Hey.. this is/. You are going to be banned if you keep spouting your pro-Microsoft mumbo jumbo. No one here cares about reality. Who cares that you can't use an Excel macro, people here think that VBScript is worthless and you need to use C, C++, assembly, or Perl to get anything done. Just use the data from the Excel sheet and write some code you lazy bafoon. Also, in a discussion about piracy who would actually be buying games, aren't we supposed to just d/l them?
Thank you for actually living in the real world, its refreshing to see that there are real people who actually get the world we actually live in on/. from time to time.
If copyrights and patents are property, then why don't copyright owners and patent holders pay a property tax?
In the US the federal government has no property taxes, usually that is a state tax. States vary but where I live property taxes are for real property which is essentially real estate. We also pay a tangible tax and an intangible tax. The tangible tax is for hard physical assets the company owns such as PC's, copiers, vehicles, etc. We also pay an intagible tax for intangible assets such as patents, trademarks, goodwill, etc. So we pay taxes on patents and copyrights but they aren't called property taxes, they are called intagible taxes. Every state probably has different rules, this is just how it works in Florida.
In essence companies do pay taxes for copyrights and patents, they just aren't called taxes, they are called fees. It can't cost anywhere near what the fees are to obtain and maintain a patent for a patent clerk to review an application.
We have tried to combine your idea of a a central common area with the private work space. I my office we have an open floor plan with L shaped desks which back up to each other. Each desk has a high (6') cabinet. This means that two people can turn around to talk to each other so if you have mini teams they can work together well and you can just shout across the room if you need to talk to someone else. There are 8 work spaces in the plan. I see pro's and cons with this set up. Colloboration is very easy and people are able to learn alot from each other. Some poeple seem to love this setup. Not one of them would rather be in a cube farm. All is not perfect in this enviornment either.
One major problem is that one employee is loud and can distract the coworker behind her. I have also had employees in the past which have had a hard time tuning out the noise from the multiple conversations which can be going on at the same time.
IM and EMail are great productivity tools but do little to foster a sense of team. From my experience building a coherent team requires more than building a paper trail to CYA as another poster mentioned, in fact this can be destructive toward a team enviornment as it allows people to place balme which I rarely try to do as a manager. I accept mistakes are going to happen and try to find a way to prevent them in the future by fixing a process or trainging, not by punnishing someone. The best teams actually do things together like going to lunch, pulling pranks, even occasionally going to a bar or something after work. A bad team does everything to avoid any additional contact with each other.
I guess what I am really tring to say is that everyone is going to have a different preference and forcing a working enviornment on someone can have very negative effects. I can't imagine putting a team of programmers at a round table. Our layout would probably be better than that situation for most developers but it really comes down to the attitudes and work preferrences of each employee.
I would ask the employees before doing anything, if they like the idea of a round table it is probably good but remember that they may not be there too long either and the next guy may be a great developer but not work in this environment.
In a perfect world, economics would be simple enough for anyone to handle it without needing an accountant. The "better save you lots more than he/she costs" is hiding the issue a bit, because regardless they ARE costing money, and that money has to come from somewhere. Under the current system, a good accountant will save you more money than they cost and therefore from YOUR point of view you've saved some money, but overall the money had to come out of somewhere, so someone has to be losing out of the deal. IF we could find a system where accountants weren't needed, this money would be distributed more appropriately.
I'm sorry but accountants are not economists and really aren't there to help someone understand economics. Most people think of accountants for their work in public accounting like tax prep and audit but that is not the most powerful part of accounting. Cost accounting is a vital role for any organization, it helps those who don't have the time or understanding of the numbers understand what is profitable what is loosing money and where there is waste in the system. This is where an accountant can really help an organization out even if the organization is a not-for-profit. In a perfect world there may not be a need for a tax accountant or someoone to perform an audit but there would still be a need to analize the numbers and understand how to figure out what is worth doing from an economic perspective. The cost accountant would probably be the one responsible for the so called "perfect world" as their one and only goal is to allow someone to manage a business unit with information which is one step closer to "perfect information." This is not quite a function which is there to fix a flaw, it is a function to keep flaws out of he system.
