1. Uhm, no. First off, much of the manufacturing is outsourceable, and it's already been done. Second, show me legislation preventing US car makers from making their vehicles outside of the US; you won't be able to, because *it doesn't exist*. Even better, such legislation is illegal under GATT - local content requirements are not allowed, which is why the Phillipines dropped theirs a couple years ago, China is in negotiations to do so, etc. Further, it has more to do with the nature of the business (5 year cycle times, 25 year programs) than anything else. Finally, the amount of foreign investment in US automotive business (Japanese and German factories and design centers being opened in the US) gives lie to the "outsourcing is cheaper" idea. Working locally is generally cheaper, at least in my industry; we design for China in China, we design for the US in the US, we design for the EU in the EU.
2. Again, there's no such thing. It's because there's a huge investment in building a *design* center for that sort of gear; I'm probably sitting in a building with a couple billion in lab gear, much of which would be impossible to move overseas, or simply more expensive to move than to just buy over there. And *we don't even have wet labs*. We outsource that to local test labs, usually, since we mostly do electronics. The cost savings for outsourcing a trans group would have to be huge for a company to think that moving the division overseas would be worth the savings. Are the cost savings of moving our 200 employee group overseas high enough that, in the 20 years that they'll probably be cheaper than we are, they'd make more profit on investing in moving the center than they would simply investing the cash they'd have to spend to do it? Quite probably not.
3. Again, automotive really isn't a protected industry, at least not anymore as free trade agreements expand. And most engineers I know do have benefits of a usable nature. Many of them work high-tech. I think you're a paranoid who's gottens screwed over a couple times, honestly. Too bad, but your problem; most of the ones I know don't seem to be having all that much trouble finding decent employment.
Yes they will- the falling dollar will take care of them, and then India and China will call in their large amounts of bonds they currently have invested in the United States and will be able to take over completely without firing a shot.
Like I said - paranoid.
Cheaper people in US Timezones exist in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile
No. People who are *compensated less highly* exist. Employing them isn't usually any cheaper. Education and quality are the main barriers, and while there is progress on those, the US is improving as well. I've seen studies on this; it usually is *not* cheaper to outsource engineering labor. This is why most American engineers remain employed.
And if you can do this WITHOUT the 2 highly paid engineers, doing it all with lower paid engineers? The United States ain't the only thing in this timezone. But of course, we can always do what your industry did and fall back on government protectionism.
You can't, is the thing, because sooner or later those lower paid engineers are going to want more money. Usually sooner. We outsource programming to Russians. Think they don't know what we get paid? Think they don't work to get their paycheck up towards our level? No one is going to say "Exploit me, exploit me!", at least not in industries that require high amounts of intelligence and training. Except maybe CS majors; you guys seem to like to work for free. See, this is where the control systems thing comes in - the whole process is in a feedback configuration, and it will settle. When trade was local, your competition was local, and the job went to the cheapest person in your town. Eventually, wages across the town more or less stabilized. Then trade became national, and the same thing happened across your country. Final
If you give your children money, and let them form a free market in your kitchen, it *is* capitalism. Yes, it's small scale, but scale doesn't change the fact that the structure, which is what's actually important, is capitalist. Similarly, if something is small-scale structured as a communist organization, it remains communist, just at a smaller scale. Certain structures do work better at certain scales than others; however, saying that it isn't communism (despite fitting the principles as you defined them) just because its small is bullshit.
I'm *not* arguing your point re: communism being ineffective at large scales. Please stop saying I am. It hasn't worked, and when it's been attempted, it has invariably devolved into totalitarian/authoritarian structures (USSR, Cuba, China).
Further, you cannot solely cite the founders of an intellectual tradition; you also have to accept the further development of that tradition. Marx is not the sole arbiter of communism; there has been other original thought on the subject since then. Democracy today has many differences from democracy in the time of Plato; would you argue that just because we don't take everything Plato says as gospel, it isn't democracy?
The key word was *force*. My understanding of Marx's doctrines is that he was saying "In a communist countty, the population will redistribute itself more equally." That it would be an inevitable consequence, an "invisible hand" effect, if you don't mind mixing your socioeconomic metaphors. The USSR used violence to force these transfers, something that I believe Marx would have felt to be antithetical to the very notion of communism. A totalitarian government has no issue with using violence againsts its citizens to force them into behaviors it considers desirable; a communist government working from Marx's blueprints would have very real issues with the idea that violence against the working class would be necessary to achieve the desired distribution of population.
re: dog and tail - exactly my point. Just because a totalitarian country represents communist does not make it communist.
The lack of checks in the Soviet implementation of communism was the fatal flaw that allowed it to be consumed from inside by totalitarianism. It is not, however, something that is inherent to communism, just like the strong checks and balances in the US republic that make it relatively difficult to subvert are not inherent to the concept of a republic. The idea is that the Party is controlled by the collective will of the people, yes? If you allow the control of the Party to be assumed by one person, you *already have* wounnd up with a dictatorship, ant then you are living in an authoritarian society with a collective economic system. Communism was both a political and economic system; with only one part and not the other, what you have left is not communism. The second Stalin took power, the USSR ceased to be a communist country.
