I didn't say that's how they should work. I said that's how they will work, if they have to to get the work done. It's the question of motivation and the work being its own reward.
Lilienthal said "Sacrifices must be made," not, "Is this covered in my benefits package?"
But that doesn't mean that the sacrifices can't be made while working for NASA. Some have.
Why bust your hump getting MS or PhD in one of the hard sciences/engineering, only to land a job making less than 80k?
Because it is all you want to do. That's the only reason to do it in the first place. A real scientist/engineer will live in a garage and scrounge dumpsters for materials if he has to. Some of them do.
If you're in it for the money, go sell real estate; please.
Or did you miss the entire outsourcing thing that's been going on for the past 25 years?
I outsource to China myself, because I cannot compete with them on the low end. I knew I'd end up here 30 years ago. I pay per item. In other words, I'm buying things from them and remarketing. I don't make the stuff. I just brand it and sell it. It's retail trade. I'm nothing but a marketing middleman. The Chinese factory's unpaid American sales staff. Although on paper I may look like the real company this is an illusion.
I'm a shop keeper. They make shit. I collect abstractions of wealth. They create wealth.
And the means to create wealth. Their profit margins are low in part because of the percentage of them that goes into capital investment in infrastructure. They're building the factories.
We're decommissioning ours.
And my abstractions flow increasingly in their direction, since when I trade my astractions for goods it tends to flow back to them again, since everyone else who can profit by it is outsourcing as well.
Yes, I'm looking from another galaxy, but through a really good telescope. You might want to try it sometime. It lets you see things as they really are, which is, as often as not, not what you thought they were.
Outsourcing has been going on for a lot more than 25 years. The American auto industry was built on outsourcing. But back in the day an American company outsourced to another American company and the money earned was used to buy American made goods, while American made goods flowed overseas. Dollars ciculated in America, each dollar doing a dollar's worth of work each time it changed hands.
Now the goods flow from overseas, and that's where the money is dribbling to as well, because money has no value other than what it represents in the goods it is exchanged for. The value of money (as opposed to the quantity) follows the stuff.
And while the most money may remain here, its actual buying power is often lower than what remains there, because money has no value, other than what you can exchange it for; and they can often exchange a dollar for more than we can exchange fifty dollars for.
That's one of the reasons they can work cheaper than us if we pay them based on our goods values.
Another reason is that they don't have a "lifestyle" that has been built around sucking at the tit of world.
The world wants its tit back. You might have to learn to chew your own solid food before your life is done. Start getting used to the idea now.
Or do you subscribe to the theory that sending large sums of money to Washington and the PTO review were simply a big coincidence.
No. I subscribe to the theory that about 98% of all patents actually granted these days are bogus, and 100% of software and "process" patents are bogus.
I empathize with widows. I was raised by one. Had $16 in her pocket when my father died. I was one and about to be diagnosed with a terminal illness, and she was pregnant and didn't know it yet. We had some hard times. My brother's "crib" was a dresser drawer in a dresser given to her by the Salvation Army.
I empathise with people fighting for the money due them from their work on intellectual property. My uncle Al spent most of his life doing that. He ended up getting money, but never did get the Nobel committie to acknowledge his work that lead to the award of the prize. There's even a book written about how he got screwed by his department head.
I guess I should read it or something.
I also empathise with basement electronics tinkerers. I've been one myself for about 40 years now. Used to go to the town dump to salvage parts from discarded TVs and radios.
In all those years I've come up with many things that I could have gotten a patent on, but only one that I believe may be legitimately patentable. I might apply for that one. I havn't bothered for the others.
I have no emapthy for RIM, per se, and the Blackberry is a tool of a "lifestyle" I personally find loathsome.
Yes, fighting a patent is expensive. So expensive that only large companies can afford it.
More's the pity.
They should never have been granted in the first place and saved everyone, including the widow, a lot of trouble and expense over nothing.
A patent holding company. The company doesn't tinker with anything but paper.
Its the widow of a basement inventor
For whose benefit the company currently exists and who certainly doesn't want control of the system. She wants the money.
What does she herself do?
The numbers got out of hand only after RIM refused to pay reasonable licensing fees of roughly $4 million.
