Wikipedia (nor any other encyclopedia that I know of) doesn't give any sources for its claim that, for example, Norway borders on Sweden, that it has a "very elongated shape" or that it is "generally perceived as clean and modern".
Giving sources for *every* claim you make quickly degrades into nonsense. It should be sufficient to give sources for any claim that isn't patently obviously true. (to anyone with a knowledge of the field anyway) One could actually well argue that the last claim I mention, what Norway is "generally perceived as" doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia, it's very subjective anyway, certainly it's not an undisputable fact.
Choosing to have sex doesn't imply knowing that your partner carries HIV. (You'll know that it's *possible* though, so you willingly take a risk)
Choosing to include sourcecode made by other people in a project of yours imply KNOWING that that sourcecode CERTAINLY is covered by some license or other. And knowing that the combination is CERTAINLY only legal if you comply with whatever licence the code is under.
The difference is significant.
You can only catch the GPL by *knowingly* incorporating code into your project that you MUST KNOW is covered by some licence or other. Even then you can fix it by removing the GPL parts. Write your own replacements. Find some code under BSD that does the same thing. Pay the original author for rigths to his code. Whatever.
The GPL IS viral if you are comparing it to, say, the BSD-license. That is a feature, not a bug.
Thats my choice. I *wrote* that program, that library, whatever. I do not *want* you to be able to take it, add 3 lines, relicense the "improved" program, and out-compete me with my own work.
If you don't like it. Tough luck. Don't distribute my program then. Your "rigth to make a living" argument applies both ways.
It undermines my chances of making a living from MY code if I have to compete with your "improved" version, and you have the advantage that you get all my sourcecode, while I don't get your sourcecode.
All media fails. I'm not convinced other typically used backup-media are significantly more reliable than say a usb-connected external harddisc.
The thing is, even though the harddisc in your computer, and the one in the usb-enclosure are both certainly going to fail, odds are good that they don't fail at precisely the same moment. Aslong as they don't fail at the same time, it does not *matter* that they fail.
This is precisely the same if you backup to tape, to HD, to DVD-R or to any other media.
If the data is very important to you, it can pay to have more than one backup. Personally I take a weekly backup on an external HD, and about once a month I make a complete copy and store with my dad (which lives 200km from me).
That way, if a single harddisc dies, I lose at most a single week of data. If *both* HDs in my house fail (or get stolen, or the house burns, whatever) I lose up to a month of data (depending on when I made the last dad-stored copy)
To me, this is acceptable, and a fair tradeoff between cost, work and security. Other people will have diffeent comfort-levels.
It's not a browser. It's an extremely thin shell around an IE-component. It's an add-on for IE, basically.
Firefox and Safari doesn't need this add-on, as they have by default options in their configuration to delete all sensitive information on program-exit.
Sure. I'm not saying that it can't work in *principle*. I'm just saying that though the idea is old (literally as old as the arpanet -- the very first computers on the arpanet had a separate complete *computer* (called an "imp") for doing the entire networking-thing.
Later, it's been tried literally every 5 years. There actually *exists* "tcp offload engines", they existed 5 years ago. 10 years ago and 15 years ago. They existed in 1969 if you count the imps. (though those where external computers, not cards inserted in a larger computer).
Nevertheless, in 35 years we have yet to see *any* advantage to using such. They have, in actual fact, failed to make inroads.
The general trend is that when they are utterly new, they are marginally faster for some very specialized loads with enormous bandwith. They are however also extremely much less flexible, you lose all of the functionality of your OS network-stack, in exchange for whatever (generally inferior in functionality) stack is on the card.
And it gets *worse* not better. Because computers have grown in power more than bandwith has. Assuming you can generate the data fast enough (which these cards won't help you with!) a perfectly ordinary $599 computer today can easily saturate a Gb-link. It's just a product with no market.
But hi -- that's just my guess. You *MAY* be rigth -- THIS time they will break trough, despite having failed to do precisely that for the last 35 years.
Yeah, sure. But still, the encoding actually used is much more clever;
It ensures that even if you have 99% of the file, you cannot say *anything* about the content of *any* part of the file. There's not a *single* bit of the file that you can guess with better than 50% probability. You know *nothing* about the file, except the file-size.
