There is just one problem with what you are saying. The growth of the US government has been exponential, it can only go on for so much longer without running up against the laws of physics. If the government can't find it within itself to reduce its size this term (it won't), the entire exonomy will likely collapse on its own weight and the US dollar isn't likely to survive as a currency. The US economy is already teetering on the edge of a cliff, with too much debt, and too much money loaned into circulation. With housing on the wane, and both a bubble in the stock market and the bond market, the gig is up. Lets fact it, neither party has what it takes to stop it. We are in deep shit.
That is because the debate isn't motivated by science, it is motivated by coal (and coal to gasoline conversion technologies) and how the US has enough of it to be energy independent for up to 800 years, and how the US being energy independent would choke off half the world oil despots of their coveted revenue streams. It has to do with the fact that OPEC can't compete off of price, and so the only other way they can compete is regulating the daylights ouf of it like they did with nuclear 30 years prior. Global warming my ass, I guarantee you that the last thing in the universe motivating the battle cry for global warming is a genuine concern for the environment. Is it any wonder they went after the US and left China (the other major coal producer) alone. Is it any wonder that got all the major non-coal countries to gang up on the US with Kyoto. If you look at the coal energy projection breakdowns prepared for energy company share holders and then you look at the ones prepared for publications like popular science, it becomes clear the global warming crowd are liars pushing an agenda.
Between the housing debt, the credit card debt, the auto debt, the city debt, the state debt, the federal government debt, corporate debt, financial sector debt, and 50 trillion dollars worth of pre obligated costs like social security and medicare. The US is bankrupt. It is about 500K per family increasing at about 30K per year. Can your family pay that?
The US economy is getting ready to collapse, and what do governments do when their economies collapse? Well, They become police states. They tend to do things like track all the citizens travels, monitor all their finances and internet activity, suspend habeas corpus. HEY LOOKIE, the US did all that !!!!
Also, do you know what a financial Derivative is? Well you should because the total estimated outstanding derivitave obligations just recently passed the Quadrillion mark. No I mean Quadrillion, not Billion, Trillion, not Hundred Billion, or Hundred Trillion. With a US GDP of 12 trillion per year, my question is how the hell can that be solvent??? (Hint, it isn't)
Every country in the world will be hit by the collapse, but none the less, only a fool would not be considering an exit strategy at this time or preparing for disaster at home. Buddy, the Titanic has been hit by an iceberg and you had better not be like those passangers who dallied around before getting on the lifeboats.
You know what I think you're problem is. That the global warming debate is not a debate about science, and it's not a debate about temperature. It's a debate about control. If the global warming proponents addressed the latter with any shred of sincerety and decency, than the formers would work themselves out without issue. In fact, more specifically the debate is about coal, and how the US has an 800 years supply worth, and how if the US made use of it (with technologies like coal gassification), we would free ourselves from every oil lord facist loony bin all over the planet. The debate is about how if an industry can't compete on costs and merits, then their only other option is to raise the costs of competitors by forcing government regulations on them.
First off, I have worked in a lot of startups and have seen first hand how patents work... so let me explain. Unless it's a lawyer startup, most innovators and startups will get a patnet for one reason and one reason only. To hold off the lawsuits. Sometimes it gives investors a warm cozy feeling of "protection", sometimes it gets us in good on a cross licensing agreement so we avoid even more lawsuits, but the number one reason is really lawsuits and that is all. While, in theory, you don't need to get a patent to prove prior art, in practice nothing holds back the dogs better then shoving a patent in their face and telling them F**k off.
Second off, many don't seem to understand that patents don't encourage innovation, all they do is force the market to center arround invention controlls instead of invention services. Well, let me tell you, inventors are good at inventing things, large corporations, lawyers, and governments are good at controlling things. So in the end, patnets do not help inventors, they help monopolies and bureauocrats.
Third off, right now patents are bearable because the control value of them tends to exceed the service value. But eventually nanotech and 3d printers are going to greate a new age of manufacturing and invention service centered from the home. Just look at what the copyright cartel did when they started to loose controll over information monopolies, well with patents it will be far more violent.
