a percentage is decreasing, and these trends look certain to continue).
In the meantime, they very sweatashops you decry are contributing greatly to their own eventual end. Unlike slavery, they are actually paying wages (20-40 cents an hour, usually) and in the countries they operate in, that can be a lot. GDP/per head/per day in Pakistan is $1.20 (compared to the $0.26 an hour they get paid), meaning they're making more than the average Pakistani after 5 hours of work.
The biggest difference between slavery and sweatshops is that slavery did not seem ready to go away on it's own, because people could and would use violence to force people to remain slaves. The quickest and easiest way to get rid of sweatshops is simply to increase the prosperity of the country they reside in.
In the meantime, the louder people call sweatshops "slavery", and demand a boycot, the less attention will be focused on actually improving conditions for the workers, eliminating *real* slavery, and ultimatly...getting rid of the sweatshops. As always, the real world does not lend itself to simple distinctions and easy answers.
Only if your an auto company. :-) What he means is, if you want to build a $15,000 car, you'd have to buy $30,000 worth of parts, and that's not even counting labor.
Similarly, a computer with an OS costs less than a computer and an OS (each sold seperatly), not even counting the labor required to install it.
Now, some companies think they have some "rights" to a package of parts they sell you, and have some say over what you can do with it, above and beyond any laws that might govern your use of it. With a car, you can do anything you like with the car OR the parts, as long as you don't break laws. But some computer companies are attemting to restrict what you can do with the bundled parts they give you, even when you aren't breaking any laws: i.e. installing an old OS on a new computer.
Common sense says this ain't going to fly. Unfortunatly, it may take a while before that becomes the case.
Please tell me your kidding. Comparing sweatshops to slavery is ludicrous (and to think I've seen people complaing that calling copyright violation "piracy" was bad...).
People in sweatshops are there by choice (unless they are actually slaves, which does happen (rarely) but then the problem is the slavery, not the sweatshops). The reason people choose to work in sweatshops is because the alternatives are WORSE. Is it a awful thing for a 13 year old kid to be working 12 hours a day for a few cents? Yeah. Would it be better if he was starving on the street instead? Not really.
Also, don't make the mistake of judging wages in terms of the price of a cup of Starbucks Super Mocha Java. In China, it's common for young women from the interior to go work in sweatshops on the coast for a few months, then go back home to the village, where they're now quite well off (yes, even at sweatshop wages), and can easily find a husband.
What is your boycot going to do? Well, actually, you'll probably just get ignored, but if you do have an impact, it'll probably be that Walmart's suppliers shift production to automated factories in Mexico. Yeah, that'll sure help the starving kids in Myanmar...
If you want to have an impact, calculate the difference in price between everything you buy that was made in a sweatshop, and it's factory-made equivalent, then donate that money to a charity. You'll do far more good.
No, seriously. There is, at the moment, a lot of bad data being used by the goverment. Often it was originally thought to be correct, but then the scientists realized they'd made an error or a mistake, or hadn't taken something into account, and they changed their minds. It happens a lot, and is the corner stone of the scientific process.
Goverment, however, (especially big ones like ours) don't change to well. The US is *STILL* using some enviromental models that turned out to be less accurate than a table of random numbers. The rest of the world has moved on, and the IPCC's new models are pretty good, but the US hasn't, which means it's worrying about the wrong things in the wrong places. This is bad. If you live near a river than flooded a lot, and the goverment could afford to build ONE dyke, wouldn't you want to make sure they built it on the correct river?
Yes, people will try and abuse the act, and some will even suceed, but you can then turn around and challenge the NEW data. At the moment any lobyist who suceeds in getting bad data entered into the record has won.
Oh, SUUUURE. That explains why nobody owns their own house in the US. Oh, wait they do... See, one of the better analogies of the spectrum is land. It too is a valuable comodity, there's a fixed supply, although we can use less of it if neccesary (high-rises), and only one person can use it at a time (in any given location, that is). Now, what your arguing is that the goverment should own ALL land in the US, because only that would stop corporations from owning all the land. It hasn't worked that way--nor have experiments where the goverment HAS owned all the land... Or to put it another way, the reasons that a mythical "Land Corporation" doesn't own every scrap of real estate in the US is the same has why a mythical "Broadcast Corporation" won't own every scrap of airwaves. Oh, and recall that the profits to be made from land are MUCH higher than airwaves, since housing is a much more vital need than wireless networks. Just look at housing prices in Silicon Valley. Honestly, do you corporate conspiracy people even put your brains in gear? And as for the poor deluded fools who think the GOVERMENT is a good "steward"... Heh. Just look at who the FCC has divied up all the current bandwidth to! At least privatization would put bandwidth in the hands of them that have something to DO with it (and thus will pay money for it). It might not help you and me get any bandwidth (although it might) but it'd certainly help. And if the privatization was smart, they'd leave the current public use sections OUT of the mix, and sell bandwith in TINY TINY chunks. And in any case, my vote is that wireless networks will ALWAYS be a side show. They might cover the "last 5 feet" from your comp to the nearest ground station on the fibre optic network...but that's probably it. There just isn't enough bandwidth for anything more, even if the spectrum IS privatized. You think any reasonable chunk of spectrum can cover a whole cities demand for Britney Spears music video clips? :-)
No! No no no! You've completly missed (or forgoten) what's wrong with discrimination.
