Right, I agree with all that. I was certainly painting an unnecessarily black and white picture for the sake of argument. I think that the.com bubble saturated the labor market in IT and it's resulted in some hard times as it readjusts; that's compounded by the recession.
I do, in fact, think that a laborer can be indispensable but only once they've reached some type of role where they're using they're intellect; for example, a job-site foreman, head general contractor, etc. Arguably those aren't labor roles, but they are the result of being very talented at labor.
If IT has truly become a labor type job it may be time to seek greener pastures. If the good people in IT find other things to do I suspect that the notion of an IT hero will return as management finds out that "the mystics of muscle" can't administer a system. Who is John Galt?
This doesn't relate to the article, but I can't not respond to the parent.
You're complaining about the youth offenders system in Australia? On/. ? People complaining about short jail sentences, particularly for young offenders was why I had to stop reading the forums on Canadian news sites. Canada and Australia both have extremely low crime rates because the criminal justice system has reasonable sentences, especially for young people. I'm tired of the "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality; it focuses on vengeance rather than prevention.
The role of the criminal justice system is to make streets a safer place, not to make you feel better after crimes have been committed. If you make it impossible for offenders to find jobs or otherwise become part of society again you limit their options and increase the likelihood of a re-offense. Certainly a strong punishment is necessary for the enforcement of laws but longer sentences are not the solution to crime; they're a simple campaign line for politicians because everyone loves to hear it. The only important factor is making sure that the fewest possible crimes occur.
I plan to move to Australia later this year. Don't fuck it up before I get there. (It already seems to be the only developed country with worse internet service than Canada, which makes me sad, although the weather looks better.)
Rand's philosophy was never to suggest that you would make things better for yourself by offering services at increasingly slimmer profit margins. It's about striving to be fucking good at what you do and demanding a premium price for your services. She (and I) would argue that you advance by making yourself indispensable to the companies you work for through providing clearly superior service.
If you're constantly under the thumb of management then you're part of the unimpressive masses in Rand's picture; doomed to either ride the coat-tails of the industrialists or to leech their profit, unearned, by extortion. Your only hope is to offer invaluable intellectual product and demand every penny of it's worth. Choosing to collectively work less hard while demanding more money results in a game at an unstable equilibrium that is doomed to fall back into competition unless it's backed by government supported extortion.
Be the indispensable, top sysadmin, the linux guru that runs the entire company's infrastructure, be the guy wrote the software that runs everything. If you're not, Rand's philosophy really isn't designed to make you happy.
It's got nothing to do with the fact that he has American plates. Living in Montreal I see tons of cars with American plates and they're no different than Canadian drivers. It's the fact that it's a white van. People who drive white vans should be banned from the roads. Them and anyone who drives a pick-up truck with a spoiler (seriously, a spoiler on a fucking truck?!?) or truck-nuts.
I grew up in Alberta where everyone complains about drivers from B.C. and Saskatchewan (everyone in B.C. and Saskatchewan complains about Alberta drivers). I then moved to Montreal where everyone complains about Ontario drivers (everyone in Ontario complains about Quebec drivers). Everyone in Canada complains about American drivers and they probably complain about Canadian drivers. My guess is that everyone in the U.S. also complains about drivers from any state other than their home state.
My conclusion: who the hell cares?!? There are crappy drivers everywhere. Also, out-of-town drivers in Montreal have a good excuse, the traffic lights here make no sense for the first few weeks. (Why the fuck is there a red light and a green arrow on the the same light standard at the same time?)
Reading/. while driving is covered the the law in question. I think a more sensible law would simply be that it is illegal to allow yourself to be unduly distracted while driving. Reading a road sign of course doesn't fit the criteria for undue distraction, I don't think changing a radio station does either as long as the driver is doing so only at a safe time.