The plural for kibbutz is kibbutzim; Hebrew word, Hebrew pluralization. The proper word for describing a kibbutz (in the general sense) is socialist, though some essentially function as communist organizations. You remain hung up on communism only in the context of nations, whereas it is a blueprint for organization of groups of people. Again, Marx and Engels originated it, but thought has moved on since their time. The countries established under communist systems have *all* failed, true; but their failure was allowing their system to become an authoritarian system. I'm not certain that it's possible to have a communist nation-state that doesn't fail in this fashion, but the truth is - there never has been a communist nation-state, not for more than a few years. Blaming communism for Stalin's abuses is like blaming democracy for the abuses of the French Revolution.
Who's to blame? Stalin. Robespierre. The dictators, the fascists. Not the systems they subverted.
1. I don't work in high-tech, I work in automotive, which is a much more stable business. 2. Not really. I do control systems development, not coding. I hand an algorithm to a programmer (Russian, right now, oddly enough) for implementation at the end. Sure, my job can be done anywhere - but I do control systems for engines and transmissions, and the infrastructure is quite large, so it isn't outsourcable unless you outsource the entire engine/transmission development, which generally isn't any cheaper than just doing it at home. It isn't like most programming. Engineering is harder to outsource than most people seem to think. 3. What lack of benefits? I have better benefits than most of my friends with university jobs do.
Outsourcing is a temporary problem; the differentials that make it currently profitable will be reduced eventually. And I'd argue that "unprofitable to hire Americans", anyway. More and more, companies seem to be going to "let's have somebody in every single timezone." If you can have 3 engineers working, one after the other, you can reduce your cycle time, which is often a better way to profit than to outsource everything to one cheap location, even if 2 of the 3 engineers are US/European and highly paid.
Yes and no; since MATLAB is numerical, not symbolic, analysis, there's no real need for a definition of approximately; MATLAB's results are all exact and/or approximate, depending on how you think about it. If we were talking about one of the symbolic packages, a Maple or Mathematica, the approximately might have some meaning, but for MATLAB it doesn't really.
And yeah, MATLAB's syntax is usually so C-like that the occasional departures are always a little weird.
They aren't suing Think Secret for divulging the information; they are suing them for inducing unnamed sources to breach NDAs. In other words, the act that's at question isn't publication of the information, but obtaining it in the first place. I support the 1st Amendment as well, but *this is not a 1st Amendment issue* and ought not to be presented as one. This is more like if Think Secret had broken into Cupertino and published what they saw during the break-in. Apple is suing over method of obtaining the information, not over the information's publication.
Now, what Apple should be doing is suing to obtain the names of the sources. Those are the people who genuinely violated their duty. However, if Think Secret actively agitated to get those people to break their NDAs, they can probably be held responsible as well.
Could be, I don't do building codes. However, let's change "restaurant" to "service business without food" (gas station, record store, etc.). They may or may not have one, but most try to because they know that most things that make their customer happier with them is likely to be good for their business.
Gas stations with bathrooms do more business than those without.
Cafes with free wifi do better business than those without.
Record stores with listening stations do better than those without.
Etc.
And I'm going to bet that restaurants with easy access to plugs do better than those without (this may not apply to $100 per plate French places, but anywhere someone isn't going to feel socially stigmatized for using electronics, it should apply.)
There's a value in precision in language; whether other people are imbeciles or not doesn't obviate our responsibility not to misuse words we know we're misusing.
I don't say Christian when I mean snake-handling cultist, and I don't say communist when I mean totalitarian. Hey, I don't even say communist when I mean free software zealot. I damn well will jump on people who misuse words and conflate two very different things into one.
I'm not arguing communism has worked at the national level. I don't think it will, as I said in my previous post. However, I pointed out that the principles are applicable on some scales, and that those principles weren't the real guiding principles of the USSR, which operated as a totalitarian oligarchy.
They work because they aren't *states*. You're hung up on the notion that communist organizations must be nations; I'm not. If you want to restrict it to nations, then yes, there are no examples you can point to. See? I've acknowledged your point, now kindly acknowledge that communism does work under certain circumstances (limited reach, limited goals).
See, it's your parenthetical remarks that make it not "real". A communist country doesn't force population transfer; a totalitarian one masquerading as communist does. Further, a democratic country has elections. Does that mean that, because the USSR had elections, it was a democratic country? Hell no. You can't say "These characteristics are shared with this form of governance, therefore that's what they were using." The USSR was built along strongly authoritarian, totalitarian lines. Just because they took on trappings of communism doesn't make them any less totalitarian.
By the way: on a kibbutz, let me go through 1 to 10.