I agree that every-10th byte is *sligthly* better in this regard that 10% first bytes. However, there's no reason to use every-10th when theres encoding-schemes which are even better than this. (cryptographic secret-splitting techniques is what)
If so, they'll be able to continue doing so. Existence of DRM on CDs doesn't in any serious way affect the desirability of going to concerts. I doubt there are "oozes" of chamber music orchestras, quartets, duos and soloists that make a living trough selling CDs. (I suppose they'll exist, but I don't believe them to be very numerous)
Yeah, sure. But it's capital in the size where you'll generally be able to write up a business-plan, invest some of your own savings and *borrow* the rest from the bank.
Without giving up any part of your company, without letting the bank have any part in your profit. Without selling out any part of the rigths to the device. The bank is satsified that you repay the loand plus normal interest.
This in contrast to venture capital, which generally means giving selling part of your company, often even a *majority* position in your company.
I agree. In Norway we also have a "personal-id-number" which works sort of like a SSN in the states. The main difference being that this is explicitly *not* secret. And *no-one* will assume that you are a certain person just because you happen to know the id-number of that person.
An id-number works perfectly well for *identifying* a certain person. (the bank, the tax-man, the car-registration-people, the unemployment-office and many more will all recognize that a certain number corresponds to a certain person)
It absolutely sucks as *authenthication* though. Because by nessecity you give the number to lots of people and organisations (if you didn't, they couldn't use it to identify you -- duh !) and trusting all these to keep the number secret, and never leak it, very obviously does not work and can not work.
The certificate gives energy-consumption (under a standardised test) in Kwh/year and also corresponds that to what is average consumption for that class of product by giving a note from A to F, also color-coded to make it idiot-proof. (have a look at the link above, I think you'll agree it's easily understandable.
Such certificates are prominently displayed in the stores, and people seem to generally prefer the more efficient products. To the point where a refrigirator, dishwasher or washing-machine that doesn't have an A, or atleast a B is hardly even sellable.
Usage is being expanded, already cars and newly built houses require such certificates, within a few years it'll become compulsory to get older houses tested and present the certificate when selling a house.
I think it works fine. People don't actually like having a cold, poorly isulated house. Give people simple, clear, understandable information, and they will most of the time make the sensible choice.
Classical music lives on state subsidies anyway. Just about every philarmonical orchestra in the world would close shop tomorrow if they didn't get subsidies in some form from government.
I already pay aproximately 90% of the costs associated with oh, say Oslo filharmoniske by paying taxes, the remaining 10% are financed with like 5% tickets to concerts, 2% donations and around 3% from selling CDs.
I don't see why free copying would influence concert-goers or donations much. So worst-case we migth need to raise subsidies from 90% to 93%. In exchange we'd get freely copyable music, and vastly increased enjoyment of the music created.
What makes most sense ? Paying $10million tax-money and getting oh say 50.000 concert-seats and 10.000 CDs (sold at normal CD-price) for the investment. Or paying $10.5million tax-money and getting an unlimited number of CDs mp3s oggs, whatever. Assuming it's sensible to give state-subsidies to culture at all, what gives the most bang for the buck ?
The instruments aren't, by the way, the expensive parts. You get a good practice-violin for around $10.000, and a excellent concert-violin that will last an entire career (and more) for 5-10 times that price. That is, the instruments a profesional violinist needs for an entire career costs only a small fraction of the salary for the same period. I'm thinking even the buildings needed for practice and concerts cost more, amortized over a career, than does the instruments.
Having every 10th byte of a file would be just as copyrigthable as having the first 10% of the file. Atleast there's no logical reason to treat the two differently, especially not when the *purpose* in both cases is to collect pieces until you've got a complete file.
The swarm-technology you talk of *may* still be able to reduce legal liability (though it's hard to say without court-cases), but that's because they work differently;
They split a file in such a way that it can be mathemathically proven that aslong as you've got less than a certain treshold number of pieces, you can say nothing about the file whatsoever, except the filesize.
*THAT* is why you may get away with legally distributing such pieces, especially if you can show that you did not know, and could not know, what the pieces combine to. If a complete file requires 1000 pieces, you can distribute 999 such pieces and have no way whatsoever of knowing *anything* about what is in the file.
The moment you have 1000 pieces though, you can reconstruct the original file.
Unlikely. "tcp offload engines" and similar crap come and die regularily.