The same is true for all of these other "professionals" you are criticizing. I am not a fan of lawyers but they do provide a usefull service in many cases. They add value to the system on a regular basis. If you try and dumb down laws to make them easier to understand the language being used in them becomes too vague and allows for more loopholes. Just think about writting laws in plain english using common terms which when you go to the dictionary has ten different meanings? How does a jury sort that out?
The Obama administration did encourage more release of records under the FOIA and a relaxing of exemptions. The idea was to assume that any record could be released unless an exemption prevented it. The previous directive was to presume that any record could not released and then try to justify it. If they couldn't justify denying it, they would grudgingly release it.
I wish that I could believe you but the minimal evidence in the TFA is giving statistics which counter your argument. I think you may have drank a little too much of the Democratic Party koolaid. Obama hasn't followed through on one campaign promise yet. Yeah, he has an Open Government Directive which isn't being followed.. who's to blame? I think the buck stops with him.
I'm not saying that Obama is really worse than Bush, just that he isn't showing that he is better either.
Throw 'em out in '10... all of them in both parties. Now that is change I do believe in.
I don't belive in change, at least not until we throw BOTH parties out.
This is what happens when an idealist with no experience goes to Washington. They can't change the system when they don't even know what the system is. We must change the system by voting everyone out and starting over.
It seems as if ethanol is actually a good fuel when an engine is tuned properly. It is used for racing already, most motorsports use pure ethanol as it has a higher octane rating which allows the production of more horsepower. If you tune and gear an engine properly you should easily be able to get similar mileage. The problem with flex fuel cars is that they are still tuned for their main source of fuel, traditional gas.
Ethonol also eliminates the need for a catalytic converter to eliminate engine knocking. If it can be produced using land which is inefficent for other agriculural uses such as west texas ranch land where hundres of acres are need per cow or argicultural byproducts such as corn cobs it is a great alternative to traditional petrolium based fuel. I never drank the corn based ethanol Koolaid, but an economical cellulosic based ethanol sounds very promising.
If you're not going to give him a second chance, why let him out of prison at all?
Good point. We should just do what the Saudi's do and cut a hand off on the first offense and forget prison. Most thieves in Saudi don't steal again. After the second chance they have a very hard time doing anything so the problem is solved all on its own although when I lived there in the 90's there was a guy who had run out of hands, they had moved on to his feet until he ran out of them, the fifth offense was his head. This was in the paper over there, I'm not sure I believe it because I don't know how you can steal very well with no hands and no feet but somehow the paper did report that he was going to be excuted in the town square on a Friday.
Re:behavioral problems have virtually disappeared
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The Wi-Fi On the Bus
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Many other countries aren't like this; their scientists are celebrities. I wish we could be more like them.
I would have to disagree with your conclusion. Scientists can be celebrities in any country. The celebrities you speak of have social skills. In the US many scientists have taken on celbrity status, look at Stephen Hawings (while not from the US he is celebrated in this country), Michio Kaku, as well as many others. They all have social skills which MUST be developed in order to attain their status. Other than fellow scientists, who really cares about your chosen subject unless you can explain to them why it is important.
Don't get me wrong, it is not acceptible to abuse other people, I am not at all in favor of beating people up or picking on them. I am not saying that victoms aren't victoms, just that building social skills is critical if you want to be part of society. You can have an IQ of 180 but if you can't communicate with anyone why should anyone else care?
EMC has a great product but it may be overkill. ApplicationXTender, in its most basic form, can do everything you are looking for. It is not cheap but it can handle any document type (although the built in viewer works only for PDF, TIFF, and MS Office documents to my knowledge). ApplicationXTender can also intgrate with any ODMA compatible application to allow new documents to be indexed and stored within the document management system. It can integrate with many other applications using an Integration module (for example you could index information from an invoice and send it directly into an accounting package as a new accounts payable item to be processed which is really powerfull if combined with a good scanning package such as Kofax which can automatically recognize a document and OCR the index fields it set up for, calculate its level of confidence, and automatically release the document or prompt a user to verify what it has read based on the confidence level). The client can run as a desktop application or as a web appliction.