1. Yes. No one owns land on kibbutzim that I've been to. 2. Yes, although the laws of the state they're part of may have some effect, most request that kibbutz members leave the kibbutz as their inheritor to minimize the effects of those laws. "Real" property is generally not owned by members anyway, while "portable" property is less of an issue and is sometimes passed along. Side note - inheritance is meaningless if everything is collectively owned. 3. Yes. People wanting to leave the kibbutz do not get to take kibbutz property with them when they go. 5. Yes and no. Kibbutz finances run through a central bank. However, they acknowledge that people on kibbutz often interact with people off kibbutz, and some measure of private capital is allowed in order to facilitate this. 6. Yes. Kibbutz owned vehicles loaned out as needed to members. 7. ABSOLUTELY. This is the core reason for most kibbutzim - they farm the land, and most now have light industry attached. Working the land is the core goal of most/many of them. 8. Yes. Everyone has responsibility to work. 9. See 7 re combination, and distribution of population is non-comparable, since they generally don't have sufficient land to try to distribute population in any way other than sensible urban planning. 10. Yes. And in many, if you want to go to an external university, the kibbutz will finance that.
You are pretty obviously not familiar with kibbutzim. We may differ on our analysis of the USSR as a communist nation, but kibbutzim are very definitely communist in structure, as defined by the Manifesto.
(Oh, and 10? Are you serious? That's true of most capitalist countries as well, at least to a given level, and sometimes even through university.)
I've generated 10 GB worth of files for a single 5 minute song when doing tracking, editing, and mix on the same machine.
The final EP took up nearly 40 GB of space, for a 25 minute album. If they'd had a full albums worth of stuff to record, it might have hit 100 GB.
And that's just audio. No video at all. Someone doing the full A/V editing for a feature length film could probably fill that 500 GB harddrive twice over in the course of the project.
I can see why someone needs this much space, easy.
Re:It's MS who's communist here, not us
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Gates Nose-Dives at CES
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· Score: 1, Interesting
You're wrong.
Real life implementations of communism that *work* and were not based on party control exist - kibbutzim in Israel, communes in the US and elsewhere. They aren't based on a Party structure at all.
The totalitarian government you had in Eastern Europe was not really communism, it just went by the name. Drawing conclusions about the validity of real communist principles from the USSR is like drawing conclusions about the lifespan of a human by studying how long penguins live.
(note: I believe communism would still fail as a government, even if it weren't implemented as a totalitarian system, but it is not in and of itself a failure as an idea, as kibbutzim, moshavim, and communes have been showing for the past century.)
Actually, people who want work to be in the public domain upon publication are closer to people who say "Look, you made a chair. As long as you keep that chair to yourself, no one else can use that chair. But if you ever let someone sit in that chair, the chair becomes theirs as well, and they can sit in it whenever they want to; further, they can share the chair with someone else and let them sit in it, and then that other person owns the chair too, and so on, and on."
It's still somewhat disrespectful, but most anti-IP types aren't trying to force you to share - they're saying if you do share, you have no further control of what is done with it. Subtle difference, but difference nonetheless.
Because before Apple Records, no one had ever named a company after an apple. In fact, no one knew what an apple was - back then, we called them "rounded pears".
I didn't invite you into my home. If I had, I'd be a bit of a jerk to say "No, you can't use my power outlets."
Can a business say "I don't want you using my power!"? Sure. But they'd be idiots to do so - they aren't required to provide you with bathrooms either, but they do (for free, generally) because serving the customer's needs and desires makes them more money than it costs to do.
Matlab uses ~. Not quite a full language, but close (language designed mainly for numerical analysis, with sufficient extra functionality at this point that I bet you could write EMACS in it).
I work a 40 hour work week. Sometimes 50, sometimes 30, it balances out to 40.
Am I married? Do I have a kid? Own my own place? Not yet, but someday; nothing about my job would prevent me from doing these things.
Find the job you love, and the rest will happen. The American Dream is *not* slaving away doing something you hate so you can own a bigger home than the next guy. At least, it shouldn't be.
Played it for about a year. It was fun, but like any MMORPG, it gets boring after a while.
I do love them for making their game available via download, though. If your game *assumes* that you have an internet connection available to play it, why the hell wouldn't you let people acquire it through that internet connection?
I'm happy to bear with you - please do me the same favor, as I've also been away from doing this formally for quite a while.
Let me first restate P3, since the way you wrote it above is possibly imprecise.
P3: "If God's desires are the sole arbiter of morality/ethics, then it would be possible for the act identified in P2 as impossible to become a moral obligation, to be a moral obligation, contradicting P2."
P1 is required, since it creates the necessary condition for P3 to possibly violate P2 - if God is not omnipotent, he might not be able to create such a world. It could be reduced to "God is the sole arbiter and source of ethics", which would make the proof more of a classic proof via contradiction, or it could be recast as an axiomatic statement. I'll go with the latter, and call it A1.
P2 is a statement of ethics; it could be more generally stated as "There are certain things that can never be a moral/ethical obligation.", and might well be less confusing that way. Again, it should probably be cast as an axiom (which I will do - A2). Those who choose not to accept it as such can reject the argument, at the cost of assuming that it is possible for torturing the innocent or other horrible acts to be moral obligations - not just acts that aren't wrong, but acts that it is in and of itself *good* to do.
