Flood insurance is basically government welfare. In the U.S. private insurance companies don't provide flood coverage only the government provides it [ National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) ] at highly subsidized rates.
Nothing pisses me off more than a Republican in a McMansion living on a flood plain bitching about the "welfare queens".
This is a good point. Despite all of the talk of "push" technology RSS isn't really pushed. It's an automated pull technology. When you "subscribe" to an RSS feed the only thing you are really doing is telling your application (the RSS reader or aggregator) to go to a specific URL and download the XML content that can be found there.
In other words your subscription to an RSS feed is roughly analogous to bookmarking a popular web page.
There are, of course, mechanism where attributes of the RSS feed can tell the reader how often to access the URL automatically (e.g. the RSS 0.91 skipDays or RSS 2 ttl tags) but that's really controlled on the client. 20 minutes with Perl or Ruby and you can write yourself a RSS reader that ignores these tags and queries once a minute or once every 20 days.
Seriously, Feces, who do you thinks pays for cleaning the chemical by products out of the rivers and air? By my definition, that's not socialism that's getting a corporation to pay the full cost of manufacturing. Just because a company in China can dump their arsenic directly into the Yellow River doesn't mean that doesn't have a real, measurable cost associated with it that is being borne by others instead of by the company itself.
In the U.S., we occasionally make companies clean up after themselves. In China, the cost is reflected in a lower life expectancy, poorer health, and the loss of value in the shared resource. You may call that capitalism, I call it a subsidy for an inefficient business paid for by the people (wow, sounds like socialism).
Thank God they didn't. You really think Pipkin would vote against a police state? He'd be appending a "video cameras in Doctor's examination rooms to prevent talking about abortion" rider to the bill.
Religious Fanatics + Police State tendancies? Hmmm? I think I know where the surviving Taliban are hiding...
I've fought this battle many times as well. Patents are not trademarks are not copyright.
However, the general problem is similar. Large corporations have co-opted all forms of legal intellectual property protection to the detriment of personal rights. Whether we are talking about Angus McDonald's pub being sued by McDonalds Inc., effectively infinite copyright terms, or patent arsenals designed to forstall competition there is a general trend of those with the money and power abusing the IP laws to expand their power and increase their money.
Now, no one honestly expects the corporations and their governments to do anything else, but we don't have to like it and, hopefully in the long run, we won't have to accept it.
I think that's the point. Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Ken Lay, and the CEO's who are yelling about the "critical IT shortage" are cheap labor conservatives because it helps them and the people who own them be more insanely wealthy than they already are.
However, no middle-class worker is going to go out and vote for a cheap labor political party if it is sold to them on those terms. They will, on the other hand, go out and vote for a political party based on "moral values" and "guts and glory nationalism".
The CEO of just about any corporation doesn't give a flying f*ck about abortion, steroids in baseball, gay marriage, or the buzz-words of the religious right, but if it distracts us from our declining standard of living and deteriorating environment they become useful tools.
1. I'm actually a bit of a consumer goods snob. I'd rather have a single nice chair that a dining set from WalMart.
2. Who said it was a vice? My initial post was simply an attempt to strip away the BS surrounding comments from CEOs about the "critical shortage of IT workers". It isn't moral that corporations want the cheapest possible labor force, but it isn't amoral. It simply is the truth.
Well, to bring this back to the initial context which was, in essence, "why do these 'critical IT shortage' articles exist when it's so hard to find a job?"
For a specific example, why does IBM claim that there is a 'critical IT shortage' in the same quarter that they are laying off 10,000 IT workers?
To use your line: "What's their motivation?"
The answer -- and I don't think anyone honestly disagrees with me though they may challenge my politics for saying it -- is to keep labor costs down. In other words, don't apologize for the cheap labor conservative ethic as some sort of morally superior world-view. It's people with 99% of the wealth trying to ensure that they can keep their wealth and make much more.
To be fair, if I was in the device driver business I would probably choose the Comp. Sci. guy on the assumption that the English Lit. guy would be bored with that type of work.
A little off topic, but if I got two programmers with equal skills at an interview and one has a Comp. Sci. degree and the other has an English Lit. degree I'm going to hire the English Lit. student. For the type of work I do -- business enterprise / workflow / short term projects being directed by non-technical clients -- I want someone who can communicate verbally and through the written word. While a English Lit. degree doesn't promise communitation skills and a Comp. Sci. degree doesn't necessarily preclude them, chances are I'm better off English Lit. candidate.
Exactly right. There's a political theory called "cheap labor conservatism" though the cheap labor conservatives, of course, don't call it that.
from the link...