It seems to me that banning electronic devices is a useless law. The police should be given the discretion to decide what constitutes distracted driving. Putting on a sweater while driving should be illegal, changing a radio station while driving through a crowded intersection should be illegal but doing so on a straight highway should be fine. The point is that most drivers are careful and do self-regulate when they engage in activities other than driving while behind the wheel. The trouble is that some don't and we need an external mechanism to enforce that kind of regulation on them.
I'm going to grammar Nazi my own comment: should be "driver's health," that mistake always bugs me. (If this makes anyone feel the need to correct my comma usage, for the sake of irony, don't bother, I don't care,)
This was an issue when the anti-smoking legislation was brought in in Alberta and still stands. A discussion was started for a possible exemption for truckers because it's obviously not a situation that the original law intended to cover but I don't think it went anywhere. If I'm not mistaken though, I believe that the police were instructed to not really pay much attention to smoking truckers.
I don't like having unwritten rules like simply turning a blind eye to truckers in particular so an exemption should be codified into law. Nonetheless, I bet the ticket was written because the trucker pissed off the cop, not because the cop was concerned for the drivers health.
I doubt that you're their target audience. How much of the crap that gets turned out by the movie do you ever rent? Personally I'm more likely to rent a good movie from a decade or two ago than the latest release; but there's a market for latest crap rentals. If a movie's good enough I'll see it in a theater, if it isn't I may rent it two years from now...but probably not.
For one thing, games don't consume very much bandwidth compared to streaming or downloading media. For another, High lag gaming sucks, it would essentially stop once network latencies went much above the norm. Youtube might see an increase, but an increase large enough to threaten the internet would surely take out even the mighty Youtube servers.
If such an enormous demand on file and streaming servers were made, surely the concentrated data requests would take down those servers before ISPs started to have problems. I doubt that Youtube, Ninjavideo and a few other large scale media servers can't pump out sufficient data to bring down the internet. Torrents may in fact decrease as people actually want to use their bandwidth while at home rather than let their Torrent client hog it all.
Ha! I'm out of my league for all the serious techie conversations on/. so I play it up when an article from my field of expertise (optics) comes around:-)
You need to install a dummy package that simply involves agreeing to the risks associated with root access. They could simply say "if you agree to it, to waive the right to software support." It would be reasonable to do this because obviously they can't help someone who was convinced to run "rm -r/*" as root. (By the way, do it, it's super-fun!)
I see. So, your idea is to optically excite the structure to induce GHz oscillations and then convert those vibrations into GHz RF by using a piezo-electric material for the nano-beam?
It's a neat thought, a nano-scale emitter could have interesting applications.
"It really annoys me when "prestigious" university professors publish crap like this"
It really annoys nobodies post crap like that. Raman scattering typically occurs when photons scatter off a molecule or crystal thereby exciting a phonon (a vibration) in the internal structure of the molecule/crystal. This is Raman scattering that excites a nano-structure that is engineered into the beam by the researchers. It is similar to regular Raman scattering, but is an engineered process at this point. It's an extremely exciting result!
Well the confined optical mode is 200THz so an RF EM mode wouldn't be confined and therefore wouldn't overlap effectively with the vibronic modes in the nano-structure. I also really doubt that inducing vibrations in the nano-structure would generate an optical (or other EM) field. It's probably a one way coupling given that it's driven by photon pressure and not any net charge in the nano-beam.
Yeah, but they'll be shitty super-3D-interactive-space-movies! We can go to them in our internal-combustion-engine-space-cars and watch them with our super-future-space-eyes!
What do you think Byzantine means in this context? I looked it up (granted, on the vast network of half-truths known as Wikipedia). "...confusing complexities organization of its ministries [...] as well as for its supposed lack of backbone in martial affairs." That's a fair assessment of the manner that tax laws for corporations in America are constructed. Certainly the manner in which taxation is split between levels of government as well as lobby-backed riders that are clearly targeted to help certain industries.
2. "19% tax on everything you buy"
Value added tax is irrelevant to a discussion of corporate tax.