Annotations can be added without checking a document out. Actually editing an editble document requires checking it out. Annotations can be as simple as highlighting something or as detailed as drawings and text. With press of a button annotation appear or dissapear.
The database back end can be MS SQL (express or full blown), MySQL, Oracle, as well as others. Some add-ons require full blown MS SQL but the basic system can run on a quite a large number of platforms. The software is modular so each add-on service can be put on any supported server. The license server (the most important part of the system since nothing works without it) seems to only run on Windows 2003 Server at this point but 2008 support is supposed to be out in a couple of months. I don't think they ever plan to release it for Linux.
The Web Server (if desired) requires IIS. EMC supports SUSE as a web client so it should work ony any Linux as long as you have Firefox (I did a quick web search and did find some Linux users having trouble trying to access something using Opera and Firefox but the error indicated an old version of ApplicationXTender).
ApplicationXTender is HIPAA complient and has a full audit trail so any changes to anything are logged. I don't let my users change index fields and since only TIFF documents are currently being stored only annotations can be added by a user which does not impact the original document I really have no use for the logs but I can definately see where it could be usefull. Office documents are strored as revisions so you can always revert to an earlier version and know who did what. Additional add-ons can allow full-text indexing (requires SQL Server) and document workflow.
I only use the basic system and use another software package (Kofax) to scan and automatically index documents which is very nice. Kofax can check what it reads against a user defined list which improves accuracy for certain field (such as a clients name). It can also use a database query to fill in information to be indexed which is great for accounting records (look up a vendor ID and fill in the full name for example). I also use another package (PlanetPress) to capture print streams index the document and send them directly into the system. Currently I am only using the system for accounting records and some rather static historical files. I plan to add the workflow module but it is expensive and I have to develop my strategy for capturing mail as it comes into our office (we get tons of it for a company of our size, it takes one person about 2-3 hours to open and sort on an average day, some days it can take all day when we get certain types of monthly bills. The number of different documents that come in also make this difficult to automate. A large portion of our business is record keeping and book keeping for our clients and the payoff on the system is very evident. What used to take hours of manual labor to find and put together can now be done in a matter of seconds.
I do not belive that more "goods and services" are always better for us, but societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and required rationing, only that in order to have one thing one must give up something else.
Just for me to sit here and enjoy a healty debate means that I am sacrificing one scarce resource for another. I am giving up my time (definately a scare resource being a business owner), which could be used chasing women, working on bettering my business, watching TV, reading a novel, or just about anything else, in order to express my thoughts. In my mind this is a rational decision (which I call greed) because I see more benefit in doing this right now as it is too early to go out, I am tired of work after a hard day, and don't really feel like killing brain cells in front of the TV.
While pre-agricultural societies may not have had the rich and famous type of elites we have today, they did have an elite class, usually called tribal leaders or chiefs. As agriculture caught on and more people were able to be fed the chiefs became kings controlling more land giving rise to the need for another class of elites called the aristocricy (yes, I really moved through time fast). In the modern era we have even more classes, regardless of the society we live in (capitalist democracies or commuunist dictatorships, it really doesn't matter).
The real world is not as the novels you point me to describe. Even if you owned all of California, accessing its resources is NOT FREE. Someone must gather the sand, mine the gold, and harvest food. All of these have a cost in economic terms.
Economic theory doesn't only describe what happens in a caplitalistic society, and can even describe, relatively accuratly, what happens in a communist country with price controls. Price controls ultimately lead to more scarcity as their is less supply as people find more valuable things to do with their time when they don't get enough gain from producing a product any more. Then you end up with either a total lack of resources or huge jumps in prices. Look at cold war era Moscow for a prime example, people had to wait in lines for bread for longer than it takes to make a loaf of bread.
In my view of the world, any resource has a cost, even if it seems free. If I want clean air then I need to reduce polution, this means I must reduce my use of fossil fuels or develop a new technology to clean the pollution out of them. If I want more free time then I work less and give up money which means that I have less money to spend on hobbies I enjoy meaning that my free time becomes less valuable.
