I cannot see the difference between governments regulating data flow and, say, an ISP subscribing and actively employing some
form of RBL type blacklist against spam.
Then you're not trying hard enough.
ISPs generally don't have policemen and armies at their disposal; governments do.
Except that (1) and (2) are highly speculative. There is a principle in law (no, IANAL) that says you have no standing to sue for relief if you were involved in the commission of a crime. That is, if I and my pal rob a bank and my pal doesn't give me my share of the booty, I can't sue him in a court of law. Assuming Microsoft's "volume licensing" indeed prohibits the use of such a license on new computers, purchases of raw PCs without Windows installed would be a tort against Microsoft, for which they are legally (albeit injustly) allowed to seek relief. (This of course brings into question the merits of buying a site license. If you can't install Windows on new machines, what good is it?) This also means the employee-rat is probably safe from termination under some states' "whistleblower" laws, although why you would want to continue working for an employer whose customer you had just screwed I really can't understand.
This is an act of an increasingly desperate company.
If you have done anything with e-commerce tools today you should know what a bloody mess it the whole area is. No one can
afford to deal with partners electronically, because it takes so much IT effort to get them up and running.
This is because the majority of e-commerce tools are inflexible and designed to the lowest-common-denominator. My company (a comparison shopping site) brings up new retailers in about 15 minutes, excluding legal overhead. It just doesn't have to be so.
From what I can tell, UDDI is the latest in buzzword-compliant technology. Just like XML, its promoters overpromise its potential. I've been banging out code for 20 years now, and I think I can safely call UDDI (and XML f'r chrissakes) another overhyped silver bullet that will find a niche somewhere.
That's just wrong. There are big differences between Linux and *BSD. Others will make this point undoubtedly, but it amounts to Linux having a much larger installed base of device drivers. OpenBSD just doesn't compare.
Still begs the issue, why now? Why did they not start on day one and come down on pirates?
I posted an article that was rejected on this subject. The answer is.NET. Microsoft is creating a problem for its customers, and has determined the way to higher profitability is to let themselves be the determining factor as to who is licensed and who is not. Hope you kept those boxes, kids... if not, there's no proof you own that shrink-wrap copy of Win2k that shipped with your PC. Essentially, MS is enhancing a problem in a gray area. There's certainly a lot of "under-licensing" out there, but there's also a lot of sloppy record-keeping.
The "advantage".NET brings to the table is that MS gets paid for every active seat, period. Our little (30 people) company got a nastygram from MS recently, saying we had better oughta be in compliance. The "or else" part wasn't spelled out, but they did forward the name of a compliance specialization company.
I expect MS will make some very public gaffes in this area in the next year or so.
Yeah, this whole "oh, conventional media is coming to an end, the sky is falling" stuff sounds suspiciously like "oh, curses, we can't shove our obnoxious, self-righteous liberal viewpoints down everyone's throats via government-restricted media (television, radio) or ones dominated by liberal groupthink (print)". Before, it was some editor at the NYT telling everybody what was news or what commentary should appear before the public; now it's some semi-random site visitor on Slashdot.
Theoretically, the semi-random visitor is an improvment over the former.
The free market is the best way to send this to the DIVX
Dustbin of History.
Except that the Content Industry is busy making damn sure that anything from a mirror to a copying machine to a computer is shut down under the DMCA and its affiliated laws. I understand the motivation to say "let the market decide", and in most circumstances, I would agree with you. However, it's clear that the same boobs who just gave away an Oscar to the second-rate Gladiator (overlooking the far more deserving Traffic) would gladly pay huge amounts of money to buy legislators -- and bad laws that restrict your freedom. Consumers can't consume if there's laws agin' it.
Wind and solar power are an unacceptable alternative to fossil fuels because they're only available at the caprice of the gods. Just ask any becalmed 19th century sea captain about that!
The "shouting fire" exception was even later overturned. IANAL, but this came up due to one of the many noxious censorship laws that the Reverend President Wilson got passed during WWI, which subsequent to the war was overturned as unconstitutional....
So the problem is that e-commerce will not and never will be the internet's true "killer app". Shipping costs and times are prohibitive
compared to the convenience and experience of walking into a store and walking out with product, regardless of the extra availability
of items online.