As an example, my mother is very smart (easily the smartest person I've ever met). When she went to university, it was assumed by the faculty that women just couldn't handle the "hard sciences", and she was very activly discouraged from taking physics and chemistry. After all, she was female--calculus would just confuse her, right?
That's an example of "bad" discrimination--people making a judgement about intelligence based on sex.
On the other hand, there would be nothing wrong with "discriminating" against stupid people because they're stupid, or even against females because they're female. Not hiring a guy to be a wet nurse isn't discrimination, it's common sense--just like not hiring an idiot to work in a nuclear power plant is common sense.
On the other hand, not hiring someone to a job that requires inteligence because of something other than inteligence (such as race or sex) *IS* bad discrimination.
That's why racism and sexism are bad. Not because they involve people not ignoring skin color or sex (ignoring stuff like that would be silly), but because they're using those attributes to make decisions that have nothing to do with the atributes in question. Prejudice (that is, the belief attributes with no correlation really are linked) is bad, but discrimination is not (unless coupled with prejudice).
As a matter of fact, it *IS* right to take into account someones risk of frostbite when hiring for a job involving work in cold weather. It would be lunacy to do otherwise. It would ALSO be lunacy to take into account someones skin color when hiring, EXCEPT to the extent that skin color effects the risk of frost bite (and ONLY to that extent).
Well...actually, it isn't. But the alternative is worse. Let me lay some facts out for you:
Soon, everyone will be able to get a test to see what genetic problems they have.
The healthy ones will have little or no interest in many types of insurance.
The unhealthy ones will have a great interest in many types of insurance.
Now, insurance already has many problems, because it's a transaction where one party (the people buying insurance) have more knowledge than the other party. This is always a bad thing from a standpoint of "fairness". Given the above mentioned facts, if insurance companies are denied knowledge of genetic tests, the situation will get a WHOLE lot worse.
See, all of a sudden, anyone who wanted insurance would be someone no insurance company would want to insure...and the only people who an insurance company could insure wouldn't want to purchase insurance. Insurance only works by spreading risks, so that the unhealthy are in the same "pool" as the healthy. If you remove the healthy (and genetic tests WILL do this), then the life and health insurance will no longer be functional. There will BE no insurance. At all.
Now, the alternative is to make the information available to everyone. That will have the effect of making a lot of people uninsurable (at least for an affordable amount of money), but at least SOME people will still be able to get insurance.
So essentially, you have a choice. Keep genetic tests private (and thus end all insurance), or don't (and only end some). Or, the goverment could offer universal health (and/or life) insurance, paid for by tax dollars. This would be the "fairest" solution, but I doubt anyone would really welcome the added tax burden.
Either insurance must be universal, or the knowledge has to be shared equally, or there will be no insurance. Choose.
Hey, your not the standard foaming demagogue! I'm impressed. Now:
:-) Indeed, why have corporation tax at all? A corporation is nothing more than shareholders and employees, and you can tax them however you choose.
Point 1: Your right.
Point 2: Perceived, yes. In actual fact, it's kind of cool if an inept bureacrat decides to subsidize the production of my new stick of RAM...or the steel that goes into my new car. Of course, those resources probably would have gone somewhere more important (education, maybe), but I can't help that. *IF* we want to treat this as a "race between countries", then subsidizing exports is an own goal. If we want to look at total human suffering, it's pretty bad, but not buying it isn't the way to fix it.
Point 3: Not strictly speaking relavent. We are discussing ways and organizations to enforce and defend intellectual property rights. Perhaps it's more important to discuss what those rights are (or should be), but that's a very seperate issue.
Point 4: Yes, but... Yeah it does cause a lot of ill-will that the big and powerful set the rules to help themselves. The developing countries are not happy that the big countries try and force reforms on them, while refusing to swallow that medicine themselves. The protests in Seattle suited a lot of powerful people in suits. It didn't suit the WTO...or the developing countries, although they were fed up before then. No matter how you look at it, it's not good. If the protesters had the best interests of the powerless at heart (and knew what they were doing) they'd be arguing for complete and unilateral removal of all tarrifs, quotas, and subsidies. The US corporations would never agree of course--which tells you all you need to know about both the effects and the possability of it happening.