The traditional view that economics is about money, is wrong, it is about supply and demand in a world with scarce resources, NOT always rare resources. Yes, things can be cheap, wheat today costs much less today than back in the 1600's before any industrial equipment was used in agriculture. As you mentioned earlier, only 2% of the American workforce is employed producing food, this is because technology has allowed us to streamline production of this resource. The cost, in terms of man hours, has significantly decreased. The introduction of industrial methods created the need for other resources such as steel and energy in the form of fossil fuels. We started with steam power, moved on to internal combustion engines and electric power. Electricty allowed us to develop new tools to help maximize efficiency such as computers and robotics. All of these new resources have a cost in terms of polution, or even just the oppportunity cost of all of those worked puting their time into engineering, manufacturing, and marketing a new product. All of t
There are two underlying principles to economic theory (in their simplest forms): 1) All resources are scarce. 2) People are greedy.
One could argue about the merits of these three underlying principles but I have yet to ever see an example of a human society where these principles break down.
I would agree that with almost any given resource technological advances have led to a decline in real costs for such resources. There are examples to the contrary such as our recent facination with protecting the environment (While not really a tree hugger I am an avid backpacker and fisherman and em enthusiastic about protecting the enviroment). Now the environment costs us much more than it did 100 years ago. Just because the cost goes down, or there is an overabundance does not make a resource free. The perfect example is with energy. The sun does provide Earth with more power than humans really ever anticipate using as we would probably run out of food production capacity before power if we covered the earth with PV cells. With that said there is a cost to harness that energy. If there is a cost the resource is scarce.
Again with the air we breathe there is a cost. Yes, if we didn't tamper with the environment we would have an overabundance of clean air. But not tampering with the enviorment is the cost of clean air. That means giving something up. When economists speak about scarcity it is in this context. One must give something up in order to get something else.
Scaricity in itself doesn't prop up the elite, that is what every human culture has done since the advent of civilization. Look at communist sociecieties, they have an eleite class jsut like a capitalist society.
Services are just as much a resource as a tangible item. People place a value on any given service. Don't most slashdot readers value their internet connection which relies on a vast array of service technicians which produce no tangible product but provide us with something we want?
I have never indicated that I actually agree with how society is organized, but it seems that human nature has set us on this path. It may not be the best theoretical way but economics is not an attempt to recreate society based on rules that defy our nature... Economics is about predict human behavior based on emperical evidence.
While I think your post was quite interesting (great references, they were interesting to read), I think you are missing a key concept of economics... All resources are scarce, therefore there is no such thing as "post scarcity." I also think you have missed the point that economics is not as much about predicting a market as it is about predicting human behavior in a market. While people are very unpredicible, often making poor decisions, most economists would blame this on an imbalance of information in the system. I had a very hard time understing how economists believe that people make rational decisions when there is so much evidence to the contrary, but in general they do make the best decisions they can with the information at hand, their individual level of understanding, and their own self interests at heart.
Yes, many resources have become cheap and abundant but even the air we rely on to sustain us is scarce. The EPA was formed in part to help protect our air and water resources by adding regulations and creating penalties for non-compliance thus adding a "cost" to the air we breathe. In the digital age we tend to forget that we must give up something in order to take advantage of something else, we must pay to have Internet access (instead of buying a few extra six-packs of beer), we must take our limited time in order to surf the Internet and post on Slashdot. Name a resource and I can demonstrate its scarcity.
There will never be such a thing as a "post scarcity" world, even hydrogen is scarce as there is only so much of it in the universe. I would go as far as to believe that as time goes on resources will become even more scarce (in general). Technology allows us to make some resources obsolete but generally puts an emphasis on new resources. I think humans will forever be chasing the ball of unlimited resources. The theory that fusion has the potential to provide free unlimited power is faulty, containing such a powerful source of energy will definately cost more than just the "free" energy of the system, someone will have to monitor the system to ensure it is safe, if that entity monitoring the system is a robot, it will have taken up other resources which could have been used elsewhere. There will be a cost, albeit lower than current costs.
I think we would both agree that traditional economic models do not predict human behavior all that well, but they do have some value when applied in context.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey.. this is /. You are going to be banned if you keep spouting your pro-Microsoft mumbo jumbo. No one here cares about reality. Who cares that you can't use an Excel macro, people here think that VBScript is worthless and you need to use C, C++, assembly, or Perl to get anything done. Just use the data from the Excel sheet and write some code you lazy bafoon. Also, in a discussion about piracy who would actually be buying games, aren't we supposed to just d/l them?