Cheap-labor conservatives don't like social spending or our "safety net". Why. Because when you're unemployed and desperate, corporations can pay you whatever they feel like - which is inevitably next to nothing. You see, they want you "over a barrel" and in a position to "work cheap or starve".
Cheap-labor conservatives don't like the minimum wage, or other improvements in wages and working conditions. Why. These reforms undo all of their efforts to keep you "over a barrel".
Cheap-labor conservatives like "free trade", NAFTA, GATT, etc. Why. Because there is a huge supply of desperately poor people in the third world, who are "over a barrel", and will work cheap.
Cheap-labor conservatives oppose a woman's right to choose. Why. Unwanted children are an economic burden that put poor women "over a barrel", forcing them to work cheap.
Cheap-labor conservatives don't like unions. Why. Because when labor "sticks together", wages go up. That's why workers unionize. Seems workers don't like being "over a barrel".
Cheap-labor conservatives constantly bray about "morality", "virtue", "respect for authority", "hard work" and other "values". Why. So they can blame your being "over a barrel" on your own "immorality", lack of "values" and "poor choices".
Cheap-labor conservatives encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. Why? Bigotry among wage earners distracts them, and keeps them from recognizing their common interests as wage earners.
I don't disagree that this patent is intentionally ambiguous. However, I fear that they (and your argument) want to have it both ways: ambiguous references to "objects" that can mean whatever their lawyers want it to mean to increase they scope of the patents, but defending it to the technical crowd as "oh, don't worry, it really only applies to this subset of implementation decisions; it's not really an abuse of the patent system..."
In any case, I'm not sure I get your distinction between objects as code vs. user interface level features. OLE is code. An ActiveX object is implemented as code but it generally has a UI. Is a Java Bean a user interface level feature? How about an EJB? Are you saying that "the idea of a button is a user interface level object, but a JButton is a code level object?".
OLE isn't mentioned in the entire patent. You would think that in a legal document like this if they meant OLE they would have said OLE.
In any case, if you read through the patent it appears that they took the user manual(*) for an email client, sprinkled in the word "object", and ran it through a lawyer filter to get a patent.
* Here's an examples:
A single click on one of the object icons of the present invention will select the entire text of the object. In addition, multiple objects can be selected via conventional cmd-click (discontiguous) or shift-click/shift-arrow (contiguous) procedures. A click and drag operation can be used to move the object within the email headers (e.g., between any of the To, From, cc, or bcc fields). The object can also be copied (by selecting the object and employing a copy command) for placement outside the address fields (e.g., the subject field, newsgroups field, the body of the message, or the Desktop). Double clicking on the icon will open the item associated with the address after looking up the contact in the local contact store (e.g. address book), or prompt the user to create an associated item if the address was manually entered or captured from a LDAP server. In this way a user can readily edit or add email addresses to his or her contacts list, thereby facilitating its inclusion in future outgoing email transmissions.
The GPP should be modded down as "troll" or "flamebait" because, COPYRIGHTS are not PATENTS!! Bitching about the "Hypocracy" of GPL defenders in another article about patents doesn't add a lot to the conversation. But, to be honest, either does this post so I'll shut up now.
You write that as if crippling the current USPTO would be a bad thing? We've already tried the "answer too loosely, and you'll end up with people patenting rediculous things" route. I, personally, am ready to give the "go overboard" route and see if there is any possibility that it could be any worse.
As long as business process and software patents (as opposed to copyright for specific code implementations which I whole-heartedly support) we will continue to see worthless patents like this one that devalue the contribution of real inventors.
My solution is much easier than yours; end business process and software patents.
Well it does say "In a preferred embodiment... {blah, blah, obvious stuff about user interface}". If you were Microsoft trying to make a buck off of this patent, do you honestly think they would limit their lawsuits to applications that exactly implemented the user interface decisions described in the patent?
Back the question of objects, wouldn't any patent that begins "blah, blah, treat X as objects" be invalidated because of prior art due to the existance of pure OO languages like Smalltalk. I mean if there has ever been an email client implementated in Smalltalk or other OO language wouldn't the email address be treated as objects by the definition of that language?
"Mr. Secretary, it is vital to the security of our nation that the border with Mexico be enhanced with a 6 lane freeway, 2 18 hole golf courses, a Walmart, and 1,400 "estate" homes on luxurious, 2 acre lots starting in the low $500k."
I don't know if "strawman" is the right term, but you see comments like this all of the time on slashdot. They are generally one line, one sentence comments in the form: "Yu are dum, proff that you r correc!".
If no one bother to respond with the links that anyone could look up on Google, then the implied logic is: "Ha ha, yo kudent proov it so I win!"