No it didn't. Some people were educated but there was massive illiteracy. People clamored for public education precisely because so much of the country was filled with uneducated people.
Where did you learn that, in a public school? No they clamored for public education to attack the Catholic power base by forcing kids out of the Catholic system into a public one and to force the Irish immigrants out of the entrepreneur sector into the factory one. Also, you should understand that it is the government sector that hasn't progressed since the 18 century. The assumption that if the government didn't do something that there would be no progress from 18 century times in education is ignorant and naive. Counter examples exist all over the world. Hong Kong didn't have any publicly funded schools at all for nearly 25 years with over 90% education rates, so you are dead wrong. Even today they don't have public schools, just subsidized private tuition in some cases.
Hey wait, no special needs programs? High cultural diversity? No NEA? No federal standards? No bond funded super schools? The US education system should blow them away... BZZT WRONG. It's the other way around.
What the hell's wrong with you, the government needs those taxes to be proactive about things.
if not for taxes to pay for public education, our kids would be the dubmest in the free world, wiat..... never mind.... well anyhow if not for taxes, our social security and medicare programs would be bankrupt. wait..... never mind..... ok lets try..... if not for taxes to fight the war on drugs, we would have drug problems in every inner city, uh..... scrap that one.... if not for taxes, the government would need to go into debt,.... oops, hold on here I'm working on it..... if not for taxes our medical and college education costs would be out of reach,..... shit, scratch that.... if not for taxes to pay for war, we'd be loosing the war on terror,.....@#@#$#$%%%^
Well, FU! you're just not trying hard enough to see how valuable all these taxs are for everyone. We NEED the government to be "proactive"
Ya know, those people who thought the earth wasn't the center of the universe when everyone else clearly knew it was. they were Zealouts.
And those people who believed that religion and government should be chosen by individuals and not kings, they were zealots also.
And those people who wanted to kill slavery and the US plantation system and go up against the big business plantations, they were also zealots.
And those black people who wanted to use the same bathrooms, and sit at the front of the bus. They were zealots too.
Well FUCK. The copyright cartell trys to treat information exactly like it's a property right when it's clearly not, and then force massive government regulations down our throat to fence off every bit of it, and then those of us who try to secure our right to share information freely in the information age - we're called the zealots? God fuckin dammit... what's it gonna take. From the very first day we have been "warned" that our zealot IP attitude is going to ruin Linux and open source, well more bullshit. One of these days they're going to realise that they need us more than we need them, and that they're the followers while people like RMS are the leaders.
All Cisco has to do is quit beating competitors over the head with patents and other anti-competitive practices and compete off of merrit and service instead. If it wasn't for things like this artifically pumping up the price of Cisco products and locking out competitors, other vendors would be more than happy to build their own brand recognition. IMHO, Cisco is getting exactly the plate that they dished themselves up, and now they wine about security, sub par products, and quality. HA! What a joke.
I once herd a person say that both the Euro and the Dollar are pieces of trash trying to find their value relative to each other. The Euro will probably out last the Dollar, but an economic collapse in the US will probably force a Euro collapse too.
If all levels of government quit going into debt, cut back drastically on all programs and taxes, and the fed quit loaning out new money, and they remonitized all cash and debt with gold. That would starve off a total collapse at the cost of a drastic and painfull transition, but IMHO, the chances of that happening before it's too late are pretty much negative infinity.
In a hyperinflationary depression the economy reaches a point where investors won't invest in businesses, so they then put all their money into commodities. This causes commodities to skyrocket, unemployment to go up, and pay to be pressured down. So everything goes up in price except for pay and profit. That makes the defaults on debt worse, makes the drive to commodities even more, causing a vicious circle. This happened in the late 70's in the US and we were able to break out of it by offering 21% interest on bonds to get investors to stop dumping cash. But this time a 21% prime will rip the US economy to shreds. BTW, over the last 5 years commodities have trippled while pay has done nearly nothing.
If by bubble you mean a time of ecenomic growth, then yes we are headed there.