Thank you for actually living in the real world, its refreshing to see that there are real people who actually get the world we actually live in on /. from time to time.
If copyrights and patents are property, then why don't copyright owners and patent holders pay a property tax?
In the US the federal government has no property taxes, usually that is a state tax. States vary but where I live property taxes are for real property which is essentially real estate. We also pay a tangible tax and an intangible tax. The tangible tax is for hard physical assets the company owns such as PC's, copiers, vehicles, etc. We also pay an intagible tax for intangible assets such as patents, trademarks, goodwill, etc. So we pay taxes on patents and copyrights but they aren't called property taxes, they are called intagible taxes. Every state probably has different rules, this is just how it works in Florida.
In essence companies do pay taxes for copyrights and patents, they just aren't called taxes, they are called fees. It can't cost anywhere near what the fees are to obtain and maintain a patent for a patent clerk to review an application.
I think most of the developers here want to work in a replica of an escape pod.
We have tried to combine your idea of a a central common area with the private work space. I my office we have an open floor plan with L shaped desks which back up to each other. Each desk has a high (6') cabinet. This means that two people can turn around to talk to each other so if you have mini teams they can work together well and you can just shout across the room if you need to talk to someone else. There are 8 work spaces in the plan. I see pro's and cons with this set up. Colloboration is very easy and people are able to learn alot from each other. Some poeple seem to love this setup. Not one of them would rather be in a cube farm. All is not perfect in this enviornment either.
One major problem is that one employee is loud and can distract the coworker behind her. I have also had employees in the past which have had a hard time tuning out the noise from the multiple conversations which can be going on at the same time.
IM and EMail are great productivity tools but do little to foster a sense of team. From my experience building a coherent team requires more than building a paper trail to CYA as another poster mentioned, in fact this can be destructive toward a team enviornment as it allows people to place balme which I rarely try to do as a manager. I accept mistakes are going to happen and try to find a way to prevent them in the future by fixing a process or trainging, not by punnishing someone. The best teams actually do things together like going to lunch, pulling pranks, even occasionally going to a bar or something after work. A bad team does everything to avoid any additional contact with each other.
I guess what I am really tring to say is that everyone is going to have a different preference and forcing a working enviornment on someone can have very negative effects. I can't imagine putting a team of programmers at a round table. Our layout would probably be better than that situation for most developers but it really comes down to the attitudes and work preferrences of each employee.
I would ask the employees before doing anything, if they like the idea of a round table it is probably good but remember that they may not be there too long either and the next guy may be a great developer but not work in this environment.
In a perfect world, economics would be simple enough for anyone to handle it without needing an accountant. The "better save you lots more than he/she costs" is hiding the issue a bit, because regardless they ARE costing money, and that money has to come from somewhere. Under the current system, a good accountant will save you more money than they cost and therefore from YOUR point of view you've saved some money, but overall the money had to come out of somewhere, so someone has to be losing out of the deal. IF we could find a system where accountants weren't needed, this money would be distributed more appropriately.
I'm sorry but accountants are not economists and really aren't there to help someone understand economics. Most people think of accountants for their work in public accounting like tax prep and audit but that is not the most powerful part of accounting. Cost accounting is a vital role for any organization, it helps those who don't have the time or understanding of the numbers understand what is profitable what is loosing money and where there is waste in the system. This is where an accountant can really help an organization out even if the organization is a not-for-profit. In a perfect world there may not be a need for a tax accountant or someoone to perform an audit but there would still be a need to analize the numbers and understand how to figure out what is worth doing from an economic perspective. The cost accountant would probably be the one responsible for the so called "perfect world" as their one and only goal is to allow someone to manage a business unit with information which is one step closer to "perfect information." This is not quite a function which is there to fix a flaw, it is a function to keep flaws out of he system.