On the other hand, if someone does try and provide some useful information the original poster ignores it without bothering to read or understand (or, best option, intelligently argue with) the post. I'm willing to bet the very few, if any, from the "Al Gore was a lier" camp are going to try and refute the Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf's article. And I'm also willing to bet that there will be fifty more "Al Gore didnt do nuthin for the interweb; prof that he did" posts before the day is out.
spells needs a -1 Adds Nothing to the Conversation mod.
In other words, I would pay an annual fee for an excellent service like Google, but I would be damned if I would reach into my wallet every time I hit the search button.
Exactly. The problem with a cost per article model is that it interferes with the way we are accustomed to using the web. An article sparks a thought, which causes me to search the web for related information, which uncovers a possibly related article, which sparks a refined thought, etc., etc.
Anyway for $50 a year for access to the NYT archive I'd sign up today.
Slashdot Mirror
Flood insurance is basically government welfare. In the U.S. private insurance companies don't provide flood coverage only the government provides it [ National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) ] at highly subsidized rates.
Nothing pisses me off more than a Republican in a McMansion living on a flood plain bitching about the "welfare queens".
This is a good point. Despite all of the talk of "push" technology RSS isn't really pushed. It's an automated pull technology. When you "subscribe" to an RSS feed the only thing you are really doing is telling your application (the RSS reader or aggregator) to go to a specific URL and download the XML content that can be found there.
In other words your subscription to an RSS feed is roughly analogous to bookmarking a popular web page.
There are, of course, mechanism where attributes of the RSS feed can tell the reader how often to access the URL automatically (e.g. the RSS 0.91 skipDays or RSS 2 ttl tags) but that's really controlled on the client. 20 minutes with Perl or Ruby and you can write yourself a RSS reader that ignores these tags and queries once a minute or once every 20 days.
I should have used a smiley face...
I may be terribly cynical, but the first thing I thought was:
1. This distracts the world from Karl's outing the CIA agent.
2. This prevents Blair from going waffely on Iraq despite Bush's lack of any compromise on global warming or aid to Africa.
In any case, we should bomb Mecca every time something like this happens.
Seriously, Feces, who do you thinks pays for cleaning the chemical by products out of the rivers and air? By my definition, that's not socialism that's getting a corporation to pay the full cost of manufacturing. Just because a company in China can dump their arsenic directly into the Yellow River doesn't mean that doesn't have a real, measurable cost associated with it that is being borne by others instead of by the company itself.
In the U.S., we occasionally make companies clean up after themselves. In China, the cost is reflected in a lower life expectancy, poorer health, and the loss of value in the shared resource. You may call that capitalism, I call it a subsidy for an inefficient business paid for by the people (wow, sounds like socialism).
Wearing an "I AM COOL(TM)" t-shirt would be very cool as long as you recognized how uncool it was to be wearing it. Fashion is very complicated.
See link for insightful related comic: http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=1244
Thank God they didn't. You really think Pipkin would vote against a police state? He'd be appending a "video cameras in Doctor's examination rooms to prevent talking about abortion" rider to the bill.
Religious Fanatics + Police State tendancies? Hmmm? I think I know where the surviving Taliban are hiding...
I've fought this battle many times as well. Patents are not trademarks are not copyright.
However, the general problem is similar. Large corporations have co-opted all forms of legal intellectual property protection to the detriment of personal rights. Whether we are talking about Angus McDonald's pub being sued by McDonalds Inc., effectively infinite copyright terms, or patent arsenals designed to forstall competition there is a general trend of those with the money and power abusing the IP laws to expand their power and increase their money.
Now, no one honestly expects the corporations and their governments to do anything else, but we don't have to like it and, hopefully in the long run, we won't have to accept it.
I don't know. The writeup sounds cool. I'm definitely looking forward to version 3!
I think that's the point. Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Ken Lay, and the CEO's who are yelling about the "critical IT shortage" are cheap labor conservatives because it helps them and the people who own them be more insanely wealthy than they already are.
However, no middle-class worker is going to go out and vote for a cheap labor political party if it is sold to them on those terms. They will, on the other hand, go out and vote for a political party based on "moral values" and "guts and glory nationalism".
The CEO of just about any corporation doesn't give a flying f*ck about abortion, steroids in baseball, gay marriage, or the buzz-words of the religious right, but if it distracts us from our declining standard of living and deteriorating environment they become useful tools.
1. I'm actually a bit of a consumer goods snob. I'd rather have a single nice chair that a dining set from WalMart.
2. Who said it was a vice? My initial post was simply an attempt to strip away the BS surrounding comments from CEOs about the "critical shortage of IT workers". It isn't moral that corporations want the cheapest possible labor force, but it isn't amoral. It simply is the truth.
Well, to bring this back to the initial context which was, in essence, "why do these 'critical IT shortage' articles exist when it's so hard to find a job?"