Point 5: Change hurts, yeah.
As for the benefits being nebulous, and the costs concrete... Agreed. But that's not REALLY the question. The question is, are the benefits bigger than the costs? And the answer is yes, by a great deal. A lot of economists have spent a lot of time answering this question (and others like it), and you can take it or not, as your opinion of economists and economics dictate. The fact is, lowering barriers to imports helps a country (and by more than it helps the trading partners, regardless of balance of trade). Similarly, export subsidies are bad for a country, although they do help the trading partners. Of course, in a democracy, more than a few politicians have found the political risks to be the inverse of the economic benefits...but that's a seperate issue.
You lose it when you come to taxation though. Don't forget where the benefits are--not with the corporation. The megacorps, by and large, LOSE from globalization. Subsidies in whatever form (and tariffs are a common form) act as a redistribution of wealth from the consumers (that is, the Average Joe) to the corporations (why do you think it's always the industrialists that lobby for protection? The steel mills that ask for protection from "dumping"?). Remove those barriers, and it's the consumers that benefit--and they can't dodge taxes by moving offshore without losing the benefits. Yeah, it's DAMN tough to see it--especially when those 100 factory workers are picketing and the 100,000 benefitting from the slightly cheaper goods (and the 100 million benefitting from the slightly springier economy) aren't... The corporations are a sideshow--not least because while they can indeed move, the shareholders can't.
That's simple. The point of the WTO is a mechanism for "bargaining" down trade barriers--and enforcing the bargains, once struck. The US says that it will drop tarrifs on wine, if the EU drops tarrifs on beef, let's say. The US could unilterally drop tarrifs on wine and be done with it--but the WTO exists to allow the US to trade that drop for another one.
That's the main reason why countries want to be in--particularly developing countries, which are desperate for lower tarrifs on agricultural products and textiles. They know that the EU would never let their hugely pampered farmers suffer without good cause--the WTO is therefore their best best: If they're lucky, they can trade something unimportant to them (removal of restrictions on foreign ownership of telecoms, let's say) for something vastly beneficial--lowered tarrifs on those goods they export. It's not easy, even with the WTO--witness the current breakdowns (which have little to do with protests--rather, the developing countries are sore that the 1st world hasn't done what it promised last round yet). That's the choice a lot of countries are having to make--stay out in the cold, with no chance of ever having enough clout to get any important barriers lowered...or enter, and have a much better chance.
Finally, the WTO is there to enforce agreements, once struck (but don't forget it was YOUR politicians that first have to agree). Once the US has agreed not to ban tuna imports, it can't then turn around and ban them, however popular or worthy the cause now is. The fault is that of shortsighted politicians, not the WTO.
As an example, China has been working very hard to get into the WTO--despite the fact that it entails a massive shake up of their entire economy, and a real chance of political instability. Why are they so keen? Easy--it's the best, maybe even the only way, they can manage to remove the massive barriers that have been set in front of them--and China needs them removed very badly. China has a massivly growing population--either the economy at least matches it, or a nuclear power with the worlds largest standing army, several territorial disputes with other nuclear powers, and several rebellious provinces (one of which is ALSO nuclear armed, probably)...goes BOOM! No, I think we need to keep those peasents in poverty myself--fatter subsidies for the steel workers! What's that you say? Let them eat cake? I couldn't agree more!
Yeah right... You'll notice that the protestors wearn't Chinese. For that matter, the current head of the WTO is from NZ, population 3.5 million, heavily dependent on agricultural products, mostly wool, cheese, butter, and so forth. Not a particularly important country--which is why NZ is such a strong proponent of free trade. We don't ask for an advantage, we just want a fair go...which is why all my friends are as puzzled as I am about the protesters in Seattle. Fair trade? That's what the WTO is DOING.
*scratch head*
Sounds fair enough to me. What he said was, in essence: "These people are complaining that the WTO is not transparent (true). Not only is the WTO transparent (also true), the form of these complaints harms transparency (very definetly true)."
On the other hand, it wouldn't even be an abuse of the law (although the law probably should be changed--but that's a seperate issue) to do the "standard" thing, and sic a bunch of lawyers, writs, restraining orders, court orders, and so forth on those responsible. Other organizations have done it with less grounds--and sone so succesfully, over a more important issue, and with less public outcry than I judge they would get here.
All in all, I'd say the fact that the WTO disagrees with their critics is hardly surprising, or proof of anything. If they didn't disagree with them, they wouldn't be critics would they? But note that instead of sending in the heavies, they're talking about it. No, they don't like it (who would?), but I'm at a loss to think of anything BETTER they could do.