3. "at least your constitution openly states, that when your government becomes unbearable, you can shoot them:
No, you stop voting for them. Like after the second Bush term.
I always have to configure the programs so much before they run. It really defeats the purpose of a virus if I have to configure it so much first. Once Linux can run Windows viruses with a one-very-poorly-chosen-click install process I might make the switch. Besides, I can just run my FOSS software under Windows and still have access to all of the proprietary viruses that are only made for windows.
Nature does not grant rights. Governments do to protect their citizens. The idea that intellectual product has value in the the same way that physical labor does is crucial to the production of the intellectual product. I argue that I have a right to profit from my ideas. The fact that they are not physical does not make them valueless; the fact that they can can be copied does not lessen the fact that I made them possible.
An ISP offering poor internet service is really a different animal altogether from pirating content. But I also don't support stealing an internet connection because you don't like your ISP's service.
Yes, let's throw out any rights that don't enhance my own personal enjoyment. Fuck everyone else. I don't like your comment and I choose to not recognize your right to post it. Mods: bump parent down a few notches so that I don't have to see it.
Seriously, copyrights must be upheld. If the legal framework for them sucks, change it, but violating someone else's right is wrong. Especially when it's so obviously just to save you a few bucks.
Piracy is in no way justified by saying that you disagree with the license terms of the product. If you don't like the way a company does business, don't do business with them; don't buy the product, don't pirate it. Pirating it is obviously strictly self-serving. Who are you trying to fool by claiming that you're pirating to stand up for freedom of information principles? The law (they don't buy it) or yourself?
It had to happen that this would be posted when the article went up. It's done now. We can avoid any more Portal references for the rest of the discussion.
Well Rand's views are a subset of libertarianism. She was trying to distance herself from those who shared a similar point on the political spectrum but included a deal more "batshit crazy" into their policy suggestions.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, I agree with all that. I was certainly painting an unnecessarily black and white picture for the sake of argument. I think that the .com bubble saturated the labor market in IT and it's resulted in some hard times as it readjusts; that's compounded by the recession.
I do, in fact, think that a laborer can be indispensable but only once they've reached some type of role where they're using they're intellect; for example, a job-site foreman, head general contractor, etc. Arguably those aren't labor roles, but they are the result of being very talented at labor.
If IT has truly become a labor type job it may be time to seek greener pastures. If the good people in IT find other things to do I suspect that the notion of an IT hero will return as management finds out that "the mystics of muscle" can't administer a system. Who is John Galt?
This doesn't relate to the article, but I can't not respond to the parent.
You're complaining about the youth offenders system in Australia? On /. ? People complaining about short jail sentences, particularly for young offenders was why I had to stop reading the forums on Canadian news sites. Canada and Australia both have extremely low crime rates because the criminal justice system has reasonable sentences, especially for young people. I'm tired of the "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality; it focuses on vengeance rather than prevention.
The role of the criminal justice system is to make streets a safer place, not to make you feel better after crimes have been committed. If you make it impossible for offenders to find jobs or otherwise become part of society again you limit their options and increase the likelihood of a re-offense. Certainly a strong punishment is necessary for the enforcement of laws but longer sentences are not the solution to crime; they're a simple campaign line for politicians because everyone loves to hear it. The only important factor is making sure that the fewest possible crimes occur.
I plan to move to Australia later this year. Don't fuck it up before I get there. (It already seems to be the only developed country with worse internet service than Canada, which makes me sad, although the weather looks better.)
Rand's philosophy was never to suggest that you would make things better for yourself by offering services at increasingly slimmer profit margins. It's about striving to be fucking good at what you do and demanding a premium price for your services. She (and I) would argue that you advance by making yourself indispensable to the companies you work for through providing clearly superior service.