For that matter, I wonder how the construction works if P2 is "Being immoral is a moral obligation.", a contradiction in and of itself. But that's a digression, and fairly uninteresting at that.
Further, this proof has *nothing* to do with the existence of God - it is solely a disproof of the notion that God is the sole and arbitrary source of morals, without recourse to any intrinsic good. Thus, given A1 and A2, P1 (nee P3) causes a possible contradiction of one of our axioms, leading to the conclusion that P1 (nee P3) cannot possibly be true. Disproving God as the sole source of morals is used to set up the next bit, wherein a God who can neither act nor affect is made unnecessary and therefore most probably non-existent. If God were the sole source of morals, a God forbidden from direct interference would still affect us by setting the goals we strive towards - he could make our actions good or bad without actually exerting any influence on us, again making the concept of free will meaningless by making it impossible to determine if we are acting properly. It is possibly not necessary, but it does make the ideas clearer, at least to me.
The whole construction of the proof is a reduction of the necessity of God, and then using that lack of necessity as a structure to say "If he's not needed, why would he exist?" The first proof, against DCM, disproves him as the source of morality, while the second eliminates him as the source of any possible action. If he can't act, can't influence, and can't affect us by changing the moral signpost, why is he necessary at all?
(For what it's worth, I'm more agnostic than atheist, and I like to imagine 'God' as the initial force that created a state of possibility out of a heat death of sameness, and then sat back to watch us become 'good' moral beings by using our own moral compasses to move towards a better state. So, your God is probably laughing his ass off at me. That's alright, though, as I think causing joy is a moral good, and if I can make *God* smile, I must be doing something right.)
(Other issues with DCM are that accepting it requires us to accept God as an arbitrary and irrational being, and to renounce any concept of God as a 'good' being. If the only arbiter for morals is an unlimited God, then his determination of morals becomes arbitrary, without appeal to any reason. If you claim that God reasons out his desires, then you must reject DCM, as he must have drawn these morals from some external intellectual source in the course of his reasonsing. Thus, DCM requires an irrational/arbitrary God. The rejection of a 'good' God is inherent in the concept - if God alone determines what
The portions of the articles I read don't really address that question.
While community trust is a good mechanism, at least to a certain extent, it also has flaws: there's no control mechanism in/.-style karma, for example, capable of controlling the tendency towards groupthink. The contrary example, that of "accepting a declared expert's viewpoint because they have a Harvard degree", tends to allow committed people with iconoclastic ideas a much better chance to make those ideas heard. On the other hand, the AASDEVBTHAHD method provides essentially no way for a self-educated expert to become trusted without going through exactly the same process as the other experts - obtaining credentials, i.e. graduating from Harvard.
I wouldn't necessarily characterize Linux as having community-chosen experts, either: for example, the free software community seems to have chosen RMS as a leader, while Linux quite often chooses to ignore his viewpoints. Linux has Linux-chosen experts; the people who gain responsibility are the ones that the current maintainers feel are the best, the most capable. Not community-chosen, or at least, not chosen by the community of users. In fact, Linux's method of choosing new maintainers is closer to the old country club model than anything else - members associate with non-members, who (in conjunction with the members, of course) are allowed to come to the club, play some golf, even drink a little in the club's reading room. They are not, of course, allowed to do any of these things without the sponsoring member present. If the member thinks they'd be good, they present their case to the other members, and if the club approves, well, it has a new member. That's about how Linux works.
Maybe a good equivalent model in a wiki would be to, initially, have a couple "credentialed" experts per general area of knowledge, with those experts being tasked with the responsibilities of approving edits by untrusted users, while also being tasked with sorting through those untrusted users to find ones suitable for elevation to "credentialed" status. Of course, that sort of model still makes it hard for contrary viewpoints to break in, and can give rise to cronyism. Hard to say what's the best model, really, as they all have problems. If I could think of a model that would work perfectly, I wouldn't be on Slashdot annoying people, I'd be setting up my own damn encyclopedia.
(By the way, your "I wouldn't want to be forced to accept some self-declared experts point of view just because they have a Harvard degree or something such as that though." is a fine exemplar of anti-elitism.)
Well, I could have said "As a member in good standing of the historically important faith of Judaism, I hold an inherent belief in the decency of mankind in general, and the inherent inadequacy of your cogitative processes. Kindly remove your cretinous claptrap to another locale as rapidly as your lower extremities will permit, in order that I never have to hear your vocal aperture waxing and waning again."
But I think my original version scans better.
My comment may be living proof I'm a prick, but it hardly has anything to do with my education. At least I use proper grammar, punctuation, and capitalization; did your European grade school fail to instill those in you, or are you just too fucking lazy?
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Did great back in the 40s. Didn't need our help at all. That NATO thing? Totally unneeded.