First off, the economy is not on the upswing. While we don't seem to have another dot.com bubble, we absolutely have a housing bubble and that is worse! If your stock tanks, you still aren't making monthly payments on it and it's a lot more liquid. The record low savings rates and record high debt rates are not symptoms of a healthy economy. Neither is the account deficit over 6%. So far the US is the only country in history to have that high of an account deficit and not have a currency collapse. The fact that it is increasing rapidly is not good. (BTW, I know it's political season, so let me just say it's not Bush's fault, but structural - for people who think I'm bashing Bush)
It is very possible to have ecenomic growth without a hyperinflated economy resulting in the proverbial bubble.....
Not in the US, not since 1911, the year of the federal reserve act. You can't keep printing up money and loaning it into the economy and expect nothing bad to happen. In fact, the efficiency of the information age means that when the money passes thru, that adjustment will be far more extreme, not less extreme. The worst part is that the Fed thinks they have lernt the lesson of the great depression - that the solution is more liquidity. No it's not! It will just change it from a great depression to a hyperinflationary great depression. I don't think people have any idea what they're in for.
Why is everyone so sureal. Any look at the numbers is just terrible, do people understand that the dollar can't make it as a global reserve currency for more than a few more years and likely can't make it as a currency at all within the next decade?
Can your family afford a debt of about 480K that is increasing at the rate of about 30K per year? Well, between all the obligations and systemic debt it already must.
I'm glad you mentioned that, because while I keep hearing about this global outsourcing threat, I never seem to experience it. In fact, just a few decades ago, it used to cost over 100 million to roll out a competitive OS. Now I can roll my own OS in a matter of minutes from my desktop. When I was a kid, calls just 200 miles away would cost over 25 cents per minute, now they are less than 3 cents per minute using VOIP asterisk to the other side of the planet. CRM solutions that used to cost $30000 are now free. In many cases, by using open source my costs are minimal compaired to what people are used to.
When push comes to shove, companies don't hire people to provide software, they hire people to provide services. They are far more interested in things like "if my phone system crashes will I have someone on site to diagnose it immediately" then they are with things like "you cost this much per hour while a developer in india cost that much". They are far more interested in things like, "I need my computers to do this and that for me, tell me the costs, pros and cons" and me being right there to tell them in plain english immediately. With open source, I have millions of dollars worth of pre developed stuff that I can make working prototypes with in a matter of hours. That hyper producitivity more than offsets the competition 10 timezones away.
One more thing. Ths US dollar is overvalued and has too much debt attached to it. Eventually things, especially pay, will re-adjust with what they pay overseas. At which time the US is more than capable of competing against China and India head on because we have more infrastructure, more economic freedoms, and a culture more adjusted to free markets, the industrial revolution, and the information age. So how do we survive the transtition, simple, get out of debt no matter what and buy lots of silver and gold while your US dollars are still overvalued. A person who plays this right could bet rich from the transition, not get put out of a job.
It would be nice if I can force javascript popups to open in another tab if I like... and make so I can force those javascript hover-over ads to act 'hidden' without the javascript program knowing.
I hate it when I hover over a link, and it doesn't tell me what it links to at the bottom of the page, can you force it?
It woud be cool if the bookmarks, the view source, and the javascript debug could be opened in new tabs. If fact, why not put most all the menu options in a tab that can brought up by pressing F2 of something
have a built in spell checker for posts (for/., you know)
have an option on firefox where it won't play flash nor sounds unless I click on it.... also, I know this is wishfull thinking but it would be nice if various movie formats, pdf, mp3, and ogg integrated into the linux browser by default. ( i know, too much proprietary crap... wishfull thinking)
have it so I can drag and drop tabs from one window to another (so I can consolidate stuff) Have an option so that if I go beyond a certain number of tabs, it will create 2 rows of them or more.
Crazy wish...
Have a firefox plugin that renders X programs in different tabs, so I can use it as a window manager on Linux.... or so I can open a linux xterm in a new tab. (great for development)
NOTE: I recently set up firefox so that it loaded up my own local html page on startup which not only had all my favorite bookmarks on it, but also hacked it to have my most used Linux programs on it - that I can click and run. I love it. It's the best program manager I've ever had. I made it so that any reference to "shell:" will run a script I wrote, so that for example shell:tet will run the tetris program when clicked on.
