It is all about risks. The worst thing p2p abuse can lead to is copyright infringement. The worst thing TIA can lead to is spurious arrests and accusations, or possibly the ability of a McCarthy like administration to crack down on "undesirables".
"I see you dont live in America. What job can you get in this economy without a degree?"
Try looking around you. I have held a number of them, ranging from $40,000 to $130,000 a year. I don't have any degree. And yes, I have lived in America all my life. It may take a bit of work, but even a good waiter can clear $35,000 pretty easily.
"What the hell are you talking about? Houses cost a quarter million dollars. I'll never be able to afford a house by myself but even if I did have a house, the property taxes are too high."
Then move somewhere reasonable. In most of the country, houses in that price range are strictly the domain of the richest in the community. I only paid $130,000 for a 2000 square foot, 3 car brand new home in the most expensive subdivision in the area, with nothing but a stream and open land behind me. My property taxes are around $1,500 a year I believe.
Even better, just go with a very inexpensive manufactured home or trailer. It doesn't have the presteige factor, but you should be able to pay it off in a couple of years. Or, if you live on the coast, get a nice 30 or 32 foot sailboat. That is a great size for 1 or 2 people, and you should be able to find one in decent condition for around $18,000, or $25,000 in excellant condition. Once you own that, everything else is cheap. Right on the coast of downtown Seattle, the rich mans marina (where Microsoft execs park their yachts) Elliot Bay, would only cost you $306.41 per month. This includes trash, water, phone, and cable TV all paid. And Elliot Bay is seen as absurdly expensive by most boaters, you can easily find a slip for half of that.
Transportation is a factor of where you live, but usually breaks even. Either you get a more expensive place close to work, or you get a cheaper place farther out and pay to commute. If you go with the boat option, you are already downtown in a lot of coastal cities, and only need a bus pass for around $30/month. Heck, look at how cheap vacations would be too, since most of the vacation spots are coastal, just sail there and avoid the hotel costs, and get SCUBA lessons or something with the money instead.
"I'm 22 years old, not 50, what savings?! 10 hours a week? Ok let me explain. College costs $10,000-30,000 a year, the average wage for an uneducated college student is around $10 an hour."
If you are single, savings is not that hard. The continuing difficulty I see in your ideas is college. It is possible to make a pretty decent living without a degree, you just have to hustle a bit to get the job. I have already shown how cheap life can be, why do you need the kind of job that requires a college education then? Go to a coastal city, live on a boat for a bit. Your expenses will be very low, you will own your "home" very quickly, and if you see better opportunities in another city, moving is easy. A similar argument can be made for living in an RV, which is how my mother made a killing. Paid off "house", low expenses, and she can now travel to where the best jobs are, or with how cheap living is, just take a year off now and then.
I've been supporting a wife and three children for years without a degree, but I have lots of skills. I know how to use them together to be more useful to a business than a specialist out of school in many cases. College is a great way to learn, and a good path for many people, but certainly not the only way to make it. In many cases, you'll find that the money spent and wasted years really don't get paid back. The 3-5 years and $50,000-$100,000 dollars could have been better used, the years working your way up in a trade or company, and the money invested. Unless you specifically want a career in one of the few that requires college, you can make a great living without.
I sleep around 6 hours, personally work around 4, that leaves plenty of time for everything else. If you choose to go to college, then you shouldn't complain about the cost. College is no more a necessity than watching TV.
For your lifestyle, why do you have to pay rent, bills, pay for education or transportation? With a couple of years of extra work and frugal living, you should be able to have a paid off house, mobile home, or boat. No more rent. If you choose the boat or mobile, your only bills are fuel and filling water, not exactly expensive. College is a luxury item, not a necessary expense. Transportation is only needed if you buy a home far from the rest of the things you need.
For the simple bills like gas and food, you should be able to pay it mostly from well invested (not risky) savings, or at most a very minimal work schedule of around 10 hours a week or less.
What I still don't see is what you think the point of life is? You don't want to work, be happy, make money, be poor, go to school, go without school, etc. Why do it then?
I guess our question is this: what, if anything, does make you happy then?
If things aren't what makes you happy, massive education and grueling work is not necessary for one without a family. If you aren't happy working, but wouldn't be happy being rich, what are you looking for?
"I just said life isnt a game. Its not about fun, its about work."
This is actually a fully developed philosophy called Puritianism, which is defined as the fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time.