I have to respectfully disagree. As someone who works for an indirect e-commerce site (pricegrabber.com), it's not that e-commerce isn't working; far from it. For us, traffic -- and yes, revenues -- have been growing more or less exponentially since we started. Likewise for our customers, the online merchants. What we have seen, however, is the decline and fall of massively overstaffed businesses. Many people got started in e-commerce with the notion that running such a business would require armies to operate. Yet some of our most successful merchants have turned out to be Yahoo webfronts with a couple guys behind it. So it cheers me to see our competitors buy TV ads. It means they still haven't figured out the size of this market. On the other hand, CNET is laying people off, so perhaps their payroll hit them with a big cluestick!
So, Jordan, you provide a nice demonstration of a flaw. It is considered polite in many circles, that when destroying someone's
hard-work, that you make a peace offering in the form of some assistance.
If the circle cannot be squared, one must Stop Trying. One cannot thread a needle with a bulldozer.
3. Country. One day all the media whores woke up and proclaimed that country was regaining popularity! There are no facts to
support their argument, but if you keep saying it often enough, eventually the great unwashed masses start believing it. The year
was 1991. The number one music genre, in terms of record sales, is Rap. Public Enemy and NWA sell the most records in that
number one genre, yet the Rap award for the Grammys was not televised. The only "rap" act to perform on TV is Vanilla Ice. Why
country? It's safe. It's contented. It's performed by white people. It sounds like 70s soft-rock. And the soft-rock scene of the 70s is
the last time the big labels had total control. New Country is a return to paradise for the suits.
This is absolute BS. Country experienced a "resurgence" in the early 90's because of SoundScan. SoundScan takes actual receipt tape sales logs and collates them into far more meaningful sales charts than were previously available: that is, sales prior to 1991 were easily manipulated by record company execs eager to hype their boy's product. The net result was -- surprise! -- that country, R&B, and other neglected types of music were actually doing much better than had been previously thought. So there's plenty of "evidence" that country was actually doing well financially. Unless, of course, you want to argue that the SoundScan numbers are being manipulated.
ive always wondered, what is "gattaca" the sequence for?
Jelly doughnuts.
True story, or it oughta be: when JFK delivered his ich bin ein Berliner speech, what he apparently did not know is that the article ein in that sentence was not only superfluous, but silly. What he meant to say was ich bin Berliner (I am a citizen of Berlin). To a Berliner, ein Berliner is a pastry not unlike a jelly doughnut. So Kennedy was calling himself a jelly doughnut to thousands, perhaps millions of German-speakers. And they were grateful.
The reason insurers have so much of a say in the medical field is because Congress long ago took away the income tax deduction for individual medical expenses. This forced the burden onto employers (large companies asked for it during WWII as a way to increase wages on the sly), who retain a tax break for providing health care to their employees. So insurance-as-intermediary-to-health-care is an invention of Congress.
Socializing medicine will do to medicine what California's misnamed "deregulation" has done for electricity: make it scarce.
Look at pilots - they're less bright than coders by a lot, (I speak from USAF experience), but they're highly
skilled and unionized - most airline pilots bring in $100,000+ for doing a job that's substantially less challenging than writing
complex code. Did I mention they have unions?
Yes, and only experienced pilots with the majors get that kind of money. You think Maj. Greenears fresh out of his three-years-and-out stint in the Air Force is gonna make that kind of money flying cargo for TNT or DHL? Uh, no. That is to say, unions are a great deal for those guys in them, but a lousy deal for those not involved. You think they're gonna let some hotshot 18-year-old in the treehouse once they've established a union? You gotta be kidding me. He's gonna have to go through all kinds of hazing before he's allowed in the club.
2. Tech companies haven't been above screwing employees. People get let go a couple weeks before their options come
due, often for fabricated reasons. H1-B visas get rammed through Congress to drive down IT salaries. Imagine if the Big
Three automakers tried to import tens of thousands of foreign workers and then pay them substandard wages!! It can only
happen in IT.
I have yet to hear a shred of evidence that foreign IT workers have actually driven down the wages. If anything, they tend to come up to industry norms once they can no longer be legally exploited because of their H-1B status.