1. Uhm, no. First off, much of the manufacturing is outsourceable, and it's already been done. Second, show me legislation preventing US car makers from making their vehicles outside of the US; you won't be able to, because *it doesn't exist*. Even better, such legislation is illegal under GATT - local content requirements are not allowed, which is why the Phillipines dropped theirs a couple years ago, China is in negotiations to do so, etc. Further, it has more to do with the nature of the business (5 year cycle times, 25 year programs) than anything else. Finally, the amount of foreign investment in US automotive business (Japanese and German factories and design centers being opened in the US) gives lie to the "outsourcing is cheaper" idea. Working locally is generally cheaper, at least in my industry; we design for China in China, we design for the US in the US, we design for the EU in the EU.
2. Again, there's no such thing. It's because there's a huge investment in building a *design* center for that sort of gear; I'm probably sitting in a building with a couple billion in lab gear, much of which would be impossible to move overseas, or simply more expensive to move than to just buy over there. And *we don't even have wet labs*. We outsource that to local test labs, usually, since we mostly do electronics. The cost savings for outsourcing a trans group would have to be huge for a company to think that moving the division overseas would be worth the savings. Are the cost savings of moving our 200 employee group overseas high enough that, in the 20 years that they'll probably be cheaper than we are, they'd make more profit on investing in moving the center than they would simply investing the cash they'd have to spend to do it? Quite probably not.
3. Again, automotive really isn't a protected industry, at least not anymore as free trade agreements expand. And most engineers I know do have benefits of a usable nature. Many of them work high-tech. I think you're a paranoid who's gottens screwed over a couple times, honestly. Too bad, but your problem; most of the ones I know don't seem to be having all that much trouble finding decent employment.
Yes they will- the falling dollar will take care of them, and then India and China will call in their large amounts of bonds they currently have invested in the United States and will be able to take over completely without firing a shot.
Like I said - paranoid.
Cheaper people in US Timezones exist in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile
No. People who are *compensated less highly* exist. Employing them isn't usually any cheaper. Education and quality are the main barriers, and while there is progress on those, the US is improving as well. I've seen studies on this; it usually is *not* cheaper to outsource engineering labor. This is why most American engineers remain employed.
And if you can do this WITHOUT the 2 highly paid engineers, doing it all with lower paid engineers? The United States ain't the only thing in this timezone. But of course, we can always do what your industry did and fall back on government protectionism.
You can't, is the thing, because sooner or later those lower paid engineers are going to want more money. Usually sooner. We outsource programming to Russians. Think they don't know what we get paid? Think they don't work to get their paycheck up towards our level? No one is going to say "Exploit me, exploit me!", at least not in industries that require high amounts of intelligence and training. Except maybe CS majors; you guys seem to like to work for free. See, this is where the control systems thing comes in - the whole process is in a feedback configuration, and it will settle. When trade was local, your competition was local, and the job went to the cheapest person in your town. Eventually, wages across the town more or less stabilized. Then trade became national, and the same thing happened across your country. Final
If you give your children money, and let them form a free market in your kitchen, it *is* capitalism. Yes, it's small scale, but scale doesn't change the fact that the structure, which is what's actually important, is capitalist. Similarly, if something is small-scale structured as a communist organization, it remains communist, just at a smaller scale. Certain structures do work better at certain scales than others; however, saying that it isn't communism (despite fitting the principles as you defined them) just because its small is bullshit.
I'm *not* arguing your point re: communism being ineffective at large scales. Please stop saying I am. It hasn't worked, and when it's been attempted, it has invariably devolved into totalitarian/authoritarian structures (USSR, Cuba, China).
Further, you cannot solely cite the founders of an intellectual tradition; you also have to accept the further development of that tradition. Marx is not the sole arbiter of communism; there has been other original thought on the subject since then. Democracy today has many differences from democracy in the time of Plato; would you argue that just because we don't take everything Plato says as gospel, it isn't democracy?
The key word was *force*. My understanding of Marx's doctrines is that he was saying "In a communist countty, the population will redistribute itself more equally." That it would be an inevitable consequence, an "invisible hand" effect, if you don't mind mixing your socioeconomic metaphors. The USSR used violence to force these transfers, something that I believe Marx would have felt to be antithetical to the very notion of communism. A totalitarian government has no issue with using violence againsts its citizens to force them into behaviors it considers desirable; a communist government working from Marx's blueprints would have very real issues with the idea that violence against the working class would be necessary to achieve the desired distribution of population.
re: dog and tail - exactly my point. Just because a totalitarian country represents communist does not make it communist.
The lack of checks in the Soviet implementation of communism was the fatal flaw that allowed it to be consumed from inside by totalitarianism. It is not, however, something that is inherent to communism, just like the strong checks and balances in the US republic that make it relatively difficult to subvert are not inherent to the concept of a republic. The idea is that the Party is controlled by the collective will of the people, yes? If you allow the control of the Party to be assumed by one person, you *already have* wounnd up with a dictatorship, ant then you are living in an authoritarian society with a collective economic system. Communism was both a political and economic system; with only one part and not the other, what you have left is not communism. The second Stalin took power, the USSR ceased to be a communist country.