In all seriousness, though, it is only about work if you make that your goal. We all end up working sometimes, but for most it is only 40 hours out of a 168 hour week, not even 25%. If you don't have a family to support or expensive desires, it doesn't even take that much. With a frugal lifestyle for a couple of years, you can easily get to the point where the only work you'll ever have to do is for yourself (cooking, doing the dishes, etc.) for the rest of your days.
Life is about doing what makes you happy and what helps you grow. Many people have tried the happiness through work/money path, and have found it lacking. Life as hard work, then, is hardly a universal definition. At best it can represent your current worldview at this stage in your personal growth.
Then quit piddling around with college and improve your life. It is expensive and time consuming, but very rewarding. However, if you are looking to make a better living, it is just a waste of time and money.
Getting laid is your idea of the end-all be-all use of time, and you accuse others of not having a life? I assure you, once you grow up you find a lot of things that are both more fun and more important.
Yep, you hit it right on the head. Each minority party may have a decent number of supporters, but unless their entire national support base moves to the same congressional district, they will never be represented. The fact that incumbants have a 95% reelection rate doesn't help either. It even extends to access. The Repub/Demo candidate could only have 5 votes in a district of a million, but they will automatically be on the ballet, in the debates, and receive funding anyway. Minority parties have to jump through major hoops just to be on the ballet, more to be in debates (and they are often excluded from the major ones anyway), and have a hard time getting funding since their parties don't have a solid track record of "return on investment" like the major parties do. Depressing is right.
Each class is supposed to cover its costs, but there are a lot of accounting gimmicks that make this more theoretical than practical. In the end, bulk mail is the one that most often lets them turn a profit, which keeps them afloat without increases, because of cost savings that aren't reflected in book balances. On the other hand, as sorting technology improves, this edge gets smaller and smaller.
An interesting analysis (though I think his ranking of the House as more important than Senate is flawed), but it does not really address the issue. If the issue is spending, you have to look at which parties pushed through funding in what amounts for which projects. It also does not address the issue that the presidency is both very powerful, and relatively powerless, depending on the nature of the particular struggle.
Another issue that makes this really nasty is when they can each claim to be the good guys. If there is avaliable money, they will each propose spending it, pass both bills, and then act shocked that we are in defecit spending again.
Having watched the dynamics of the relationship between Regan and Congress at that time, they formed a very strange loop. While the president technically does not have spending authority, between the power of the "bully pulpit" and the occasional threat of veto, he wields pretty significant power. What both sides did is end up funding what they wanted, at the cost of the budget, in what they would like to pretend was either one party being irresponsible, or a "compromise solution" depending on whether the person they are talking to recieved a chunk of that money. Life in DC is simply too convoluted for simple measurement.
Also, with spam you are subsidizing them because the ISP passes costs along to you. With postal mail, the junk mailers are subsidizing you, since bulk mail helps to keep first class rates down.
Look for dead dot coms in bankruptcy, or small town ISP's that are folding. I'm not sure if there is really a place they list them for sale, probably not ebay type material.
"Right. It's the key to getting Democrats back into power. Why win on the issues when you can simply BRIBE voters to put you into office. Fifty years of making promises the country can't keep, lets do it till we are totally bankrupt!"
Hmm, who sent out cash to voters? Which administration is giving tax cuts to people that don't need it while raising spending, while tax recepits are down? Who is bankrupting the country? They all are, if you think you can tie it to a party, you have blinders on.
I almost took this seriously until the being rich is a reward for innovative work and thought, not for being born to the right family and inheriting it. Good one!
"When I buy a Windows product, its mine. They can't "take it back" or "decide they have a better use for it"."
You haven't read your EULA recently, have you?
As to the whole slavery bit, where did that come from? He does not advocate writing OSS, he simply advises not to build your software on API's and platforms that you have no control over, no ownership of, and no recourse if you don't like what the vendor does with them.
The point is that most companies don't care what is on the backend, so the money isn't only on the proprietary platforms. That is why he pushes using all browser based software, it makes the platform irrelevant.
Yes, Linux could cease to be used in all of industry. Which is more likely though, a single vendor disappearing or yanking support, or a widespread product that can be supported or picked up by anyone disappearing? It is the same old story, if the entire OSS community just dropped Linux/Apache/whatever, you could still just form a co-op with other businesses to hire some programmers to make the changes you need. If a proprietary product is dropped, you can do _nothing_, you have no options because everything is in the hands of one entity.
I don't agree with his entire "sharecropping" analogy, but he hits an important point about depending on your vendor. History is littered with products built on great widgets, only to die when the widget vendor goes bankrupt or drops support because they don't want to port to Win32/64 bit Unix/whatever.