The problem is that general-purpose cpus grow in power so quickly that the offload-engines get ever-larger problems beating them. And they get the aditional problem that they don't get packet-filtering or anything else that is not custom-written for that particular card (if it's even possible to convince the card to do it!)
It's also nothing new -- these cards have existed for literally decades, and haven't managed to make any kind of inroads, not even in specialized servers.
Have a look at this year-old Lwn-article for an example listing some disadvantages.
ask.com doesn't even *HAVE* a world-map, so how it can beat Googles is a mystery to me. (they do have a USA-map though)
Re:Hate them! Hate them! Hate them!
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A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
That would utterly suck and be a huge step *backwards*
Problem is, humans are capable of learning. It's easier to learn something if you can *understand* it (what a concept!). What you are suggesting is having items magically appear or disappear from a menu according to some unspecified, complex algorithm. Invariably the algorithm will be *wrong* and nobody will know how to fix it -- because nobody really understands it.
End result ? People quickly learn that certain programs sometimes magically disappear and appear from the list, which makes the list useless for starting those programs. So they pretend that the list don't exist and instead make their own shortcuts or something. I know I never use the windows or kde start-menus for programs I regularily use. Never.
Re:Region coding? About reducing sales
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30 Days of DRM
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· Score: 1
It's not only DVDs. Same for games.
My wife loved Shadow-Hearts. (the PS2-game). The day after renting the first one to try it out, she was in the shop, and happily paid top-dollar (well, euro, but you get the point) for the game. We had v2 -- covenant -- on release-day and again paid full retail, happily.
Now there's v3 -- "from the new world". Not sold in europe. Guess what motivated us to get a chipped PS2 ? (that in itself legal in our jurisdiction) Guess how motivated she was this time of paying full retail for the game -- after having had a a lot of hassle bypassing *deliberate* incompatibilities (which is what region-coding is) ?
It's true that rich westerners could afford significantly less if all goods and services had to be produced by people earning the same, and enjoying the same standards of living as we do.
However, you exagerate. The west is rich *partly* because of the large supply of cheap labor in other countries, but not *only* because of that.
In actual fact, your claims are wrong.
I've eaten bread today. The bread was made by a norwegian baker. (infact he lives less than a km from me and I know him well.) The ingredients going into the bread where *also* all made by Norwegians, with two exceptions: the salt and the honey where imported. It would not have made the bread significantly more expensive to use norwegian salt/honey, those are present in the bread in only minute amounts anyway.
I'm wearing a sweater. It's made of wool. The making of the sweater happened at a norwegian company producing in norway. The yarn used came from Dale, also in norway. The wool used for the yarn came from sheep (duh!) some of which, again, live only a few km from where I live.
I also drank milk. And had butter on my bread. Both made by norwegian companies, producing in Norway, from milk made by norwegian cows eating norwegian grass. (and yes, indeed ! the grass grows by norwegian (plentiful!) rainfall and (less plentiful) sunshine.
My house was built by norwegian carpenters. The main ingredients are wood, from norwegian forests, sand and cement, also from norwegian sources.
A *lot* of what westerners wear, own and eat are made by poorly paid 3rd worlders. It's not even close to the truth to claim "all" though. Indeed the house alone is more than half of my net-worth, and it has less than 5% foreign components. (mainly the glass in the windows (the framing for the windows is locally made) and the electrical switches and fusing (not the cabling, that is norwegian)
As you say, Belgium has dutch and french, so english would be at best a *third* language for most people, I expect. I don't expect that a very large portion of the population in most countries speak 3 or more languages really fluently.
My own first-hand experience is from Norway, from Finnland and from Germany. Of those the germans know the least english, for two reasons. First german is a major language, which means germans have the "luxury" of being less bathed in foreign languages. In Germany movies are re-dubbed to german (not subtitled), same for tv. Germans go on vacation to Mallorca, Turkey, Greece etc and expect the hotel-staff (atleast!) to speak passable german. That's a luxury the we scandinawians don't have, so we're more motivated to learn. Secondly older people in what used to be east-germany had *russian* in school rather than english, so many people above 40-50 will know no or little english unless they're well-educated. Still, its not in the *least* difficult to travel in germany knowing only english.
But that's just bad marketing of self on behalf of the candidate.