Usually when politics is about the environment, it's about trillions and trillions of dollars worth of government impositions on every last aspect of private individual lives. Anything from toilets, to showerheads, to cell phones, to jumping thru 100 hoops to use your car. In fact, it's not uncommon for companies to exploit environmental issues to their favor (eg regulate to drive used cars out of the market place, lobby to force companies to use a particular monitoring technology that only you have, kill electricity competition like nuclear power) Are you sure a more appropiate description - pirate party hijacked by enviromental politics?
This really does happen, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I never would have believed it.
In one company I worked for, the CEO (who was mutually appointed, but not the founder) immediately started driving the company into the dirt. He would do things like a big company CEO would do, like get into global car rental agreements. Things that would probably work for a large company, but are absolutely insane and suicidal for a small startup.
When it became obvious that the CEO was making things worse, rather than kick him out, the VC's used him to drive the company into the dirt. Well not exactly, they would drive the company to the brink of bankruptcy which would always coax the founder to give up pay and sell shares to the VC's for cash to "save" the company. (the CEO never took a cut) After this happened a few times and they did nothing to get rid of the CEO, the founder finally said "it's either me or him" at which time they finally fired the CEO. (whith a quarter million doller severance). But by that time the VC's had majority shares, and it was too late.
A few months later, they fired the founder when he wouldn't give them a blank check with the board of directors. Also, his termination was clearly wrongfull termination, and his severence was refused even though it was in his contract, but they were counting on him not suing the company because he founded it, he still held shares, and was still on the board.
Then they continued to use their influence to drive the company into the dirt, and when the company was on the brink again they would loan the company money to "save" it. You see, the founder still had shares, and was still on the borad, but lenders have first rights over share holders - so if they lend the company into bankruptcy, they get it - ALL of it.
The most crazy thing of all was that the founder had created a very nice company. They were profitable, had a good reputation, had a strong customer base, and the employees were reasonably happy. If they had just done nothing at all, things would have been fine. In fact, if the appointed CEO just sat in a corner and took a fat salary and didn't do anything else - the company was still doing well enough to really make it. In fact, if they would have just let the founder do his thing, all they would have had to do was sit back and watch their share valuation grow. In fact, when things first got bad, the founder drummed up new independent investors to buy it back - but they refused. The founder got new projects started that customers offered to pay big money for - they killed it. So even with the CEO driving things into the dirt, he still would have been able to keep the company and investors in the money if they would have just left things alone.
Don't even get me started about the stealth companies they set up and sub contracted with in india to siphon off profit, product, and controll.
Anyhow, at this point there are a bunch of battles going on and it seems like lawsuits are ready to fly, most of the key employees have been driven off (including myself) and it seems that the customers suffered enough neglect thru all of this that they are starting to get pissed, and it seems like the company has suffered enough damage thru all of this that I would be supprised if it survived.
So the moral is, PLEASE be carefull with VC's. You have no idea how ugly it can get.
It is called SELinux and has been built into Linux for a long time. But unless you need it for a specific situation, privilege separation is a pain in the ass which is why many people turn it off. I would be glad to sacrifice some usability if it made windows more secure, but ironically a Linux box with privilege separation turned off is still more secure.
I could see that and link to it, or I could participate in their comments, or send them an e-mail saying, 'What's going on?' And that told those people that someone was listening to their rants, that this is a different world than the one in which no one listens.
More like, they search all the blogs like/. and mod down anyone who critizes Microsoft or calls their products proprietary pieces of shit.
If I had 5 mod points, I'd give them all to you right now. Balance and compromise with copyrights is like balance and compromise with the maggots at a picnic. You either get rid of all of them, or get ran over with parasites. If you don't you're only going to exhaust yourself as things constantly grow out of control. Hey lookie! Copyrights are constantly growing out of controll. We're under constant attack, we're under constant pressure to expand their scope, no matter what the policy is they never let it rest. If people understoodd that feeding copyrights is like feeding maggots, they might not get all shocked when they ruin the fresh food.