The trickle down theory was an attempt by a minor school of economists to take a simple phenomenon and draw absurd conclusions about macroeconomic theory from it. And yes, allowing families who have hundreds of millions of dollars to pass it on to their dynasty tax free creates an aristocracy just as effectively as as it has throughout all of history. One of the major good reasons for an inheritance tax (which should have a minimum of 3-5 million, the current limit was a bit low) is to prevent the migration of wealth upwards, where it then sits. Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett came out in support of this goal.
The current tax changes are all designed to benefit old money, and penalize new money. The inheritance and dividend taxes all protect old money families, and no changes in capital gains hurt the new money families. This is just an economic war between generations, the older of which is still ticked at all the people who made their fortunes, while they inherited theirs, knowing full well that they couldn't earn that money if their lives depended on it.
Because he loved jabbing the US in the eye. One of the major reasons for what popularity he had in the Arab world is that he would stand up to the US, he just misjudged his limits this time.
As to the sanctions, he loved them! They allowed him and him alone to ration out all goods to the public, creating artificial scarcity. This both let him keep his people too weak for revolution, and gave him a propaganda tool to demonize the US.
Of course he didn't comply, look at all those banned weapons we found...oh wait...there weren't any. Make an argument for freeing an oppressed people and I'll back it, but I'm tired of being lied to by the people in charge to get support for what they want.
Funny, the time when they most improved from "dirt floor shacks" was far before the era of "tinkle on" economics, back when the top marginal rate approached 90%. The preservation of a hereditary aristocracy is not a requirment for the increase of wealth in a nation.
Two things you're forgetting. First, SCO does not have any actual products worth mentioning. For the most part they are trying to milk the locked in clients from when Unix on x86 was a novelty. Second, what actual IP? The SCO Group has not produced anything original. They are charging people to use a few ancient bits of code to avoid lawsuits based on "IP" purchased from someone who bought it from their neighbor's cousin's former roommate. They have no product, they have no innovation.
This is the crux of why no geeks take the suit against IBM seriously. A lot of us have had to work with SCO products, and can't imagine that they have anything to offer or teach a company like IBM or Sun.
Slashdot Mirror
It is all about risks. The worst thing p2p abuse can lead to is copyright infringement. The worst thing TIA can lead to is spurious arrests and accusations, or possibly the ability of a McCarthy like administration to crack down on "undesirables".
"I see you dont live in America. What job can you get in this economy without a degree?"
Try looking around you. I have held a number of them, ranging from $40,000 to $130,000 a year. I don't have any degree. And yes, I have lived in America all my life. It may take a bit of work, but even a good waiter can clear $35,000 pretty easily.
"What the hell are you talking about? Houses cost a quarter million dollars. I'll never be able to afford a house by myself but even if I did have a house, the property taxes are too high."
Then move somewhere reasonable. In most of the country, houses in that price range are strictly the domain of the richest in the community. I only paid $130,000 for a 2000 square foot, 3 car brand new home in the most expensive subdivision in the area, with nothing but a stream and open land behind me. My property taxes are around $1,500 a year I believe.
Even better, just go with a very inexpensive manufactured home or trailer. It doesn't have the presteige factor, but you should be able to pay it off in a couple of years. Or, if you live on the coast, get a nice 30 or 32 foot sailboat. That is a great size for 1 or 2 people, and you should be able to find one in decent condition for around $18,000, or $25,000 in excellant condition. Once you own that, everything else is cheap. Right on the coast of downtown Seattle, the rich mans marina (where Microsoft execs park their yachts) Elliot Bay, would only cost you $306.41 per month. This includes trash, water, phone, and cable TV all paid. And Elliot Bay is seen as absurdly expensive by most boaters, you can easily find a slip for half of that.
Transportation is a factor of where you live, but usually breaks even. Either you get a more expensive place close to work, or you get a cheaper place farther out and pay to commute. If you go with the boat option, you are already downtown in a lot of coastal cities, and only need a bus pass for around $30/month. Heck, look at how cheap vacations would be too, since most of the vacation spots are coastal, just sail there and avoid the hotel costs, and get SCUBA lessons or something with the money instead.
"I'm 22 years old, not 50, what savings?! 10 hours a week? Ok let me explain. College costs $10,000-30,000 a year, the average wage for an uneducated college student is around $10 an hour."