If the patents are good, that's reasonable. If they aren't, it's extortion. The fact that it's a widow doing the extorting doesn't make it more ethical; any more than being an orphan makes piracy ethically acceptable.
And it isn't RIM's fault if the basement tinkerer didn't come up with something legitimately patentable, even if he left a poor, starving widow behind. Perhaps she can figure out something for the company to do.
which is what most people really care about when making purchasing choices
Purchasing choices are irrelevant.
The assembly in China.
Which is where all the money and infrastructure goes.
Basically China is using Apple to finance all the R&D for them and handle the marketing while they make all the actual stuff and take the dough, because the iPod doens't make any money for Apple.
Apple makes its money by selling the razor blades, the "content" to put on the iPod.
Apple doesn't make or control that "content" either. They just market it.
Possibly the settlement could involve transfer of the system to NTP's control?
Good Lord! The last thing in the world NTP wants is control of the system. They're just in it for the money.
If they had control of the system they might actually have to do something like work to earn their living, instead of just buying, selling and litigating bits of paper. They much prefer being part of the something for nothing economy.
KFG
Re:Sinners stay on earth!
on
Inescapable Data
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
OMG the sky is falling because our fridges are talking to our cell phones!!!
And the conversation is being monitored and logged. Your own car may already be giving evidence against you.
A response to the first guy to respond to you brings up the study that I wanted to bring up that mentions that this is the kind of humor most appreciate by my fellow Americans and by Canadians, but there are other kinds of humor out there.
Of course, but I was talking in the context of a caveman getting stomped on by a dinosaur and the perception of threat to the viewer and how that relates to comedy. I was not trying to define all of comedy.
The broad definition of comedy is simply whatever makes you laugh.
Here's the joke that some Europeans found most funny:
"To stamp out burning ducks."
One of my own all time favorites. Note that it involves flaming ducks getting stomped flat. No violence inherent in that system. No siree, Bob! This joke is, in fact, the very model for the caveman commercial.
Whereas the bear joke contains no actual violence at all. It's funny because of the way way it twists the normal perception of the threatening situation. It becomes even funnier when you get down to the meta level of the joke and realize it isn't doing anything but speaking an eternal verity of life. A really good lock on your front door doesn't keep the burgler from getting in. It just makes your neighbor a more attractive target.
A better example would have been Shaw's observation that England and America were two nations seperated by a common language. That one's a hoot.
Surreal humor is the core of why Monty Python and Douglas Adams are funny.
Ford Prefect was the perfect putz. Take the putz out and the material isn't funny anymore. Note also that what escalates is the threat to Prefect. What Adams was particularly good at was the creation, release and recreation of tension. He escalates from the worst possible scenario, resolves it, then shows that Ford is incongrously worse off than before.
His house is coming to an end, but that's ok, because his house doesn't matter. ..because the world is coming to an end, but that's ok because at least he himself survives, but that means he is subjected to Vogon poetry. . . ad infinitum.
The model for Adams, by the way, is Dickens.
The guy is fired for not fulfilling a boss's impossible demands. It's funny because we've all been there to some degree (and because of the surreal nature of the boss requiring something that doesn't yet exist).
No, because we've all been there makes it tragedy. Tragedy relies on empathy. We've all stubbed our toes. What we do when we watch tragedy is vicarioulsy feel bad for ourselves.
What makes the bit funny is the caveman's reaction, the delivery of the joke, letting us know to react to him as a putz. If the caveman had simply looked at his boss and said, "Ya know? Yer a fuckin' putz" there would have been no comedy. Getting fired, of course, is a major threat and hurt in today's world. Far moreso than getting stomped by a dinosaur. People have killed themselves over it.
When someone is really hurt, I think most people stops to find it funny.
Perhaps, but people might surprise you.
I found it more entertaining than my friends seeing the accident.
Ah, but what about the strangers?
The difference in movies is that you know that no one was hurt.
Well we were talking within the context of film/stupid TV ads/jokes. There weren't really two campers and a bear. It's just a joke. No caveman actually got stomped by a dinosaur.
Obviously it isn't a definitive rule that it's funnier when other people get hurt.