The same is true for all of these other "professionals" you are criticizing. I am not a fan of lawyers but they do provide a usefull service in many cases. They add value to the system on a regular basis. If you try and dumb down laws to make them easier to understand the language being used in them becomes too vague and allows for more loopholes. Just think about writting laws in plain english using common terms which when you go to the dictionary has ten different meanings? How does a jury sort that out?
The Obama administration did encourage more release of records under the FOIA and a relaxing of exemptions. The idea was to assume that any record could be released unless an exemption prevented it. The previous directive was to presume that any record could not released and then try to justify it. If they couldn't justify denying it, they would grudgingly release it.
I wish that I could believe you but the minimal evidence in the TFA is giving statistics which counter your argument. I think you may have drank a little too much of the Democratic Party koolaid. Obama hasn't followed through on one campaign promise yet. Yeah, he has an Open Government Directive which isn't being followed.. who's to blame? I think the buck stops with him.
I'm not saying that Obama is really worse than Bush, just that he isn't showing that he is better either.
Throw 'em out in '10... all of them in both parties. Now that is change I do believe in.
Come on.. you can trust these guys.. really.
I don't belive in change, at least not until we throw BOTH parties out.
This is what happens when an idealist with no experience goes to Washington. They can't change the system when they don't even know what the system is. We must change the system by voting everyone out and starting over.
Thanks for the clarification.
Last I check raising cattle IS agriculture.
I read an interesting article about how ethanol really can be similar to gas, parituclar in an engine designed for gas. http://www.radford.edu/wkovarik/papers/fuel.htm
It seems as if ethanol is actually a good fuel when an engine is tuned properly. It is used for racing already, most motorsports use pure ethanol as it has a higher octane rating which allows the production of more horsepower. If you tune and gear an engine properly you should easily be able to get similar mileage. The problem with flex fuel cars is that they are still tuned for their main source of fuel, traditional gas.
Ethonol also eliminates the need for a catalytic converter to eliminate engine knocking. If it can be produced using land which is inefficent for other agriculural uses such as west texas ranch land where hundres of acres are need per cow or argicultural byproducts such as corn cobs it is a great alternative to traditional petrolium based fuel. I never drank the corn based ethanol Koolaid, but an economical cellulosic based ethanol sounds very promising.
If you're not going to give him a second chance, why let him out of prison at all?
Good point. We should just do what the Saudi's do and cut a hand off on the first offense and forget prison. Most thieves in Saudi don't steal again. After the second chance they have a very hard time doing anything so the problem is solved all on its own although when I lived there in the 90's there was a guy who had run out of hands, they had moved on to his feet until he ran out of them, the fifth offense was his head. This was in the paper over there, I'm not sure I believe it because I don't know how you can steal very well with no hands and no feet but somehow the paper did report that he was going to be excuted in the town square on a Friday.
Many other countries aren't like this; their scientists are celebrities. I wish we could be more like them.
I would have to disagree with your conclusion. Scientists can be celebrities in any country. The celebrities you speak of have social skills. In the US many scientists have taken on celbrity status, look at Stephen Hawings (while not from the US he is celebrated in this country), Michio Kaku, as well as many others. They all have social skills which MUST be developed in order to attain their status. Other than fellow scientists, who really cares about your chosen subject unless you can explain to them why it is important.
Don't get me wrong, it is not acceptible to abuse other people, I am not at all in favor of beating people up or picking on them. I am not saying that victoms aren't victoms, just that building social skills is critical if you want to be part of society. You can have an IQ of 180 but if you can't communicate with anyone why should anyone else care?
EMC has a great product but it may be overkill. ApplicationXTender, in its most basic form, can do everything you are looking for. It is not cheap but it can handle any document type (although the built in viewer works only for PDF, TIFF, and MS Office documents to my knowledge). ApplicationXTender can also intgrate with any ODMA compatible application to allow new documents to be indexed and stored within the document management system. It can integrate with many other applications using an Integration module (for example you could index information from an invoice and send it directly into an accounting package as a new accounts payable item to be processed which is really powerfull if combined with a good scanning package such as Kofax which can automatically recognize a document and OCR the index fields it set up for, calculate its level of confidence, and automatically release the document or prompt a user to verify what it has read based on the confidence level). The client can run as a desktop application or as a web appliction.