The plural for kibbutz is kibbutzim; Hebrew word, Hebrew pluralization. The proper word for describing a kibbutz (in the general sense) is socialist, though some essentially function as communist organizations. You remain hung up on communism only in the context of nations, whereas it is a blueprint for organization of groups of people. Again, Marx and Engels originated it, but thought has moved on since their time. The countries established under communist systems have *all* failed, true; but their failure was allowing their system to become an authoritarian system. I'm not certain that it's possible to have a communist nation-state that doesn't fail in this fashion, but the truth is - there never has been a communist nation-state, not for more than a few years. Blaming communism for Stalin's abuses is like blaming democracy for the abuses of the French Revolution.
Who's to blame? Stalin. Robespierre. The dictators, the fascists. Not the systems they subverted.
1. I don't work in high-tech, I work in automotive, which is a much more stable business.
2. Not really. I do control systems development, not coding. I hand an algorithm to a programmer (Russian, right now, oddly enough) for implementation at the end. Sure, my job can be done anywhere - but I do control systems for engines and transmissions, and the infrastructure is quite large, so it isn't outsourcable unless you outsource the entire engine/transmission development, which generally isn't any cheaper than just doing it at home. It isn't like most programming. Engineering is harder to outsource than most people seem to think.
3. What lack of benefits? I have better benefits than most of my friends with university jobs do.
Outsourcing is a temporary problem; the differentials that make it currently profitable will be reduced eventually. And I'd argue that "unprofitable to hire Americans", anyway. More and more, companies seem to be going to "let's have somebody in every single timezone." If you can have 3 engineers working, one after the other, you can reduce your cycle time, which is often a better way to profit than to outsource everything to one cheap location, even if 2 of the 3 engineers are US/European and highly paid.
Yes and no; since MATLAB is numerical, not symbolic, analysis, there's no real need for a definition of approximately; MATLAB's results are all exact and/or approximate, depending on how you think about it. If we were talking about one of the symbolic packages, a Maple or Mathematica, the approximately might have some meaning, but for MATLAB it doesn't really.
And yeah, MATLAB's syntax is usually so C-like that the occasional departures are always a little weird.
Wasn't aware of that, will keep it in mind.
They aren't suing Think Secret for divulging the information; they are suing them for inducing unnamed sources to breach NDAs. In other words, the act that's at question isn't publication of the information, but obtaining it in the first place. I support the 1st Amendment as well, but *this is not a 1st Amendment issue* and ought not to be presented as one. This is more like if Think Secret had broken into Cupertino and published what they saw during the break-in. Apple is suing over method of obtaining the information, not over the information's publication.
Now, what Apple should be doing is suing to obtain the names of the sources. Those are the people who genuinely violated their duty. However, if Think Secret actively agitated to get those people to break their NDAs, they can probably be held responsible as well.
Could be, I don't do building codes. However, let's change "restaurant" to "service business without food" (gas station, record store, etc.). They may or may not have one, but most try to because they know that most things that make their customer happier with them is likely to be good for their business.
Gas stations with bathrooms do more business than those without.
Cafes with free wifi do better business than those without.
Record stores with listening stations do better than those without.
Etc.
And I'm going to bet that restaurants with easy access to plugs do better than those without (this may not apply to $100 per plate French places, but anywhere someone isn't going to feel socially stigmatized for using electronics, it should apply.)
There's a value in precision in language; whether other people are imbeciles or not doesn't obviate our responsibility not to misuse words we know we're misusing.
I don't say Christian when I mean snake-handling cultist, and I don't say communist when I mean totalitarian. Hey, I don't even say communist when I mean free software zealot. I damn well will jump on people who misuse words and conflate two very different things into one.
I'm not arguing communism has worked at the national level. I don't think it will, as I said in my previous post. However, I pointed out that the principles are applicable on some scales, and that those principles weren't the real guiding principles of the USSR, which operated as a totalitarian oligarchy.
They work because they aren't *states*. You're hung up on the notion that communist organizations must be nations; I'm not. If you want to restrict it to nations, then yes, there are no examples you can point to. See? I've acknowledged your point, now kindly acknowledge that communism does work under certain circumstances (limited reach, limited goals).
See, it's your parenthetical remarks that make it not "real". A communist country doesn't force population transfer; a totalitarian one masquerading as communist does. Further, a democratic country has elections. Does that mean that, because the USSR had elections, it was a democratic country? Hell no. You can't say "These characteristics are shared with this form of governance, therefore that's what they were using." The USSR was built along strongly authoritarian, totalitarian lines. Just because they took on trappings of communism doesn't make them any less totalitarian.
By the way: on a kibbutz, let me go through 1 to 10.
1. Yes. No one owns land on kibbutzim that I've been to.
2. Yes, although the laws of the state they're part of may have some effect, most request that kibbutz members leave the kibbutz as their inheritor to minimize the effects of those laws. "Real" property is generally not owned by members anyway, while "portable" property is less of an issue and is sometimes passed along. Side note - inheritance is meaningless if everything is collectively owned.
3. Yes. People wanting to leave the kibbutz do not get to take kibbutz property with them when they go.
5. Yes and no. Kibbutz finances run through a central bank. However, they acknowledge that people on kibbutz often interact with people off kibbutz, and some measure of private capital is allowed in order to facilitate this.