"Threat" and "hurt" cover a broad range. For instance, the social faux pas, the basis of the greatest threat known to mankind, public speaking; and the basis of much humor, although you might want to go watch a Daffy Duck cartoon and think over your position.
See, I don't see how there's necessarily a disconnect. So what if there's a threatening image that resonates with a part of the brain? That doesn't mean it can't be funny.
In fact, they are intimately connected. Remember Mel Brooks' famous explanation of the difference between tragedy and comedy:
If I stub my toe; that's tragedy.
If you fall down a manhole and die; that's comedy.
Perhaps the best joke expression of this the one that ends with the punchline:
I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.
Comedy is a threatening situation that gets the other guy, not you, because he's a putz, and you're not, so you experience the vicarious superiority of having survived the threat. No threat, no sense of superiority, no comedy.
. ..the days of everyone wanting his or her own webpage just to rant out a bunch of poorly stucture meme-junk are over as well. That's what blogs are for.
And thank God you don't need a webpage for that. I, for one, welcome our direct to the mind meme-junk beaming overlords.
Slashdot Mirror
And the reason the word is spelled "fore" is because it's not a number, it's a direction. The opposite of "aft."
Look out ahead.
Although if your swing really, really sucks. . .
KFG
If you want the best foods and the best four walls and roof around, bust your hump for money.
You can get the best on $40k a year.
The rest is just more expensive.
Any engineer worth his salt, and paycheck, should understand that.
KFG
I was thinking Warner
Warner isn't responsible for the Walkman.
KFG
And if America adopts your attitude. . .
Then we might have a few engineers who are actually worth a crap, and a salary.
KFG
Hey business people? Want professionals? Gotta pay a professional wage. Welcome to reality.
Perhaps if there were fewer worker bees and more professionals in the field they could command professional wages.
KFG
Perhaps you should read my post again.
convince a prospective wife to overlook his scientist-ic geekiness and marry him.
On the other hand, someone who would have a wife like this probably shouldn't be a scientist/engineer in the first place either.
KFG
I didn't say that's how they should work. I said that's how they will work, if they have to to get the work done. It's the question of motivation and the work being its own reward.
Lilienthal said "Sacrifices must be made," not, "Is this covered in my benefits package?"
But that doesn't mean that the sacrifices can't be made while working for NASA. Some have.
KFG
Why bust your hump getting MS or PhD in one of the hard sciences/engineering, only to land a job making less than 80k?
Because it is all you want to do. That's the only reason to do it in the first place. A real scientist/engineer will live in a garage and scrounge dumpsters for materials if he has to. Some of them do.
If you're in it for the money, go sell real estate; please.
KFG
Or did you miss the entire outsourcing thing that's been going on for the past 25 years?
I outsource to China myself, because I cannot compete with them on the low end. I knew I'd end up here 30 years ago. I pay per item. In other words, I'm buying things from them and remarketing. I don't make the stuff. I just brand it and sell it. It's retail trade. I'm nothing but a marketing middleman. The Chinese factory's unpaid American sales staff. Although on paper I may look like the real company this is an illusion.
I'm a shop keeper. They make shit. I collect abstractions of wealth. They create wealth.
And the means to create wealth. Their profit margins are low in part because of the percentage of them that goes into capital investment in infrastructure. They're building the factories.
We're decommissioning ours.
And my abstractions flow increasingly in their direction, since when I trade my astractions for goods it tends to flow back to them again, since everyone else who can profit by it is outsourcing as well.
Yes, I'm looking from another galaxy, but through a really good telescope. You might want to try it sometime. It lets you see things as they really are, which is, as often as not, not what you thought they were.
Outsourcing has been going on for a lot more than 25 years. The American auto industry was built on outsourcing. But back in the day an American company outsourced to another American company and the money earned was used to buy American made goods, while American made goods flowed overseas. Dollars ciculated in America, each dollar doing a dollar's worth of work each time it changed hands.
Now the goods flow from overseas, and that's where the money is dribbling to as well, because money has no value other than what it represents in the goods it is exchanged for. The value of money (as opposed to the quantity) follows the stuff.