Slashdot Mirror
There is just one problem with what you are saying. The growth of the US government has been exponential, it can only go on for so much longer without running up against the laws of physics. If the government can't find it within itself to reduce its size this term (it won't), the entire exonomy will likely collapse on its own weight and the US dollar isn't likely to survive as a currency. The US economy is already teetering on the edge of a cliff, with too much debt, and too much money loaned into circulation. With housing on the wane, and both a bubble in the stock market and the bond market, the gig is up. Lets fact it, neither party has what it takes to stop it. We are in deep shit.
That is because the debate isn't motivated by science, it is motivated by coal (and coal to gasoline conversion technologies) and how the US has enough of it to be energy independent for up to 800 years, and how the US being energy independent would choke off half the world oil despots of their coveted revenue streams. It has to do with the fact that OPEC can't compete off of price, and so the only other way they can compete is regulating the daylights ouf of it like they did with nuclear 30 years prior. Global warming my ass, I guarantee you that the last thing in the universe motivating the battle cry for global warming is a genuine concern for the environment. Is it any wonder they went after the US and left China (the other major coal producer) alone. Is it any wonder that got all the major non-coal countries to gang up on the US with Kyoto. If you look at the coal energy projection breakdowns prepared for energy company share holders and then you look at the ones prepared for publications like popular science, it becomes clear the global warming crowd are liars pushing an agenda.
You don't understand.
Between the housing debt, the credit card debt, the auto debt, the city debt, the state debt, the federal government debt, corporate debt, financial sector debt, and 50 trillion dollars worth of pre obligated costs like social security and medicare. The US is bankrupt. It is about 500K per family increasing at about 30K per year. Can your family pay that?
The US economy is getting ready to collapse, and what do governments do when their economies collapse? Well, They become police states. They tend to do things like track all the citizens travels, monitor all their finances and internet activity, suspend habeas corpus. HEY LOOKIE, the US did all that !!!!
Also, do you know what a financial Derivative is? Well you should because the total estimated outstanding derivitave obligations just recently passed the Quadrillion mark. No I mean Quadrillion, not Billion, Trillion, not Hundred Billion, or Hundred Trillion. With a US GDP of 12 trillion per year, my question is how the hell can that be solvent??? (Hint, it isn't)
Every country in the world will be hit by the collapse, but none the less, only a fool would not be considering an exit strategy at this time or preparing for disaster at home. Buddy, the Titanic has been hit by an iceberg and you had better not be like those passangers who dallied around before getting on the lifeboats.
You know what I think you're problem is. That the global warming debate is not a debate about science, and it's not a debate about temperature. It's a debate about control. If the global warming proponents addressed the latter with any shred of sincerety and decency, than the formers would work themselves out without issue. In fact, more specifically the debate is about coal, and how the US has an 800 years supply worth, and how if the US made use of it (with technologies like coal gassification), we would free ourselves from every oil lord facist loony bin all over the planet. The debate is about how if an industry can't compete on costs and merits, then their only other option is to raise the costs of competitors by forcing government regulations on them.
Ssssssh! Shut up, the global warming mob might hear you.
First off, I have worked in a lot of startups and have seen first hand how patents work ... so let me explain. Unless it's a lawyer startup, most innovators and startups will get a patnet for one reason and one reason only. To hold off the lawsuits. Sometimes it gives investors a warm cozy feeling of "protection", sometimes it gets us in good on a cross licensing agreement so we avoid even more lawsuits, but the number one reason is really lawsuits and that is all. While, in theory, you don't need to get a patent to prove prior art, in practice nothing holds back the dogs better then shoving a patent in their face and telling them F**k off.
Second off, many don't seem to understand that patents don't encourage innovation, all they do is force the market to center arround invention controlls instead of invention services. Well, let me tell you, inventors are good at inventing things, large corporations, lawyers, and governments are good at controlling things. So in the end, patnets do not help inventors, they help monopolies and bureauocrats.
Third off, right now patents are bearable because the control value of them tends to exceed the service value. But eventually nanotech and 3d printers are going to greate a new age of manufacturing and invention service centered from the home. Just look at what the copyright cartel did when they started to loose controll over information monopolies, well with patents it will be far more violent.