6. Yes. Kibbutz owned vehicles loaned out as needed to members.
7. ABSOLUTELY. This is the core reason for most kibbutzim - they farm the land, and most now have light industry attached. Working the land is the core goal of most/many of them.
8. Yes. Everyone has responsibility to work.
9. See 7 re combination, and distribution of population is non-comparable, since they generally don't have sufficient land to try to distribute population in any way other than sensible urban planning.
10. Yes. And in many, if you want to go to an external university, the kibbutz will finance that.
You are pretty obviously not familiar with kibbutzim. We may differ on our analysis of the USSR as a communist nation, but kibbutzim are very definitely communist in structure, as defined by the Manifesto.
(Oh, and 10? Are you serious? That's true of most capitalist countries as well, at least to a given level, and sometimes even through university.)
You got it wrong.
Music CD-Rs can be burned with anything, in anything. They also cost twice as much.
Data CD-Rs burn fine in CD-RW drives, but component CD burners, the kind that look like normal CD players, won't touch 'em.
But yes, you're likely right that this will die on the vine.
I've generated 10 GB worth of files for a single 5 minute song when doing tracking, editing, and mix on the same machine.
The final EP took up nearly 40 GB of space, for a 25 minute album. If they'd had a full albums worth of stuff to record, it might have hit 100 GB.
And that's just audio. No video at all. Someone doing the full A/V editing for a feature length film could probably fill that 500 GB harddrive twice over in the course of the project.
I can see why someone needs this much space, easy.
You're wrong.
Real life implementations of communism that *work* and were not based on party control exist - kibbutzim in Israel, communes in the US and elsewhere. They aren't based on a Party structure at all.
The totalitarian government you had in Eastern Europe was not really communism, it just went by the name. Drawing conclusions about the validity of real communist principles from the USSR is like drawing conclusions about the lifespan of a human by studying how long penguins live.
(note: I believe communism would still fail as a government, even if it weren't implemented as a totalitarian system, but it is not in and of itself a failure as an idea, as kibbutzim, moshavim, and communes have been showing for the past century.)
Actually, people who want work to be in the public domain upon publication are closer to people who say "Look, you made a chair. As long as you keep that chair to yourself, no one else can use that chair. But if you ever let someone sit in that chair, the chair becomes theirs as well, and they can sit in it whenever they want to; further, they can share the chair with someone else and let them sit in it, and then that other person owns the chair too, and so on, and on."
It's still somewhat disrespectful, but most anti-IP types aren't trying to force you to share - they're saying if you do share, you have no further control of what is done with it. Subtle difference, but difference nonetheless.
Yes.
Because before Apple Records, no one had ever named a company after an apple. In fact, no one knew what an apple was - back then, we called them "rounded pears".
I didn't invite you into my home. If I had, I'd be a bit of a jerk to say "No, you can't use my power outlets."
Can a business say "I don't want you using my power!"? Sure. But they'd be idiots to do so - they aren't required to provide you with bathrooms either, but they do (for free, generally) because serving the customer's needs and desires makes them more money than it costs to do.
All I need to say to this is: trespass does *not* alleviate your responsibility not to leave unmarked active hazards on your property.
Matlab uses ~. Not quite a full language, but close (language designed mainly for numerical analysis, with sufficient extra functionality at this point that I bet you could write EMACS in it).
Sorry, but you're wrong.
I love my job (control systems engineer).
I work a 40 hour work week. Sometimes 50, sometimes 30, it balances out to 40.
Am I married? Do I have a kid? Own my own place? Not yet, but someday; nothing about my job would prevent me from doing these things.
Find the job you love, and the rest will happen. The American Dream is *not* slaving away doing something you hate so you can own a bigger home than the next guy. At least, it shouldn't be.
Played it for about a year. It was fun, but like any MMORPG, it gets boring after a while.
I do love them for making their game available via download, though. If your game *assumes* that you have an internet connection available to play it, why the hell wouldn't you let people acquire it through that internet connection?
I'm happy to bear with you - please do me the same favor, as I've also been away from doing this formally for quite a while.
Let me first restate P3, since the way you wrote it above is possibly imprecise.
P3: "If God's desires are the sole arbiter of morality/ethics, then it would be possible for the act identified in P2 as impossible to become a moral obligation, to be a moral obligation, contradicting P2."
P1 is required, since it creates the necessary condition for P3 to possibly violate P2 - if God is not omnipotent, he might not be able to create such a world. It could be reduced to "God is the sole arbiter and source of ethics", which would make the proof more of a classic proof via contradiction, or it could be recast as an axiomatic statement. I'll go with the latter, and call it A1.
P2 is a statement of ethics; it could be more generally stated as "There are certain things that can never be a moral/ethical obligation.", and might well be less confusing that way. Again, it should probably be cast as an axiom (which I will do - A2). Those who choose not to accept it as such can reject the argument, at the cost of assuming that it is possible for torturing the innocent or other horrible acts to be moral obligations - not just acts that aren't wrong, but acts that it is in and of itself *good* to do.