When someone asks what kind of projects you where responsible for, what is stopping you from saying; I was responsible for a large project that earned over $20 million for the company. You yourself has to consciously choose to use the cost of a project as a primary parameter. And that's just dumb.
Even in industrialized countries. A small fraction of the population can read English. What I mean by "reading" is to understand the meaning of a book, a letter, etc.
I challenge this. It may be true for *some* industrialized countries, but there's certainly many where the english-knowledge is significantly better than that.
Furthermore, even if you are saying doing trade with or being a traveller in one of the countries where english *is* known by a small fraction -- odds are it's known by a much larger fraction of the people who deal with international trade and/or tourism.
Norway is an industrialized country. Everyone whos had primary and secondary school has had a minimum of 6 years of english-teaching, everyone with more than that (even if they're just car-mechanics) will have had a minimum of 8 years of english.
Aditionally, 80% of the music here is in english, 80% of the movies (subtitled though), perhaps half of all television-programs, and a large fraction of internet and game-media. It's safe to say exposure is high.
No, not everyone speaks english perfectly fluently with no difficulty whatsoever. Reading a book may be slow going for some, reading a letter would be simple for most. The *english* version of Harry Potter outsold the Norwegian one -- on grounds of being available a few months earlier. And that's a teenager-book. It's got simple english, but on the other hand it *is* like 4000 pages or whatever. I'd say anyone who is capable of reading HP in english knows english.
No, not like a native. That's not the point. (I also don't speak/write english as well as similarily educated natives) But well enough to be able to effectively use the language for communicating, and that's the point, isn't it ?
I agree one should learn the mothertongue well first. But I think learning english second can be a good choice.
That'd perhaps be true if projects where only measured by cost, and not by benefit. Which would be amazingly stupid. What you're basically saying is the more resources you waste (i.e. higher cost) the more chance of promotion. If any companies work like that, I pity them.
More relevant is the *benefit* of a project. If your project solves a problem worth a million bucks, while costing 100K to run, it's a *MUCH* better project than the 900K project that also saves (or earns) a million.
It's called ROI, and yes, it can be pretty darn hard to fairly estimate. That's no excuse for not even trying though.
I've got photoalbums. They contain photos, on photopaper. And text written by me and/or my wife. Many of them have great affectionate value to us. The album is not much different than the albums my grandmother used to have, except the pictures are sharper and in color.
Our son will be small only once. If we should lose the pictures of him as a toddler, the pictures would *stay* gone.
So, because the photos are taken with a digital camera, there's backups of them. Geographically distributed backups. This sounds complicated -- it's not. It's as simple as giving grandmother a DVD with all pictures of her grandson, along with the album containing profesionally printed copies of the best of them. Additional expense ? literally 10 minutes of work and $0.50
The knowledge that *should* disaster strike and say burn our home to the ground, we can still, if not reconstruct the original album, then atleast still look at all the original pictures is worth a lot. Certainly more than $0.50
My grandmother didn't have that option. The few pictures she have, some are physically degraded to the point where they're hardly watchable. Some are simply lost. And the remaining ones needs to be shared between her kids, there's only a single copy of most pictures, and making aditional copies is time and cost-prohibitive for all but a few photos. (those you care the most about)
I'm certain you're rigth that some books will stay on paper for a long time, for affectionate reasons.
But lets face it, that's not the case for 99% or more of all bougth books. I don't particularily care about physical hundreds of old paperbacks I have, I *would* be highly annoyed if I lost them all though, because it'd mean I either couldn't read them anymore, or would have to re-purchase them.
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Wikipedia (nor any other encyclopedia that I know of) doesn't give any sources for its claim that, for example, Norway borders on Sweden, that it has a "very elongated shape" or that it is "generally perceived as clean and modern".
Giving sources for *every* claim you make quickly degrades into nonsense. It should be sufficient to give sources for any claim that isn't patently obviously true. (to anyone with a knowledge of the field anyway) One could actually well argue that the last claim I mention, what Norway is "generally perceived as" doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia, it's very subjective anyway, certainly it's not an undisputable fact.
The GPL does NOT "infect" any projects where you don't deliberately, consciously CHOOSE to use GPL code.
You can get herpes by accident. Without intending to. Without even knowing about it until later.
You cannot get GPL into a project by accident. It has to be deliberate, with full knowledge of the fact that you are copying code into your project.
If you don't see the difference, thats your problem I guess.