Where did you learn that, in a public school? No they clamored for public education to attack the Catholic power base by forcing kids out of the Catholic system into a public one and to force the Irish immigrants out of the entrepreneur sector into the factory one. Also, you should understand that it is the government sector that hasn't progressed since the 18 century. The assumption that if the government didn't do something that there would be no progress from 18 century times in education is ignorant and naive. Counter examples exist all over the world. Hong Kong didn't have any publicly funded schools at all for nearly 25 years with over 90% education rates, so you are dead wrong. Even today they don't have public schools, just subsidized private tuition in some cases.
Hey wait, no special needs programs? High cultural diversity? No NEA? No federal standards? No bond funded super schools? The US education system should blow them away ... BZZT WRONG. It's the other way around.
Nah, they probably just couldn't milk it for any more donation money to prop up their "causes" any more.
What the hell's wrong with you, the government needs those taxes to be proactive about things.
.... well anyhow ..... never mind ..... ok lets try ..... ..... scrap that one.... .... oops, hold on here I'm working on it ..... ..... shit, scratch that .... .....@#@#$#$%%%^
if not for taxes to pay for public education, our kids would be the dubmest in the free world, wiat..... never mind
if not for taxes, our social security and medicare programs would be bankrupt. wait
if not for taxes to fight the war on drugs, we would have drug problems in every inner city, uh
if not for taxes, the government would need to go into debt,
if not for taxes our medical and college education costs would be out of reach,
if not for taxes to pay for war, we'd be loosing the war on terror,
Well, FU! you're just not trying hard enough to see how valuable all these taxs are for everyone. We NEED the government to be "proactive"
Ya know, those people who thought the earth wasn't the center of the universe when everyone else clearly knew it was. they were Zealouts.
... what's it gonna take. From the very first day we have been "warned" that our zealot IP attitude is going to ruin Linux and open source, well more bullshit. One of these days they're going to realise that they need us more than we need them, and that they're the followers while people like RMS are the leaders.
And those people who believed that religion and government should be chosen by individuals and not kings, they were zealots also.
And those people who wanted to kill slavery and the US plantation system and go up against the big business plantations, they were also zealots.
And those black people who wanted to use the same bathrooms, and sit at the front of the bus. They were zealots too.
Well FUCK. The copyright cartell trys to treat information exactly like it's a property right when it's clearly not, and then force massive government regulations down our throat to fence off every bit of it, and then those of us who try to secure our right to share information freely in the information age - we're called the zealots? God fuckin dammit
Straight Talk about Copyrights
A violent protest against Patents
A Bitter protest against copyrights
All Cisco has to do is quit beating competitors over the head with patents and other anti-competitive practices and compete off of merrit and service instead. If it wasn't for things like this artifically pumping up the price of Cisco products and locking out competitors, other vendors would be more than happy to build their own brand recognition. IMHO, Cisco is getting exactly the plate that they dished themselves up, and now they wine about security, sub par products, and quality. HA! What a joke.
In a way, that's what people have been doing with housing, but it backfired because the inflation started to trickle down into prices but not pay.
I once herd a person say that both the Euro and the Dollar are pieces of trash trying to find their value relative to each other. The Euro will probably out last the Dollar, but an economic collapse in the US will probably force a Euro collapse too.
If all levels of government quit going into debt, cut back drastically on all programs and taxes, and the fed quit loaning out new money, and they remonitized all cash and debt with gold. That would starve off a total collapse at the cost of a drastic and painfull transition, but IMHO, the chances of that happening before it's too late are pretty much negative infinity.
In a hyperinflationary depression the economy reaches a point where investors won't invest in businesses, so they then put all their money into commodities. This causes commodities to skyrocket, unemployment to go up, and pay to be pressured down. So everything goes up in price except for pay and profit. That makes the defaults on debt worse, makes the drive to commodities even more, causing a vicious circle. This happened in the late 70's in the US and we were able to break out of it by offering 21% interest on bonds to get investors to stop dumping cash. But this time a 21% prime will rip the US economy to shreds. BTW, over the last 5 years commodities have trippled while pay has done nearly nothing.