Annotations can be added without checking a document out. Actually editing an editble document requires checking it out. Annotations can be as simple as highlighting something or as detailed as drawings and text. With press of a button annotation appear or dissapear.
The database back end can be MS SQL (express or full blown), MySQL, Oracle, as well as others. Some add-ons require full blown MS SQL but the basic system can run on a quite a large number of platforms. The software is modular so each add-on service can be put on any supported server. The license server (the most important part of the system since nothing works without it) seems to only run on Windows 2003 Server at this point but 2008 support is supposed to be out in a couple of months. I don't think they ever plan to release it for Linux.
The Web Server (if desired) requires IIS. EMC supports SUSE as a web client so it should work ony any Linux as long as you have Firefox (I did a quick web search and did find some Linux users having trouble trying to access something using Opera and Firefox but the error indicated an old version of ApplicationXTender).
ApplicationXTender is HIPAA complient and has a full audit trail so any changes to anything are logged. I don't let my users change index fields and since only TIFF documents are currently being stored only annotations can be added by a user which does not impact the original document I really have no use for the logs but I can definately see where it could be usefull. Office documents are strored as revisions so you can always revert to an earlier version and know who did what. Additional add-ons can allow full-text indexing (requires SQL Server) and document workflow.
I only use the basic system and use another software package (Kofax) to scan and automatically index documents which is very nice. Kofax can check what it reads against a user defined list which improves accuracy for certain field (such as a clients name). It can also use a database query to fill in information to be indexed which is great for accounting records (look up a vendor ID and fill in the full name for example). I also use another package (PlanetPress) to capture print streams index the document and send them directly into the system. Currently I am only using the system for accounting records and some rather static historical files. I plan to add the workflow module but it is expensive and I have to develop my strategy for capturing mail as it comes into our office (we get tons of it for a company of our size, it takes one person about 2-3 hours to open and sort on an average day, some days it can take all day when we get certain types of monthly bills. The number of different documents that come in also make this difficult to automate. A large portion of our business is record keeping and book keeping for our clients and the payoff on the system is very evident. What used to take hours of manual labor to find and put together can now be done in a matter of seconds.
Dismantle a nuclear bomb, and you can light a city for a year. Drop a nuclear bomb...
Not in my back yard
I do not belive that more "goods and services" are always better for us, but societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and required rationing, only that in order to have one thing one must give up something else.
Just for me to sit here and enjoy a healty debate means that I am sacrificing one scarce resource for another. I am giving up my time (definately a scare resource being a business owner), which could be used chasing women, working on bettering my business, watching TV, reading a novel, or just about anything else, in order to express my thoughts. In my mind this is a rational decision (which I call greed) because I see more benefit in doing this right now as it is too early to go out, I am tired of work after a hard day, and don't really feel like killing brain cells in front of the TV.
While pre-agricultural societies may not have had the rich and famous type of elites we have today, they did have an elite class, usually called tribal leaders or chiefs. As agriculture caught on and more people were able to be fed the chiefs became kings controlling more land giving rise to the need for another class of elites called the aristocricy (yes, I really moved through time fast). In the modern era we have even more classes, regardless of the society we live in (capitalist democracies or commuunist dictatorships, it really doesn't matter).
The real world is not as the novels you point me to describe. Even if you owned all of California, accessing its resources is NOT FREE. Someone must gather the sand, mine the gold, and harvest food. All of these have a cost in economic terms.
Economic theory doesn't only describe what happens in a caplitalistic society, and can even describe, relatively accuratly, what happens in a communist country with price controls. Price controls ultimately lead to more scarcity as their is less supply as people find more valuable things to do with their time when they don't get enough gain from producing a product any more. Then you end up with either a total lack of resources or huge jumps in prices. Look at cold war era Moscow for a prime example, people had to wait in lines for bread for longer than it takes to make a loaf of bread.
In my view of the world, any resource has a cost, even if it seems free. If I want clean air then I need to reduce polution, this means I must reduce my use of fossil fuels or develop a new technology to clean the pollution out of them. If I want more free time then I work less and give up money which means that I have less money to spend on hobbies I enjoy meaning that my free time becomes less valuable.