If a company is willing to screw consumers
with "content protection" do you really trust it not to screw its own employees?
Here you are talking about Hollywood. This is a heavily unionized business, and one that is about to have a 32 oz. can of whoopass delivered unto them. There, unions are on the verge of shooting themselves in the foot again as the Screenwriter's Guild has created a setup that may bust that union altogether: by announcing with near certainty that a strike will occur this summer, studios are stockpiling scripts, ensuring no work will get done -- and nobody will get paid. But simultaneously, their heavily counted-upon co-unionists, the Actors' Guild, are still licking their wounds from last year's strike, so there's no guarantee that the actors will honor the WGA's "picket line". This on top of stupid laws, rising real estate prices, stupid union demands (Internet rights? Don't they know there's no money to be made on the Internet?), and idiots in charge of production have seen the heavy attrition of union jobs from showbiz.
4. A lot of anti-union people scream "I'm too good for a union - unions are for idiot construction workers." But many
industry that depend on highly skilled labor are highly [unionized] - pilots, aviation mechanics, teachers, athletes, actors. It obviously
works for other "knowledge industries".
Pilots are expensive albeit hypercompetent bus drivers. Teachers are to education what the jackhammer operator is to the construction industry, that is to say, teachers are in the business of indoctrination rather than education. Athletes and actors are idiots. Aviation mechanics are probably the only group you mentioned that has a semblance of being a "knowledge worker".
5. Technology unions probably would be different than old-school unions - it would have to be easier to get rid of people,
since it's easier to freeload than it is in manufacturing. Contracts would probably be shorter term, grievance procedures
would be streamlined/scaled back, working condition issues would be much less important, etc.
Mmm, no. See, back in the 60's, my dad used to work for what was then called North American Aviation, which was subsequently swallowed by Rockwell. He was a frontline manager at the metrology lab, which meant that he managed the guys who maintained and calibrated all the ohmmeters, oscilloscopes, waveform generators, etc. It being that North American was a "closed shop" (i.e., the union could extract dues from all employees, regardless of whether they wanted union representation or not), my dad ended up getting exactly zero benefits from this arrangement. The union, for all its bluster, got the front line employees exactly zilch as far as increased wages (at that time in the late 60's, raises were impossible to come by), but they sure weren't gonna let go of those weekly dues!
Engineering unions do exist, but only at large companies. These are not the kind of companies geeks generally enjoy working for anyway -- they tend to be bureaucratic and defensive.
An anecdote on unions generally: when I used to work for the industrial-defense complex, I worked at a fairly small group within a very, very large company (Hughes Aircraft, if you must know) with about 200 people, of whom the programming staff was about 40 or so. (Yes, you saw that correctly -- 80% overhead. And I think we were one of the leaner organizations!) Somehow, we had inherited a lone union guy, perhaps a Teamster, perhaps a UAW man -- I don't recall. His job, apparently, was to show up for work every day perfectly soused. He was redfaced all the time and reeked of scotch. Most of the time he spent in the warehouse in back. Nobody could say what he did, but we all made damn sure that we didn't try to move computers during the day when he might stumble out from his warren. No matter how incompetent he may have been, he could still issue a grievance against us geeks for taking his (or a co-unionist's) job by moving a Wyse terminal. Ugh.
I know of *no* industry where unionization has decreased wages or really adversely affected employees.
That's because you're not looking hard enough. Airline traffic controllers. Eastern Airlines, where the unions badly miscalculated and drove a foundering airline into the ground, leaving all their members without jobs. The auto industry, where they drove down quality, pushing American car buyers into the waiting arms of the Japanese. Unions make stupid decisions all the time that result in a net loss of unionized jobs.
In the end, unions are about solidarity, not intelligence. If history is any guide, and I think it absolutely is, a programmers' union would rapidly dissolve into pissing matches about who gets to write "if" statements, and who gets to write "where" clauses. Nothing would get done, and the fun (and there is a lot of it) in our field would rapidly drain out of it, to the exact extent that the business is unionized. As one of my friends who works as an animator for a major studio observed once he got his union card, the union heirarchy is dominated by people who can't draw worth a damn.