And while the most money may remain here, its actual buying power is often lower than what remains there, because money has no value, other than what you can exchange it for; and they can often exchange a dollar for more than we can exchange fifty dollars for.
That's one of the reasons they can work cheaper than us if we pay them based on our goods values.
Another reason is that they don't have a "lifestyle" that has been built around sucking at the tit of world.
The world wants its tit back. You might have to learn to chew your own solid food before your life is done. Start getting used to the idea now.
KFG
. . .it is actually the US company that made most of the money. US does not have a real "trade deficit".
Do not mistake money for wealth.
KFG
Or do you subscribe to the theory that sending large sums of money to Washington and the PTO review were simply a big coincidence.
No. I subscribe to the theory that about 98% of all patents actually granted these days are bogus, and 100% of software and "process" patents are bogus.
I empathize with widows. I was raised by one. Had $16 in her pocket when my father died. I was one and about to be diagnosed with a terminal illness, and she was pregnant and didn't know it yet. We had some hard times. My brother's "crib" was a dresser drawer in a dresser given to her by the Salvation Army.
I empathise with people fighting for the money due them from their work on intellectual property. My uncle Al spent most of his life doing that. He ended up getting money, but never did get the Nobel committie to acknowledge his work that lead to the award of the prize. There's even a book written about how he got screwed by his department head.
I guess I should read it or something.
I also empathise with basement electronics tinkerers. I've been one myself for about 40 years now. Used to go to the town dump to salvage parts from discarded TVs and radios.
In all those years I've come up with many things that I could have gotten a patent on, but only one that I believe may be legitimately patentable. I might apply for that one. I havn't bothered for the others.
I have no emapthy for RIM, per se, and the Blackberry is a tool of a "lifestyle" I personally find loathsome.
Yes, fighting a patent is expensive. So expensive that only large companies can afford it.
More's the pity.
They should never have been granted in the first place and saved everyone, including the widow, a lot of trouble and expense over nothing.
KFG
Who do you think NTP is?
A patent holding company. The company doesn't tinker with anything but paper.
Its the widow of a basement inventor
For whose benefit the company currently exists and who certainly doesn't want control of the system. She wants the money.
What does she herself do?
The numbers got out of hand only after RIM refused to pay reasonable licensing fees of roughly $4 million.
If the patents are good, that's reasonable. If they aren't, it's extortion. The fact that it's a widow doing the extorting doesn't make it more ethical; any more than being an orphan makes piracy ethically acceptable.
And it isn't RIM's fault if the basement tinkerer didn't come up with something legitimately patentable, even if he left a poor, starving widow behind. Perhaps she can figure out something for the company to do.
KFG
Got that wrong, too: Sony == Japan, BMG == Germany
Oooooh! Irony. No, I'm afraid we don't have much call for that around these parts.
KFG
It is well known that Apple makes its money off the iPod.
Mea Culpa.
KFG
which is what most people really care about when making purchasing choices
Purchasing choices are irrelevant.
The assembly in China.
Which is where all the money and infrastructure goes.
Basically China is using Apple to finance all the R&D for them and handle the marketing while they make all the actual stuff and take the dough, because the iPod doens't make any money for Apple.
Apple makes its money by selling the razor blades, the "content" to put on the iPod.
Apple doesn't make or control that "content" either. They just market it.
Who makes the "content"?
AHA! Sony/BMG
Go USA!
KFG
Oh really? Just where is the iPod made?
KFG
Possibly the settlement could involve transfer of the system to NTP's control?
Good Lord! The last thing in the world NTP wants is control of the system. They're just in it for the money.
If they had control of the system they might actually have to do something like work to earn their living, instead of just buying, selling and litigating bits of paper. They much prefer being part of the something for nothing economy.
KFG
OMG the sky is falling because our fridges are talking to our cell phones!!!
And the conversation is being monitored and logged. Your own car may already be giving evidence against you.
KFG
I believe that this view of "the convergence" is as overly optimistic . . .
If you view a world where your XML driven refrigerator does your banking for you with optimism you and I aren't likely to get along.
I'm getting an icebox.
KFG
A response to the first guy to respond to you brings up the study that I wanted to bring up that mentions that this is the kind of humor most appreciate by my fellow Americans and by Canadians, but there are other kinds of humor out there.