The traditional view that economics is about money, is wrong, it is about supply and demand in a world with scarce resources, NOT always rare resources. Yes, things can be cheap, wheat today costs much less today than back in the 1600's before any industrial equipment was used in agriculture. As you mentioned earlier, only 2% of the American workforce is employed producing food, this is because technology has allowed us to streamline production of this resource. The cost, in terms of man hours, has significantly decreased. The introduction of industrial methods created the need for other resources such as steel and energy in the form of fossil fuels. We started with steam power, moved on to internal combustion engines and electric power. Electricty allowed us to develop new tools to help maximize efficiency such as computers and robotics. All of these new resources have a cost in terms of polution, or even just the oppportunity cost of all of those worked puting their time into engineering, manufacturing, and marketing a new product. All of t
There are two underlying principles to economic theory (in their simplest forms): 1) All resources are scarce. 2) People are greedy.
One could argue about the merits of these three underlying principles but I have yet to ever see an example of a human society where these principles break down.
I would agree that with almost any given resource technological advances have led to a decline in real costs for such resources. There are examples to the contrary such as our recent facination with protecting the environment (While not really a tree hugger I am an avid backpacker and fisherman and em enthusiastic about protecting the enviroment). Now the environment costs us much more than it did 100 years ago. Just because the cost goes down, or there is an overabundance does not make a resource free. The perfect example is with energy. The sun does provide Earth with more power than humans really ever anticipate using as we would probably run out of food production capacity before power if we covered the earth with PV cells. With that said there is a cost to harness that energy. If there is a cost the resource is scarce.
Again with the air we breathe there is a cost. Yes, if we didn't tamper with the environment we would have an overabundance of clean air. But not tampering with the enviorment is the cost of clean air. That means giving something up. When economists speak about scarcity it is in this context. One must give something up in order to get something else.
Scaricity in itself doesn't prop up the elite, that is what every human culture has done since the advent of civilization. Look at communist sociecieties, they have an eleite class jsut like a capitalist society.
Services are just as much a resource as a tangible item. People place a value on any given service. Don't most slashdot readers value their internet connection which relies on a vast array of service technicians which produce no tangible product but provide us with something we want?
I have never indicated that I actually agree with how society is organized, but it seems that human nature has set us on this path. It may not be the best theoretical way but economics is not an attempt to recreate society based on rules that defy our nature... Economics is about predict human behavior based on emperical evidence.
While I think your post was quite interesting (great references, they were interesting to read), I think you are missing a key concept of economics... All resources are scarce, therefore there is no such thing as "post scarcity." I also think you have missed the point that economics is not as much about predicting a market as it is about predicting human behavior in a market. While people are very unpredicible, often making poor decisions, most economists would blame this on an imbalance of information in the system. I had a very hard time understing how economists believe that people make rational decisions when there is so much evidence to the contrary, but in general they do make the best decisions they can with the information at hand, their individual level of understanding, and their own self interests at heart. Yes, many resources have become cheap and abundant but even the air we rely on to sustain us is scarce. The EPA was formed in part to help protect our air and water resources by adding regulations and creating penalties for non-compliance thus adding a "cost" to the air we breathe. In the digital age we tend to forget that we must give up something in order to take advantage of something else, we must pay to have Internet access (instead of buying a few extra six-packs of beer), we must take our limited time in order to surf the Internet and post on Slashdot. Name a resource and I can demonstrate its scarcity. There will never be such a thing as a "post scarcity" world, even hydrogen is scarce as there is only so much of it in the universe. I would go as far as to believe that as time goes on resources will become even more scarce (in general). Technology allows us to make some resources obsolete but generally puts an emphasis on new resources. I think humans will forever be chasing the ball of unlimited resources. The theory that fusion has the potential to provide free unlimited power is faulty, containing such a powerful source of energy will definately cost more than just the "free" energy of the system, someone will have to monitor the system to ensure it is safe, if that entity monitoring the system is a robot, it will have taken up other resources which could have been used elsewhere. There will be a cost, albeit lower than current costs. I think we would both agree that traditional economic models do not predict human behavior all that well, but they do have some value when applied in context.