For that matter, I wonder how the construction works if P2 is "Being immoral is a moral obligation.", a contradiction in and of itself. But that's a digression, and fairly uninteresting at that.
Further, this proof has *nothing* to do with the existence of God - it is solely a disproof of the notion that God is the sole and arbitrary source of morals, without recourse to any intrinsic good. Thus, given A1 and A2, P1 (nee P3) causes a possible contradiction of one of our axioms, leading to the conclusion that P1 (nee P3) cannot possibly be true. Disproving God as the sole source of morals is used to set up the next bit, wherein a God who can neither act nor affect is made unnecessary and therefore most probably non-existent. If God were the sole source of morals, a God forbidden from direct interference would still affect us by setting the goals we strive towards - he could make our actions good or bad without actually exerting any influence on us, again making the concept of free will meaningless by making it impossible to determine if we are acting properly. It is possibly not necessary, but it does make the ideas clearer, at least to me.
The whole construction of the proof is a reduction of the necessity of God, and then using that lack of necessity as a structure to say "If he's not needed, why would he exist?" The first proof, against DCM, disproves him as the source of morality, while the second eliminates him as the source of any possible action. If he can't act, can't influence, and can't affect us by changing the moral signpost, why is he necessary at all?
(For what it's worth, I'm more agnostic than atheist, and I like to imagine 'God' as the initial force that created a state of possibility out of a heat death of sameness, and then sat back to watch us become 'good' moral beings by using our own moral compasses to move towards a better state. So, your God is probably laughing his ass off at me. That's alright, though, as I think causing joy is a moral good, and if I can make *God* smile, I must be doing something right.)
(Other issues with DCM are that accepting it requires us to accept God as an arbitrary and irrational being, and to renounce any concept of God as a 'good' being. If the only arbiter for morals is an unlimited God, then his determination of morals becomes arbitrary, without appeal to any reason. If you claim that God reasons out his desires, then you must reject DCM, as he must have drawn these morals from some external intellectual source in the course of his reasonsing. Thus, DCM requires an irrational/arbitrary God. The rejection of a 'good' God is inherent in the concept - if God alone determines what
See, here's the thing.
These Linux based PMPs are cool.
But the iPod Photo is a Portable Image and Music Player.
And everyone knows nothing else is as cool as a PIMP.
The portions of the articles I read don't really address that question.
/.-style karma, for example, capable of controlling the tendency towards groupthink. The contrary example, that of "accepting a declared expert's viewpoint because they have a Harvard degree", tends to allow committed people with iconoclastic ideas a much better chance to make those ideas heard. On the other hand, the AASDEVBTHAHD method provides essentially no way for a self-educated expert to become trusted without going through exactly the same process as the other experts - obtaining credentials, i.e. graduating from Harvard.
While community trust is a good mechanism, at least to a certain extent, it also has flaws: there's no control mechanism in
I wouldn't necessarily characterize Linux as having community-chosen experts, either: for example, the free software community seems to have chosen RMS as a leader, while Linux quite often chooses to ignore his viewpoints. Linux has Linux-chosen experts; the people who gain responsibility are the ones that the current maintainers feel are the best, the most capable. Not community-chosen, or at least, not chosen by the community of users. In fact, Linux's method of choosing new maintainers is closer to the old country club model than anything else - members associate with non-members, who (in conjunction with the members, of course) are allowed to come to the club, play some golf, even drink a little in the club's reading room. They are not, of course, allowed to do any of these things without the sponsoring member present. If the member thinks they'd be good, they present their case to the other members, and if the club approves, well, it has a new member. That's about how Linux works.
Maybe a good equivalent model in a wiki would be to, initially, have a couple "credentialed" experts per general area of knowledge, with those experts being tasked with the responsibilities of approving edits by untrusted users, while also being tasked with sorting through those untrusted users to find ones suitable for elevation to "credentialed" status. Of course, that sort of model still makes it hard for contrary viewpoints to break in, and can give rise to cronyism. Hard to say what's the best model, really, as they all have problems. If I could think of a model that would work perfectly, I wouldn't be on Slashdot annoying people, I'd be setting up my own damn encyclopedia.
(By the way, your "I wouldn't want to be forced to accept some self-declared experts point of view just because they have a Harvard degree or something such as that though." is a fine exemplar of anti-elitism.)
Well, I could have said "As a member in good standing of the historically important faith of Judaism, I hold an inherent belief in the decency of mankind in general, and the inherent inadequacy of your cogitative processes. Kindly remove your cretinous claptrap to another locale as rapidly as your lower extremities will permit, in order that I never have to hear your vocal aperture waxing and waning again."
But I think my original version scans better.
My comment may be living proof I'm a prick, but it hardly has anything to do with my education. At least I use proper grammar, punctuation, and capitalization; did your European grade school fail to instill those in you, or are you just too fucking lazy?
No, no, no.
A giant gas bag is a Stallman!
Generally, it is spelled Philistines. And as a proper noun, capitalized.