.because the world is coming to an end, but that's ok because at least he himself survives, but that means he is subjected to Vogon poetry. . . ad infinitum.
Of course, but I was talking in the context of a caveman getting stomped on by a dinosaur and the perception of threat to the viewer and how that relates to comedy. I was not trying to define all of comedy.
The broad definition of comedy is simply whatever makes you laugh.
Here's the joke that some Europeans found most funny:
"To stamp out burning ducks."
One of my own all time favorites. Note that it involves flaming ducks getting stomped flat. No violence inherent in that system. No siree, Bob! This joke is, in fact, the very model for the caveman commercial.
Whereas the bear joke contains no actual violence at all. It's funny because of the way way it twists the normal perception of the threatening situation. It becomes even funnier when you get down to the meta level of the joke and realize it isn't doing anything but speaking an eternal verity of life. A really good lock on your front door doesn't keep the burgler from getting in. It just makes your neighbor a more attractive target.
A better example would have been Shaw's observation that England and America were two nations seperated by a common language. That one's a hoot.
Surreal humor is the core of why Monty Python and Douglas Adams are funny.
Ford Prefect was the perfect putz. Take the putz out and the material isn't funny anymore. Note also that what escalates is the threat to Prefect. What Adams was particularly good at was the creation, release and recreation of tension. He escalates from the worst possible scenario, resolves it, then shows that Ford is incongrously worse off than before.
His house is coming to an end, but that's ok, because his house doesn't matter. .
The model for Adams, by the way, is Dickens.
The guy is fired for not fulfilling a boss's impossible demands. It's funny because we've all been there to some degree (and because of the surreal nature of the boss requiring something that doesn't yet exist).
No, because we've all been there makes it tragedy. Tragedy relies on empathy. We've all stubbed our toes. What we do when we watch tragedy is vicarioulsy feel bad for ourselves.
What makes the bit funny is the caveman's reaction, the delivery of the joke, letting us know to react to him as a putz. If the caveman had simply looked at his boss and said, "Ya know? Yer a fuckin' putz" there would have been no comedy. Getting fired, of course, is a major threat and hurt in today's world. Far moreso than getting stomped by a dinosaur. People have killed themselves over it.
KFG
. . .enough with laws that liken pirates to terrorists
Why on earth do you think they called him the Dread Pirate Roberts?
Among our tools are terror.
KFG
When someone is really hurt, I think most people stops to find it funny.
Perhaps, but people might surprise you.
I found it more entertaining than my friends seeing the accident.
Ah, but what about the strangers?
The difference in movies is that you know that no one was hurt.
Well we were talking within the context of film/stupid TV ads/jokes. There weren't really two campers and a bear. It's just a joke. No caveman actually got stomped by a dinosaur.
Obviously it isn't a definitive rule that it's funnier when other people get hurt.
"Threat" and "hurt" cover a broad range. For instance, the social faux pas, the basis of the greatest threat known to mankind, public speaking; and the basis of much humor, although you might want to go watch a Daffy Duck cartoon and think over your position.
KFG
See, I don't see how there's necessarily a disconnect. So what if there's a threatening image that resonates with a part of the brain? That doesn't mean it can't be funny.
In fact, they are intimately connected. Remember Mel Brooks' famous explanation of the difference between tragedy and comedy:
If I stub my toe; that's tragedy.
If you fall down a manhole and die; that's comedy.
Perhaps the best joke expression of this the one that ends with the punchline:
I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.
Comedy is a threatening situation that gets the other guy, not you, because he's a putz, and you're not, so you experience the vicarious superiority of having survived the threat. No threat, no sense of superiority, no comedy.
KFG
. . .the days of everyone wanting his or her own webpage just to rant out a bunch of poorly stucture meme-junk are over as well. That's what blogs are for.
And thank God you don't need a webpage for that. I, for one, welcome our direct to the mind meme-junk beaming overlords.
KFG
. . .even ignoring the fact that just because it warms your body, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's cancerous.
Does that mean I can turn my frickin' space heater back on? It's gettin' frickin' cold in here.
KFG