"Socialist" power from LA is only above water because they've been charging the rest of the state extortionate rates for electricity. This, too, was forgotten in Gray Davis' little tirade against out-of-state power generators, who, for the record, have actually bailed out California's ass. Davis, like a lot of Californians and all New Yorkers, thinks the world spins on an axis centered on his city. He is wrong.
There is such a thing as excess. When environmental regulations become more of a burden than a help, they need examination as well. This is lost on most liberals, who assume the environment is some ultimate good that should never, ever be bent to helping people.
California's Democratic administration has basically decided that California should get into the business of building and operating power plants, and that this electricity should be sold to what's left of the public utilities -- if there is anything left after this year. Gray Davis in his recent speeches has made it very clear this is a direction he is willing to take, but mercifully has offered few specifics. To me, this means he may not be able to pull such a thing off immediately, or is even interested in doing so.
This amounts to nationalization on a state scale. Done in New York with the railroads back in the 70's when the Penn Central went bust, it put rail service in the hands of the NY MTA. The MTA is now run by the unions that service it, and I mean run... I have heard firsthand accounts of union slackers working one day a month and getting away with it because they know how to pump the rules. That is to say, a state-run power grid would have the exact same problem as the prison system does now.
But aside from this, the original poster does have a point. No new power plants have been sited in California, frequently because of environmental regulations and plain old NIMBYism. Californians, it turns out, are not so opposed to pollution that they won't let it happen in other states, though... which is why the LA DWP runs power plants in Utah, and why so much power is generated out of state. I find it very annoying that the idiots at the state legislature mandate things like electric cars and then claim they don't pollute, when the reality is that, hey, there's something at the other end of that wall socket. This goes for Cisco, Sun, and all the other "non-polluting" tech companies as well.
Re: This would make a good tampon
on
Nano-pants
·
· Score: 1
Close, maybe. Disposable diapers? I tend to agree with the other poster about the problems of toxic shock making such a device unlikely.
And to answer the other poster who said that
a woman's business down there is something us guys don't to think about nor dare try to innovate inside
Well, hey, the Pill and the first commercial tampon were invented by men. The female body being a part of the natural world, us guys are as entitled to think upon it and help out our sisters, mothers, and wives out as anybody. Claiming otherwise is about as dumb as saying only blacks should do research on sickle-cell anemia.
Slashdot Mirror
ISPs generally don't have policemen and armies at their disposal; governments do.
This is an act of an increasingly desperate company.
Well, what did you want? They're used to fucking people over (ba-dum-dum!) Thank you! I'm here all week!
From what I can tell, UDDI is the latest in buzzword-compliant technology. Just like XML, its promoters overpromise its potential. I've been banging out code for 20 years now, and I think I can safely call UDDI (and XML f'r chrissakes) another overhyped silver bullet that will find a niche somewhere.
To whoever modded this up: You just wasted your points.
That's just wrong. There are big differences between Linux and *BSD. Others will make this point undoubtedly, but it amounts to Linux having a much larger installed base of device drivers. OpenBSD just doesn't compare.
The "advantage" .NET brings to the table is that MS gets paid for every active seat, period. Our little (30 people) company got a nastygram from MS recently, saying we had better oughta be in compliance. The "or else" part wasn't spelled out, but they did forward the name of a compliance specialization company.
I expect MS will make some very public gaffes in this area in the next year or so.
Theoretically, the semi-random visitor is an improvment over the former.
Wind and solar power are an unacceptable alternative to fossil fuels because they're only available at the caprice of the gods. Just ask any becalmed 19th century sea captain about that!
The "shouting fire" exception was even later overturned. IANAL, but this came up due to one of the many noxious censorship laws that the Reverend President Wilson got passed during WWI, which subsequent to the war was overturned as unconstitutional....
True story, or it oughta be: when JFK delivered his ich bin ein Berliner speech, what he apparently did not know is that the article ein in that sentence was not only superfluous, but silly. What he meant to say was ich bin Berliner (I am a citizen of Berlin). To a Berliner, ein Berliner is a pastry not unlike a jelly doughnut. So Kennedy was calling himself a jelly doughnut to thousands, perhaps millions of German-speakers. And they were grateful.