First off, the economy is not on the upswing. While we don't seem to have another dot.com bubble, we absolutely have a housing bubble and that is worse! If your stock tanks, you still aren't making monthly payments on it and it's a lot more liquid. The record low savings rates and record high debt rates are not symptoms of a healthy economy. Neither is the account deficit over 6%. So far the US is the only country in history to have that high of an account deficit and not have a currency collapse. The fact that it is increasing rapidly is not good. (BTW, I know it's political season, so let me just say it's not Bush's fault, but structural - for people who think I'm bashing Bush)
Not in the US, not since 1911, the year of the federal reserve act. You can't keep printing up money and loaning it into the economy and expect nothing bad to happen. In fact, the efficiency of the information age means that when the money passes thru, that adjustment will be far more extreme, not less extreme. The worst part is that the Fed thinks they have lernt the lesson of the great depression - that the solution is more liquidity. No it's not! It will just change it from a great depression to a hyperinflationary great depression. I don't think people have any idea what they're in for.
Why is everyone so sureal. Any look at the numbers is just terrible, do people understand that the dollar can't make it as a global reserve currency for more than a few more years and likely can't make it as a currency at all within the next decade? Can your family afford a debt of about 480K that is increasing at the rate of about 30K per year? Well, between all the obligations and systemic debt it already must.
I'm serious. The more stupid and computer illiterate people you scare off, the better off we all will be.
I'm glad you mentioned that, because while I keep hearing about this global outsourcing threat, I never seem to experience it. In fact, just a few decades ago, it used to cost over 100 million to roll out a competitive OS. Now I can roll my own OS in a matter of minutes from my desktop. When I was a kid, calls just 200 miles away would cost over 25 cents per minute, now they are less than 3 cents per minute using VOIP asterisk to the other side of the planet. CRM solutions that used to cost $30000 are now free. In many cases, by using open source my costs are minimal compaired to what people are used to.
When push comes to shove, companies don't hire people to provide software, they hire people to provide services. They are far more interested in things like "if my phone system crashes will I have someone on site to diagnose it immediately" then they are with things like "you cost this much per hour while a developer in india cost that much". They are far more interested in things like, "I need my computers to do this and that for me, tell me the costs, pros and cons" and me being right there to tell them in plain english immediately. With open source, I have millions of dollars worth of pre developed stuff that I can make working prototypes with in a matter of hours. That hyper producitivity more than offsets the competition 10 timezones away.
One more thing. Ths US dollar is overvalued and has too much debt attached to it. Eventually things, especially pay, will re-adjust with what they pay overseas. At which time the US is more than capable of competing against China and India head on because we have more infrastructure, more economic freedoms, and a culture more adjusted to free markets, the industrial revolution, and the information age. So how do we survive the transtition, simple, get out of debt no matter what and buy lots of silver and gold while your US dollars are still overvalued. A person who plays this right could bet rich from the transition, not get put out of a job.
My wishes ...
... and make so I can force those javascript hover-over ads to act 'hidden' without the javascript program knowing.
/., you know)
... also, I know this is wishfull thinking but it would be nice if various movie formats, ... wishfull thinking)
...
... or so I can open a linux xterm in a new tab. (great for development)
It would be nice if I can force javascript popups to open in another tab if I like
I hate it when I hover over a link, and it doesn't tell me what it links to at the bottom of the page,
can you force it?
It woud be cool if the bookmarks, the view source, and the javascript debug could be opened in new tabs.
If fact, why not put most all the menu options in a tab that can brought up by pressing F2 of something
have a built in spell checker for posts (for
have an option on firefox where it won't play flash nor sounds unless I click on it.
pdf, mp3, and ogg integrated into the linux browser by default. ( i know, too much proprietary crap
have it so I can drag and drop tabs from one window to another (so I can consolidate stuff)
Have an option so that if I go beyond a certain number of tabs, it will create 2 rows of them or more.
Crazy wish
Have a firefox plugin that renders X programs in different tabs, so I can use it as a window manager on Linux.