Choosing to have sex doesn't imply knowing that your partner carries HIV. (You'll know that it's *possible* though, so you willingly take a risk)
Choosing to include sourcecode made by other people in a project of yours imply KNOWING that that sourcecode CERTAINLY is covered by some license or other. And knowing that the combination is CERTAINLY only legal if you comply with whatever licence the code is under.
The difference is significant.
You can only catch the GPL by *knowingly* incorporating code into your project that you MUST KNOW is covered by some licence or other. Even then you can fix it by removing the GPL parts. Write your own replacements. Find some code under BSD that does the same thing. Pay the original author for rigths to his code. Whatever.
Thats my choice. I *wrote* that program, that library, whatever. I do not *want* you to be able to take it, add 3 lines, relicense the "improved" program, and out-compete me with my own work.
If you don't like it. Tough luck. Don't distribute my program then. Your "rigth to make a living" argument applies both ways.
It undermines my chances of making a living from MY code if I have to compete with your "improved" version, and you have the advantage that you get all my sourcecode, while I don't get your sourcecode.
All media fails. I'm not convinced other typically used backup-media are significantly more reliable than say a usb-connected external harddisc.
The thing is, even though the harddisc in your computer, and the one in the usb-enclosure are both certainly going to fail, odds are good that they don't fail at precisely the same moment. Aslong as they don't fail at the same time, it does not *matter* that they fail.
This is precisely the same if you backup to tape, to HD, to DVD-R or to any other media.
If the data is very important to you, it can pay to have more than one backup. Personally I take a weekly backup on an external HD, and about once a month I make a complete copy and store with my dad (which lives 200km from me).
That way, if a single harddisc dies, I lose at most a single week of data. If *both* HDs in my house fail (or get stolen, or the house burns, whatever) I lose up to a month of data (depending on when I made the last dad-stored copy)
To me, this is acceptable, and a fair tradeoff between cost, work and security. Other people will have diffeent comfort-levels.
Firefox and Safari doesn't need this add-on, as they have by default options in their configuration to delete all sensitive information on program-exit.
Later, it's been tried literally every 5 years. There actually *exists* "tcp offload engines", they existed 5 years ago. 10 years ago and 15 years ago. They existed in 1969 if you count the imps. (though those where external computers, not cards inserted in a larger computer).
Nevertheless, in 35 years we have yet to see *any* advantage to using such. They have, in actual fact, failed to make inroads.
The general trend is that when they are utterly new, they are marginally faster for some very specialized loads with enormous bandwith. They are however also extremely much less flexible, you lose all of the functionality of your OS network-stack, in exchange for whatever (generally inferior in functionality) stack is on the card.
And it gets *worse* not better. Because computers have grown in power more than bandwith has. Assuming you can generate the data fast enough (which these cards won't help you with!) a perfectly ordinary $599 computer today can easily saturate a Gb-link. It's just a product with no market.
But hi -- that's just my guess. You *MAY* be rigth -- THIS time they will break trough, despite having failed to do precisely that for the last 35 years.
I agree that every-10th byte is *sligthly* better in this regard that 10% first bytes. However, there's no reason to use every-10th when theres encoding-schemes which are even better than this. (cryptographic secret-splitting techniques is what)
If so, they'll be able to continue doing so. Existence of DRM on CDs doesn't in any serious way affect the desirability of going to concerts. I doubt there are "oozes" of chamber music orchestras, quartets, duos and soloists that make a living trough selling CDs. (I suppose they'll exist, but I don't believe them to be very numerous)
Without giving up any part of your company, without letting the bank have any part in your profit. Without selling out any part of the rigths to the device. The bank is satsified that you repay the loand plus normal interest.
This in contrast to venture capital, which generally means giving selling part of your company, often even a *majority* position in your company.
An id-number works perfectly well for *identifying* a certain person. (the bank, the tax-man, the car-registration-people, the unemployment-office and many more will all recognize that a certain number corresponds to a certain person)
It absolutely sucks as *authenthication* though. Because by nessecity you give the number to lots of people and organisations (if you didn't, they couldn't use it to identify you -- duh !) and trusting all these to keep the number secret, and never leak it, very obviously does not work and can not work.
Here's an example how the certificate would look for a house.