For a specific example, why does IBM claim that there is a 'critical IT shortage' in the same quarter that they are laying off 10,000 IT workers?
To use your line: "What's their motivation?"
The answer -- and I don't think anyone honestly disagrees with me though they may challenge my politics for saying it -- is to keep labor costs down. In other words, don't apologize for the cheap labor conservative ethic as some sort of morally superior world-view. It's people with 99% of the wealth trying to ensure that they can keep their wealth and make much more.
To be fair, if I was in the device driver business I would probably choose the Comp. Sci. guy on the assumption that the English Lit. guy would be bored with that type of work.
A little off topic, but if I got two programmers with equal skills at an interview and one has a Comp. Sci. degree and the other has an English Lit. degree I'm going to hire the English Lit. student. For the type of work I do -- business enterprise / workflow / short term projects being directed by non-technical clients -- I want someone who can communicate verbally and through the written word. While a English Lit. degree doesn't promise communitation skills and a Comp. Sci. degree doesn't necessarily preclude them, chances are I'm better off English Lit. candidate.
from the link...
I don't disagree that this patent is intentionally ambiguous. However, I fear that they (and your argument) want to have it both ways: ambiguous references to "objects" that can mean whatever their lawyers want it to mean to increase they scope of the patents, but defending it to the technical crowd as "oh, don't worry, it really only applies to this subset of implementation decisions; it's not really an abuse of the patent system..."
In any case, I'm not sure I get your distinction between objects as code vs. user interface level features. OLE is code. An ActiveX object is implemented as code but it generally has a UI. Is a Java Bean a user interface level feature? How about an EJB? Are you saying that "the idea of a button is a user interface level object, but a JButton is a code level object?".
In any case, if you read through the patent it appears that they took the user manual(*) for an email client, sprinkled in the word "object", and ran it through a lawyer filter to get a patent.
* Here's an examples:
The GPP should be modded down as "troll" or "flamebait" because, COPYRIGHTS are not PATENTS!! Bitching about the "Hypocracy" of GPL defenders in another article about patents doesn't add a lot to the conversation. But, to be honest, either does this post so I'll shut up now.
You write that as if crippling the current USPTO would be a bad thing? We've already tried the "answer too loosely, and you'll end up with people patenting rediculous things" route. I, personally, am ready to give the "go overboard" route and see if there is any possibility that it could be any worse.
As long as business process and software patents (as opposed to copyright for specific code implementations which I whole-heartedly support) we will continue to see worthless patents like this one that devalue the contribution of real inventors.
My solution is much easier than yours; end business process and software patents.
Well it does say "In a preferred embodiment... {blah, blah, obvious stuff about user interface}". If you were Microsoft trying to make a buck off of this patent, do you honestly think they would limit their lawsuits to applications that exactly implemented the user interface decisions described in the patent?
Back the question of objects, wouldn't any patent that begins "blah, blah, treat X as objects" be invalidated because of prior art due to the existance of pure OO languages like Smalltalk. I mean if there has ever been an email client implementated in Smalltalk or other OO language wouldn't the email address be treated as objects by the definition of that language?
I followed your link and learned everything I needed to know:
We are currently unable to serve your request
We are sorry, but there was an error and your request could not be completed
This error has been logged and the issue should be resolved shortly
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Damn that Slashdot spin!!
Damn, I can see the security briefing now...
"Mr. Secretary, it is vital to the security of our nation that the border with Mexico be enhanced with a 6 lane freeway, 2 18 hole golf courses, a Walmart, and 1,400 "estate" homes on luxurious, 2 acre lots starting in the low $500k."
Gives whole new meaning to "reprogramming camps".
I don't know if "strawman" is the right term, but you see comments like this all of the time on slashdot. They are generally one line, one sentence comments in the form: "Yu are dum, proff that you r correc!".
If no one bother to respond with the links that anyone could look up on Google, then the implied logic is: "Ha ha, yo kudent proov it so I win!"
On the other hand, if someone does try and provide some useful information the original poster ignores it without bothering to read or understand (or, best option, intelligently argue with) the post. I'm willing to bet the very few, if any, from the "Al Gore was a lier" camp are going to try and refute the Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf's article. And I'm also willing to bet that there will be fifty more "Al Gore didnt do nuthin for the interweb; prof that he did" posts before the day is out.
spells needs a -1 Adds Nothing to the Conversation mod.
Exactly. The problem with a cost per article model is that it interferes with the way we are accustomed to using the web. An article sparks a thought, which causes me to search the web for related information, which uncovers a possibly related article, which sparks a refined thought, etc., etc.
Anyway for $50 a year for access to the NYT archive I'd sign up today.