If you're constantly under the thumb of management then you're part of the unimpressive masses in Rand's picture; doomed to either ride the coat-tails of the industrialists or to leech their profit, unearned, by extortion. Your only hope is to offer invaluable intellectual product and demand every penny of it's worth. Choosing to collectively work less hard while demanding more money results in a game at an unstable equilibrium that is doomed to fall back into competition unless it's backed by government supported extortion.
Be the indispensable, top sysadmin, the linux guru that runs the entire company's infrastructure, be the guy wrote the software that runs everything. If you're not, Rand's philosophy really isn't designed to make you happy.
It's got nothing to do with the fact that he has American plates. Living in Montreal I see tons of cars with American plates and they're no different than Canadian drivers. It's the fact that it's a white van. People who drive white vans should be banned from the roads. Them and anyone who drives a pick-up truck with a spoiler (seriously, a spoiler on a fucking truck?!?) or truck-nuts.
I grew up in Alberta where everyone complains about drivers from B.C. and Saskatchewan (everyone in B.C. and Saskatchewan complains about Alberta drivers). I then moved to Montreal where everyone complains about Ontario drivers (everyone in Ontario complains about Quebec drivers). Everyone in Canada complains about American drivers and they probably complain about Canadian drivers. My guess is that everyone in the U.S. also complains about drivers from any state other than their home state.
My conclusion: who the hell cares?!? There are crappy drivers everywhere. Also, out-of-town drivers in Montreal have a good excuse, the traffic lights here make no sense for the first few weeks. (Why the fuck is there a red light and a green arrow on the the same light standard at the same time?)
Reading /. while driving is covered the the law in question. I think a more sensible law would simply be that it is illegal to allow yourself to be unduly distracted while driving. Reading a road sign of course doesn't fit the criteria for undue distraction, I don't think changing a radio station does either as long as the driver is doing so only at a safe time.
It seems to me that banning electronic devices is a useless law. The police should be given the discretion to decide what constitutes distracted driving. Putting on a sweater while driving should be illegal, changing a radio station while driving through a crowded intersection should be illegal but doing so on a straight highway should be fine. The point is that most drivers are careful and do self-regulate when they engage in activities other than driving while behind the wheel. The trouble is that some don't and we need an external mechanism to enforce that kind of regulation on them.
I'm going to grammar Nazi my own comment: should be "driver's health," that mistake always bugs me. (If this makes anyone feel the need to correct my comma usage, for the sake of irony, don't bother, I don't care,)
This was an issue when the anti-smoking legislation was brought in in Alberta and still stands. A discussion was started for a possible exemption for truckers because it's obviously not a situation that the original law intended to cover but I don't think it went anywhere. If I'm not mistaken though, I believe that the police were instructed to not really pay much attention to smoking truckers.
I don't like having unwritten rules like simply turning a blind eye to truckers in particular so an exemption should be codified into law. Nonetheless, I bet the ticket was written because the trucker pissed off the cop, not because the cop was concerned for the drivers health.
The distribution side of film production isn't exactly a competitor to the film industry.
As the parent suggests, they can choose to not sell to rental businesses until a month after sales started.
I doubt that you're their target audience. How much of the crap that gets turned out by the movie do you ever rent? Personally I'm more likely to rent a good movie from a decade or two ago than the latest release; but there's a market for latest crap rentals. If a movie's good enough I'll see it in a theater, if it isn't I may rent it two years from now...but probably not.
For one thing, games don't consume very much bandwidth compared to streaming or downloading media. For another, High lag gaming sucks, it would essentially stop once network latencies went much above the norm. Youtube might see an increase, but an increase large enough to threaten the internet would surely take out even the mighty Youtube servers.
If such an enormous demand on file and streaming servers were made, surely the concentrated data requests would take down those servers before ISPs started to have problems. I doubt that Youtube, Ninjavideo and a few other large scale media servers can't pump out sufficient data to bring down the internet. Torrents may in fact decrease as people actually want to use their bandwidth while at home rather than let their Torrent client hog it all.