I've got mixed feelings, to tell the truth. On the one hand, I deeply dislike organizations that try and bully all and sundry (remember eToys?) about domain names. And as an added bonus, the message of their victims (if any) is usually cool. Nobody LIKES to see someone making jokes about corporate stupidity get shut down by the corporation in question--you lose access to the jokes.
In this case, it seems the WTO is being cool about this website--which they can be congratulated on. This is, after all, the way it's supposed to work. On the other hand that website is getting close to crossing the very fine line between satire (one of the highest forms of humour) and libel, which is just lying about people.
I looked through the site, and these people aren't saying anything informed or intelligent...or even funny. There are legitament criticizism of many of the things the WTO has done...but these people don't seem to know what they are. There are funny jokes that could be made...but these people aren't making them. The WTO has done stupid things...but these people don't know what they are. There are flaws in some bits of the economic reasoning you could drive a truck through...but these people have no clue. The entire point of the site seems to be to confuse and mislead--NOT to entertain or convince.
As it happens, I agree with much (not all) of WTO policy. But I ALSO agree with the right for people to disagree. These people may or may not have the right message--that doesn't matter. But they aren't using the right method. I have a right to tell you what I think of Bush--I don't have the right to tell you I *AM* Bush.
How come it's always the cool sites that get slapped down?
Actually, military stuff is very vulnerable to EMP--much more than it commonly supposed. The Russians made an attempt at preparing for EMP attacks, but didn't get very far. China doesn't really need to (you'd be surprised how many tube manufactuers the Chinese army keeps in business--or, since this is China, runs). The US, OTOH, uses very vulnerable electronics, and hasn't done much about it. The US used to run wargames of Word War 3, and they always started by the Red team detonating an EMP over the US, and then everyone would go get some coffee while the umpires removed half the US's forces. :-)
The reason is obvious enough--people glibly assume that there's some way to shield electronics from Bad Things(tm) like EMP blasts, particle beams, X-ray lasers, and so forth. In reality (and I'm not an electrician, so this is only roughly accurate) you can either completly isolate it from EVERYTHING (effectivly impossible), or enclose it in active shielding, like an electrified cage (sometimes called a Faraday shield, IIRC). Neither is perfect, and neither works well for systems in planes, missiles, or handheld devices, many of which are, from an EMP point of view, just like your Palm, except MUCH MORE VALUABLE.
In any case, vulnerable is relative. Your Palm has tiny wires, so it's difficult for any major potential difference to be set up. What's vulnerable is big long wires. Power lines, telephone cables, networks, and anything connected to them, including telephone exchanges and sub-stations. The old sub-orbital EMP burst is crippling because it turns all of your power liness into antennas--thereby frying everthing connected to them. In theory, an EMP burst might cause a poorly run/designed nuclear power plant to go boom--not by messing with the electronics in the control room, but by inducting big currents in the outgoing power lines. These EMP shells work on a different scale, but the principle is similar.
The short of it is, magnetic memory is probably going to be toast, and anything connected to power lines without a surge protector is toast. Anything connected to a copper network is also likely toast. But solid state electronics are (mostly) only as vulnerable as the power supply (that is, they can be toasted by stuff that is vulnerable to EMP, but are not themselves directly vulnerable), unless the flux levels reach a level so high that metal starts melting, in which case your probably going to be more concerned about your fillings, not your computer.
Or to be blunt: Of course the military is vulnerable. No, there's nothing anyone can do. But no, these shells aren't really that useful, since the area of effect will be so much smaller.
So in summary:
You think spelling and grammar have some vital importance. I'm happy for you--but not happy enough to try and emulate you, as I'm not quite that anal retentive.
You miss the point that the kid probably IS enjoying his childhood, and probably wouldn't want to interact with anyone that wasn't as smart as him (I know *MY* opinion of other nine year olds when I was that age). You also fail to grasp that you can be bright AND decent.
Also, you seem to have some bitterness about school. I enjoyed high school immensely myself. Does the reference to "jerkoffs who made fun of you...and... [pump] your gas" have some personal meaning to you? I detect a note of bitterness...
And finally, you completly fail to grasp that those same losers pumping gas are the "decent people" you think so highly of. Sure they have girlfriends. But you and others seem to think that you have to choose between being "decent", having a girl friend, and pumping gas for a living, or being "bright", an anti-social reject, and a geek. It ain't so.
It's about ten years too early to say where the prodigy in question will end up ten years from now, but nothing mentioned so far indicates any reason why he might not end up well adjusted and "decent", as well as "bright". The key, as always, is good parenting--but that's true regardless of the childs intelligence. Of course, good parenting can't make up for stunting the kid...