NOTE: I recently set up firefox so that it loaded up my own local html page on startup which
not only had all my favorite bookmarks on it, but also hacked it to have my most used Linux programs
on it - that I can click and run. I love it. It's the best program manager I've ever had.
I made it so that any reference to "shell:" will run a script I wrote, so that for example shell:tet
will run the tetris program when clicked on.
Usually when politics is about the environment, it's about trillions and trillions of dollars worth of government impositions on every last aspect of private individual lives. Anything from toilets, to showerheads, to cell phones, to jumping thru 100 hoops to use your car. In fact, it's not uncommon for companies to exploit environmental issues to their favor (eg regulate to drive used cars out of the market place, lobby to force companies to use a particular monitoring technology that only you have, kill electricity competition like nuclear power) Are you sure a more appropiate description - pirate party hijacked by enviromental politics?
It just means that the FBI needs a high level Linux hacker.
This really does happen, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I never would have believed it.
In one company I worked for, the CEO (who was mutually appointed, but not the founder) immediately started driving the company into the dirt. He would do things like a big company CEO would do, like get into global car rental agreements. Things that would probably work for a large company, but are absolutely insane and suicidal for a small startup.
When it became obvious that the CEO was making things worse, rather than kick him out, the VC's used him to drive the company into the dirt. Well not exactly, they would drive the company to the brink of bankruptcy which would always coax the founder to give up pay and sell shares to the VC's for cash to "save" the company. (the CEO never took a cut) After this happened a few times and they did nothing to get rid of the CEO, the founder finally said "it's either me or him" at which time they finally fired the CEO. (whith a quarter million doller severance). But by that time the VC's had majority shares, and it was too late.
A few months later, they fired the founder when he wouldn't give them a blank check with the board of directors. Also, his termination was clearly wrongfull termination, and his severence was refused even though it was in his contract, but they were counting on him not suing the company because he founded it, he still held shares, and was still on the board.
Then they continued to use their influence to drive the company into the dirt, and when the company was on the brink again they would loan the company money to "save" it. You see, the founder still had shares, and was still on the borad, but lenders have first rights over share holders - so if they lend the company into bankruptcy, they get it - ALL of it.
The most crazy thing of all was that the founder had created a very nice company. They were profitable, had a good reputation, had a strong customer base, and the employees were reasonably happy. If they had just done nothing at all, things would have been fine. In fact, if the appointed CEO just sat in a corner and took a fat salary and didn't do anything else - the company was still doing well enough to really make it. In fact, if they would have just let the founder do his thing, all they would have had to do was sit back and watch their share valuation grow. In fact, when things first got bad, the founder drummed up new independent investors to buy it back - but they refused. The founder got new projects started that customers offered to pay big money for - they killed it. So even with the CEO driving things into the dirt, he still would have been able to keep the company and investors in the money if they would have just left things alone.
Don't even get me started about the stealth companies they set up and sub contracted with in india to siphon off profit, product, and controll.
Anyhow, at this point there are a bunch of battles going on and it seems like lawsuits are ready to fly, most of the key employees have been driven off (including myself) and it seems that the customers suffered enough neglect thru all of this that they are starting to get pissed, and it seems like the company has suffered enough damage thru all of this that I would be supprised if it survived.
So the moral is, PLEASE be carefull with VC's. You have no idea how ugly it can get.
It is called SELinux and has been built into Linux for a long time. But unless you need it for a specific situation, privilege separation is a pain in the ass which is why many people turn it off. I would be glad to sacrifice some usability if it made windows more secure, but ironically a Linux box with privilege separation turned off is still more secure.
More like, they search all the blogs like /. and mod down anyone who critizes Microsoft or calls their products proprietary pieces of shit.
If I had 5 mod points, I'd give them all to you right now. Balance and compromise with copyrights is like balance and compromise with the maggots at a picnic. You either get rid of all of them, or get ran over with parasites. If you don't you're only going to exhaust yourself as things constantly grow out of control. Hey lookie! Copyrights are constantly growing out of controll. We're under constant attack, we're under constant pressure to expand their scope, no matter what the policy is they never let it rest. If people understoodd that feeding copyrights is like feeding maggots, they might not get all shocked when they ruin the fresh food.