But your solution is a socialistic one.
The reason insurers have so much of a say in the medical field is because Congress long ago took away the income tax deduction for individual medical expenses. This forced the burden onto employers (large companies asked for it during WWII as a way to increase wages on the sly), who retain a tax break for providing health care to their employees. So insurance-as-intermediary-to-health-care is an invention of Congress.
Socializing medicine will do to medicine what California's misnamed "deregulation" has done for electricity: make it scarce.
Engineering unions do exist, but only at large companies. These are not the kind of companies geeks generally enjoy working for anyway -- they tend to be bureaucratic and defensive.
An anecdote on unions generally: when I used to work for the industrial-defense complex, I worked at a fairly small group within a very, very large company (Hughes Aircraft, if you must know) with about 200 people, of whom the programming staff was about 40 or so. (Yes, you saw that correctly -- 80% overhead. And I think we were one of the leaner organizations!) Somehow, we had inherited a lone union guy, perhaps a Teamster, perhaps a UAW man -- I don't recall. His job, apparently, was to show up for work every day perfectly soused. He was redfaced all the time and reeked of scotch. Most of the time he spent in the warehouse in back. Nobody could say what he did, but we all made damn sure that we didn't try to move computers during the day when he might stumble out from his warren. No matter how incompetent he may have been, he could still issue a grievance against us geeks for taking his (or a co-unionist's) job by moving a Wyse terminal. Ugh.
That's because you're not looking hard enough. Airline traffic controllers. Eastern Airlines, where the unions badly miscalculated and drove a foundering airline into the ground, leaving all their members without jobs. The auto industry, where they drove down quality, pushing American car buyers into the waiting arms of the Japanese. Unions make stupid decisions all the time that result in a net loss of unionized jobs.In the end, unions are about solidarity, not intelligence. If history is any guide, and I think it absolutely is, a programmers' union would rapidly dissolve into pissing matches about who gets to write "if" statements, and who gets to write "where" clauses. Nothing would get done, and the fun (and there is a lot of it) in our field would rapidly drain out of it, to the exact extent that the business is unionized. As one of my friends who works as an animator for a major studio observed once he got his union card, the union heirarchy is dominated by people who can't draw worth a damn.
"Socialist" power from LA is only above water because they've been charging the rest of the state extortionate rates for electricity. This, too, was forgotten in Gray Davis' little tirade against out-of-state power generators, who, for the record, have actually bailed out California's ass. Davis, like a lot of Californians and all New Yorkers, thinks the world spins on an axis centered on his city. He is wrong.
There is such a thing as excess. When environmental regulations become more of a burden than a help, they need examination as well. This is lost on most liberals, who assume the environment is some ultimate good that should never, ever be bent to helping people.
I dunno. We in the U.S. do a pretty good job of kicking the French on our own, thanks :-)
Why not? It happened during the Democrats' watch in the state legislature?
This amounts to nationalization on a state scale. Done in New York with the railroads back in the 70's when the Penn Central went bust, it put rail service in the hands of the NY MTA. The MTA is now run by the unions that service it, and I mean run... I have heard firsthand accounts of union slackers working one day a month and getting away with it because they know how to pump the rules. That is to say, a state-run power grid would have the exact same problem as the prison system does now.
But aside from this, the original poster does have a point. No new power plants have been sited in California, frequently because of environmental regulations and plain old NIMBYism. Californians, it turns out, are not so opposed to pollution that they won't let it happen in other states, though... which is why the LA DWP runs power plants in Utah, and why so much power is generated out of state. I find it very annoying that the idiots at the state legislature mandate things like electric cars and then claim they don't pollute, when the reality is that, hey, there's something at the other end of that wall socket. This goes for Cisco, Sun, and all the other "non-polluting" tech companies as well.
And to answer the other poster who said that
Well, hey, the Pill and the first commercial tampon were invented by men. The female body being a part of the natural world, us guys are as entitled to think upon it and help out our sisters, mothers, and wives out as anybody. Claiming otherwise is about as dumb as saying only blacks should do research on sickle-cell anemia.