Ha! I'm out of my league for all the serious techie conversations on /. so I play it up when an article from my field of expertise (optics) comes around :-)
You need to install a dummy package that simply involves agreeing to the risks associated with root access. They could simply say "if you agree to it, to waive the right to software support." It would be reasonable to do this because obviously they can't help someone who was convinced to run "rm -r /*" as root. (By the way, do it, it's super-fun!)
I see. So, your idea is to optically excite the structure to induce GHz oscillations and then convert those vibrations into GHz RF by using a piezo-electric material for the nano-beam?
It's a neat thought, a nano-scale emitter could have interesting applications.
"It really annoys me when "prestigious" university professors publish crap like this"
It really annoys nobodies post crap like that. Raman scattering typically occurs when photons scatter off a molecule or crystal thereby exciting a phonon (a vibration) in the internal structure of the molecule/crystal. This is Raman scattering that excites a nano-structure that is engineered into the beam by the researchers. It is similar to regular Raman scattering, but is an engineered process at this point. It's an extremely exciting result!
Well the confined optical mode is 200THz so an RF EM mode wouldn't be confined and therefore wouldn't overlap effectively with the vibronic modes in the nano-structure. I also really doubt that inducing vibrations in the nano-structure would generate an optical (or other EM) field. It's probably a one way coupling given that it's driven by photon pressure and not any net charge in the nano-beam.
Yeah, but they'll be shitty super-3D-interactive-space-movies! We can go to them in our internal-combustion-engine-space-cars and watch them with our super-future-space-eyes!
1. "Byzantine?"
What do you think Byzantine means in this context? I looked it up (granted, on the vast network of half-truths known as Wikipedia). "...confusing complexities organization of its ministries [...] as well as for its supposed lack of backbone in martial affairs." That's a fair assessment of the manner that tax laws for corporations in America are constructed. Certainly the manner in which taxation is split between levels of government as well as lobby-backed riders that are clearly targeted to help certain industries.
2. "19% tax on everything you buy"
Value added tax is irrelevant to a discussion of corporate tax.
3. "at least your constitution openly states, that when your government becomes unbearable, you can shoot them:
No, you stop voting for them. Like after the second Bush term.
I always have to configure the programs so much before they run. It really defeats the purpose of a virus if I have to configure it so much first. Once Linux can run Windows viruses with a one-very-poorly-chosen-click install process I might make the switch. Besides, I can just run my FOSS software under Windows and still have access to all of the proprietary viruses that are only made for windows.
Nature does not grant rights. Governments do to protect their citizens. The idea that intellectual product has value in the the same way that physical labor does is crucial to the production of the intellectual product. I argue that I have a right to profit from my ideas. The fact that they are not physical does not make them valueless; the fact that they can can be copied does not lessen the fact that I made them possible.
An ISP offering poor internet service is really a different animal altogether from pirating content. But I also don't support stealing an internet connection because you don't like your ISP's service.
Yes, let's throw out any rights that don't enhance my own personal enjoyment. Fuck everyone else. I don't like your comment and I choose to not recognize your right to post it. Mods: bump parent down a few notches so that I don't have to see it.
Seriously, copyrights must be upheld. If the legal framework for them sucks, change it, but violating someone else's right is wrong. Especially when it's so obviously just to save you a few bucks.
Piracy is in no way justified by saying that you disagree with the license terms of the product. If you don't like the way a company does business, don't do business with them; don't buy the product, don't pirate it. Pirating it is obviously strictly self-serving. Who are you trying to fool by claiming that you're pirating to stand up for freedom of information principles? The law (they don't buy it) or yourself?
It had to happen that this would be posted when the article went up. It's done now. We can avoid any more Portal references for the rest of the discussion.
Well Rand's views are a subset of libertarianism. She was trying to distance herself from those who shared a similar point on the political spectrum but included a deal more "batshit crazy" into their policy suggestions.