The certificate gives energy-consumption (under a standardised test) in Kwh/year and also corresponds that to what is average consumption for that class of product by giving a note from A to F, also color-coded to make it idiot-proof. (have a look at the link above, I think you'll agree it's easily understandable.
Such certificates are prominently displayed in the stores, and people seem to generally prefer the more efficient products. To the point where a refrigirator, dishwasher or washing-machine that doesn't have an A, or atleast a B is hardly even sellable.
Usage is being expanded, already cars and newly built houses require such certificates, within a few years it'll become compulsory to get older houses tested and present the certificate when selling a house.
I think it works fine. People don't actually like having a cold, poorly isulated house. Give people simple, clear, understandable information, and they will most of the time make the sensible choice.
I already pay aproximately 90% of the costs associated with oh, say Oslo filharmoniske by paying taxes, the remaining 10% are financed with like 5% tickets to concerts, 2% donations and around 3% from selling CDs.
I don't see why free copying would influence concert-goers or donations much. So worst-case we migth need to raise subsidies from 90% to 93%. In exchange we'd get freely copyable music, and vastly increased enjoyment of the music created.
What makes most sense ? Paying $10million tax-money and getting oh say 50.000 concert-seats and 10.000 CDs (sold at normal CD-price) for the investment. Or paying $10.5million tax-money and getting an unlimited number of CDs mp3s oggs, whatever. Assuming it's sensible to give state-subsidies to culture at all, what gives the most bang for the buck ?
The instruments aren't, by the way, the expensive parts. You get a good practice-violin for around $10.000, and a excellent concert-violin that will last an entire career (and more) for 5-10 times that price. That is, the instruments a profesional violinist needs for an entire career costs only a small fraction of the salary for the same period. I'm thinking even the buildings needed for practice and concerts cost more, amortized over a career, than does the instruments.
Having every 10th byte of a file would be just as copyrigthable as having the first 10% of the file. Atleast there's no logical reason to treat the two differently, especially not when the *purpose* in both cases is to collect pieces until you've got a complete file.
The swarm-technology you talk of *may* still be able to reduce legal liability (though it's hard to say without court-cases), but that's because they work differently;
They split a file in such a way that it can be mathemathically proven that aslong as you've got less than a certain treshold number of pieces, you can say nothing about the file whatsoever, except the filesize.
*THAT* is why you may get away with legally distributing such pieces, especially if you can show that you did not know, and could not know, what the pieces combine to. If a complete file requires 1000 pieces, you can distribute 999 such pieces and have no way whatsoever of knowing *anything* about what is in the file.
The moment you have 1000 pieces though, you can reconstruct the original file.
The problem is that general-purpose cpus grow in power so quickly that the offload-engines get ever-larger problems beating them. And they get the aditional problem that they don't get packet-filtering or anything else that is not custom-written for that particular card (if it's even possible to convince the card to do it!)
It's also nothing new -- these cards have existed for literally decades, and haven't managed to make any kind of inroads, not even in specialized servers.
Have a look at this year-old Lwn-article for an example listing some disadvantages.
What is so hard about the following:
That's not really harder than say with writely:
Both procedures should be within the capabilities of most normal computer-users.
ask.com doesn't even *HAVE* a world-map, so how it can beat Googles is a mystery to me. (they do have a USA-map though)
Problem is, humans are capable of learning. It's easier to learn something if you can *understand* it (what a concept!). What you are suggesting is having items magically appear or disappear from a menu according to some unspecified, complex algorithm. Invariably the algorithm will be *wrong* and nobody will know how to fix it -- because nobody really understands it.
End result ? People quickly learn that certain programs sometimes magically disappear and appear from the list, which makes the list useless for starting those programs. So they pretend that the list don't exist and instead make their own shortcuts or something. I know I never use the windows or kde start-menus for programs I regularily use. Never.
My wife loved Shadow-Hearts. (the PS2-game). The day after renting the first one to try it out, she was in the shop, and happily paid top-dollar (well, euro, but you get the point) for the game. We had v2 -- covenant -- on release-day and again paid full retail, happily.
Now there's v3 -- "from the new world". Not sold in europe. Guess what motivated us to get a chipped PS2 ? (that in itself legal in our jurisdiction) Guess how motivated she was this time of paying full retail for the game -- after having had a a lot of hassle bypassing *deliberate* incompatibilities (which is what region-coding is) ?
Thougth so.