If you are single, savings is not that hard. The continuing difficulty I see in your ideas is college. It is possible to make a pretty decent living without a degree, you just have to hustle a bit to get the job. I have already shown how cheap life can be, why do you need the kind of job that requires a college education then? Go to a coastal city, live on a boat for a bit. Your expenses will be very low, you will own your "home" very quickly, and if you see better opportunities in another city, moving is easy. A similar argument can be made for living in an RV, which is how my mother made a killing. Paid off "house", low expenses, and she can now travel to where the best jobs are, or with how cheap living is, just take a year off now and then.
I've been supporting a wife and three children for years without a degree, but I have lots of skills. I know how to use them together to be more useful to a business than a specialist out of school in many cases. College is a great way to learn, and a good path for many people, but certainly not the only way to make it. In many cases, you'll find that the money spent and wasted years really don't get paid back. The 3-5 years and $50,000-$100,000 dollars could have been better used, the years working your way up in a trade or company, and the money invested. Unless you specifically want a career in one of the few that requires college, you can make a great living without.
I sleep around 6 hours, personally work around 4, that leaves plenty of time for everything else. If you choose to go to college, then you shouldn't complain about the cost. College is no more a necessity than watching TV.
For your lifestyle, why do you have to pay rent, bills, pay for education or transportation? With a couple of years of extra work and frugal living, you should be able to have a paid off house, mobile home, or boat. No more rent. If you choose the boat or mobile, your only bills are fuel and filling water, not exactly expensive. College is a luxury item, not a necessary expense. Transportation is only needed if you buy a home far from the rest of the things you need.
For the simple bills like gas and food, you should be able to pay it mostly from well invested (not risky) savings, or at most a very minimal work schedule of around 10 hours a week or less.
What I still don't see is what you think the point of life is? You don't want to work, be happy, make money, be poor, go to school, go without school, etc. Why do it then?
I guess our question is this: what, if anything, does make you happy then?
If things aren't what makes you happy, massive education and grueling work is not necessary for one without a family. If you aren't happy working, but wouldn't be happy being rich, what are you looking for?
"I just said life isnt a game. Its not about fun, its about work."
This is actually a fully developed philosophy called Puritianism, which is defined as the fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time.
In all seriousness, though, it is only about work if you make that your goal. We all end up working sometimes, but for most it is only 40 hours out of a 168 hour week, not even 25%. If you don't have a family to support or expensive desires, it doesn't even take that much. With a frugal lifestyle for a couple of years, you can easily get to the point where the only work you'll ever have to do is for yourself (cooking, doing the dishes, etc.) for the rest of your days.
Life is about doing what makes you happy and what helps you grow. Many people have tried the happiness through work/money path, and have found it lacking. Life as hard work, then, is hardly a universal definition. At best it can represent your current worldview at this stage in your personal growth.
Then quit piddling around with college and improve your life. It is expensive and time consuming, but very rewarding. However, if you are looking to make a better living, it is just a waste of time and money.
Getting laid is your idea of the end-all be-all use of time, and you accuse others of not having a life? I assure you, once you grow up you find a lot of things that are both more fun and more important.
Yep, you hit it right on the head. Each minority party may have a decent number of supporters, but unless their entire national support base moves to the same congressional district, they will never be represented. The fact that incumbants have a 95% reelection rate doesn't help either. It even extends to access. The Repub/Demo candidate could only have 5 votes in a district of a million, but they will automatically be on the ballet, in the debates, and receive funding anyway. Minority parties have to jump through major hoops just to be on the ballet, more to be in debates (and they are often excluded from the major ones anyway), and have a hard time getting funding since their parties don't have a solid track record of "return on investment" like the major parties do. Depressing is right.
Each class is supposed to cover its costs, but there are a lot of accounting gimmicks that make this more theoretical than practical. In the end, bulk mail is the one that most often lets them turn a profit, which keeps them afloat without increases, because of cost savings that aren't reflected in book balances. On the other hand, as sorting technology improves, this edge gets smaller and smaller.
An interesting analysis (though I think his ranking of the House as more important than Senate is flawed), but it does not really address the issue. If the issue is spending, you have to look at which parties pushed through funding in what amounts for which projects. It also does not address the issue that the presidency is both very powerful, and relatively powerless, depending on the nature of the particular struggle.
Another issue that makes this really nasty is when they can each claim to be the good guys. If there is avaliable money, they will each propose spending it, pass both bills, and then act shocked that we are in defecit spending again.
Having watched the dynamics of the relationship between Regan and Congress at that time, they formed a very strange loop. While the president technically does not have spending authority, between the power of the "bully pulpit" and the occasional threat of veto, he wields pretty significant power. What both sides did is end up funding what they wanted, at the cost of the budget, in what they would like to pretend was either one party being irresponsible, or a "compromise solution" depending on whether the person they are talking to recieved a chunk of that money. Life in DC is simply too convoluted for simple measurement.