However, you exagerate. The west is rich *partly* because of the large supply of cheap labor in other countries, but not *only* because of that.
In actual fact, your claims are wrong.
A *lot* of what westerners wear, own and eat are made by poorly paid 3rd worlders. It's not even close to the truth to claim "all" though. Indeed the house alone is more than half of my net-worth, and it has less than 5% foreign components. (mainly the glass in the windows (the framing for the windows is locally made) and the electrical switches and fusing (not the cabling, that is norwegian)
My own first-hand experience is from Norway, from Finnland and from Germany. Of those the germans know the least english, for two reasons. First german is a major language, which means germans have the "luxury" of being less bathed in foreign languages. In Germany movies are re-dubbed to german (not subtitled), same for tv. Germans go on vacation to Mallorca, Turkey, Greece etc and expect the hotel-staff (atleast!) to speak passable german. That's a luxury the we scandinawians don't have, so we're more motivated to learn. Secondly older people in what used to be east-germany had *russian* in school rather than english, so many people above 40-50 will know no or little english unless they're well-educated. Still, its not in the *least* difficult to travel in germany knowing only english.
When someone asks what kind of projects you where responsible for, what is stopping you from saying; I was responsible for a large project that earned over $20 million for the company. You yourself has to consciously choose to use the cost of a project as a primary parameter. And that's just dumb.
I challenge this. It may be true for *some* industrialized countries, but there's certainly many where the english-knowledge is significantly better than that.
Furthermore, even if you are saying doing trade with or being a traveller in one of the countries where english *is* known by a small fraction -- odds are it's known by a much larger fraction of the people who deal with international trade and/or tourism.
Norway is an industrialized country. Everyone whos had primary and secondary school has had a minimum of 6 years of english-teaching, everyone with more than that (even if they're just car-mechanics) will have had a minimum of 8 years of english.
Aditionally, 80% of the music here is in english, 80% of the movies (subtitled though), perhaps half of all television-programs, and a large fraction of internet and game-media. It's safe to say exposure is high.
No, not everyone speaks english perfectly fluently with no difficulty whatsoever. Reading a book may be slow going for some, reading a letter would be simple for most. The *english* version of Harry Potter outsold the Norwegian one -- on grounds of being available a few months earlier. And that's a teenager-book. It's got simple english, but on the other hand it *is* like 4000 pages or whatever. I'd say anyone who is capable of reading HP in english knows english.
No, not like a native. That's not the point. (I also don't speak/write english as well as similarily educated natives) But well enough to be able to effectively use the language for communicating, and that's the point, isn't it ?
I agree one should learn the mothertongue well first. But I think learning english second can be a good choice.
More relevant is the *benefit* of a project. If your project solves a problem worth a million bucks, while costing 100K to run, it's a *MUCH* better project than the 900K project that also saves (or earns) a million.
It's called ROI, and yes, it can be pretty darn hard to fairly estimate. That's no excuse for not even trying though.
I've got photoalbums. They contain photos, on photopaper. And text written by me and/or my wife. Many of them have great affectionate value to us. The album is not much different than the albums my grandmother used to have, except the pictures are sharper and in color.
Our son will be small only once. If we should lose the pictures of him as a toddler, the pictures would *stay* gone.
So, because the photos are taken with a digital camera, there's backups of them. Geographically distributed backups. This sounds complicated -- it's not. It's as simple as giving grandmother a DVD with all pictures of her grandson, along with the album containing profesionally printed copies of the best of them. Additional expense ? literally 10 minutes of work and $0.50
The knowledge that *should* disaster strike and say burn our home to the ground, we can still, if not reconstruct the original album, then atleast still look at all the original pictures is worth a lot. Certainly more than $0.50
My grandmother didn't have that option. The few pictures she have, some are physically degraded to the point where they're hardly watchable. Some are simply lost. And the remaining ones needs to be shared between her kids, there's only a single copy of most pictures, and making aditional copies is time and cost-prohibitive for all but a few photos. (those you care the most about)
I'm certain you're rigth that some books will stay on paper for a long time, for affectionate reasons.
But lets face it, that's not the case for 99% or more of all bougth books. I don't particularily care about physical hundreds of old paperbacks I have, I *would* be highly annoyed if I lost them all though, because it'd mean I either couldn't read them anymore, or would have to re-purchase them.