Also, with spam you are subsidizing them because the ISP passes costs along to you. With postal mail, the junk mailers are subsidizing you, since bulk mail helps to keep first class rates down.
Look for dead dot coms in bankruptcy, or small town ISP's that are folding. I'm not sure if there is really a place they list them for sale, probably not ebay type material.
You seem to be operating under the illusion that the choice of candidate has an effect on the political system or government.
"Right. It's the key to getting Democrats back into power. Why win on the issues when you can simply BRIBE voters to put you into office. Fifty years of making promises the country can't keep, lets do it till we are totally bankrupt!"
Hmm, who sent out cash to voters? Which administration is giving tax cuts to people that don't need it while raising spending, while tax recepits are down? Who is bankrupting the country? They all are, if you think you can tie it to a party, you have blinders on.
I almost took this seriously until the being rich is a reward for innovative work and thought, not for being born to the right family and inheriting it. Good one!
Actually, I think most people in IT know all about PeopleSoft, the question is who has heard of an on budget functional PeopleSoft implementation?
"When I buy a Windows product, its mine. They can't "take it back" or "decide they have a better use for it"."
You haven't read your EULA recently, have you?
As to the whole slavery bit, where did that come from? He does not advocate writing OSS, he simply advises not to build your software on API's and platforms that you have no control over, no ownership of, and no recourse if you don't like what the vendor does with them.
The point is that most companies don't care what is on the backend, so the money isn't only on the proprietary platforms. That is why he pushes using all browser based software, it makes the platform irrelevant.
Yes, Linux could cease to be used in all of industry. Which is more likely though, a single vendor disappearing or yanking support, or a widespread product that can be supported or picked up by anyone disappearing? It is the same old story, if the entire OSS community just dropped Linux/Apache/whatever, you could still just form a co-op with other businesses to hire some programmers to make the changes you need. If a proprietary product is dropped, you can do _nothing_, you have no options because everything is in the hands of one entity.
I don't agree with his entire "sharecropping" analogy, but he hits an important point about depending on your vendor. History is littered with products built on great widgets, only to die when the widget vendor goes bankrupt or drops support because they don't want to port to Win32/64 bit Unix/whatever.
The trickle down theory was an attempt by a minor school of economists to take a simple phenomenon and draw absurd conclusions about macroeconomic theory from it. And yes, allowing families who have hundreds of millions of dollars to pass it on to their dynasty tax free creates an aristocracy just as effectively as as it has throughout all of history. One of the major good reasons for an inheritance tax (which should have a minimum of 3-5 million, the current limit was a bit low) is to prevent the migration of wealth upwards, where it then sits. Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett came out in support of this goal.
The current tax changes are all designed to benefit old money, and penalize new money. The inheritance and dividend taxes all protect old money families, and no changes in capital gains hurt the new money families. This is just an economic war between generations, the older of which is still ticked at all the people who made their fortunes, while they inherited theirs, knowing full well that they couldn't earn that money if their lives depended on it.
Because he loved jabbing the US in the eye. One of the major reasons for what popularity he had in the Arab world is that he would stand up to the US, he just misjudged his limits this time.
As to the sanctions, he loved them! They allowed him and him alone to ration out all goods to the public, creating artificial scarcity. This both let him keep his people too weak for revolution, and gave him a propaganda tool to demonize the US.
I don't know, my kids would sure get a kick out of a ship named after Grover.
You really need to get out more...
Of course he didn't comply, look at all those banned weapons we found...oh wait...there weren't any. Make an argument for freeing an oppressed people and I'll back it, but I'm tired of being lied to by the people in charge to get support for what they want.
Funny, the time when they most improved from "dirt floor shacks" was far before the era of "tinkle on" economics, back when the top marginal rate approached 90%. The preservation of a hereditary aristocracy is not a requirment for the increase of wealth in a nation.
Two things you're forgetting. First, SCO does not have any actual products worth mentioning. For the most part they are trying to milk the locked in clients from when Unix on x86 was a novelty. Second, what actual IP? The SCO Group has not produced anything original. They are charging people to use a few ancient bits of code to avoid lawsuits based on "IP" purchased from someone who bought it from their neighbor's cousin's former roommate. They have no product, they have no innovation.
This is the crux of why no geeks take the suit against IBM seriously. A lot of us have had to work with SCO products, and can't imagine that they have anything to offer or teach a company like IBM or Sun.