Another serious problem with "free trade" is that one of the major reasons corporations carry it out is to circumvent environmental regulations and working conditions. This isn't so much a problem in the tech sector but plays a big role in manufacturing, textiles, and others. In other words, there are many cases where corporations simply move to another part of the world just so that they can hire workers that they can fire at will, pay no benefits, etc.
What passes for "free trade" is coming at the expense of workers. Most leftists would not want to see all the benefits accrued by worker movements in the past to be destroyed.
Too right. I went on a trip to China last year, and part of it involved a tour of a silk factory. The conditions were appalling. It looked like something out of the 19th Century. The heat was stifling (no air conditioning of any description), and this was with 90% of machines off. The noise from the few that were on was deafening, and there was little in the way of safty equipment for the operators. The workers were paid a pittance (even considering the far cheeper local prices), and worked 60+ hrs/week.
And this was in a factory deemed fit for Western visitors. I hate to think what the others must be like.
I'd love to see a website set up which shows how the cost of common goods is actually made up (what % of the revenue for each item sold goes on CEO's salary against what goes on salary for factory workers, and on health and safety in their country etc).
fear of outsourcing is a direct result of people being ignorant of economics.
Or maybe it's based on seeing what happens to areas when their main industries are destroyed by cheaper foreign competition, such as much of the north of England during the '80s.
Whether you believe competition is a basic fact of life or not, that doesn't particularly comfort the millions (yes millions) of people out of work as a result.
Already happened in UK
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm pretty certain it's already dead in the UK, killed by Sky+, the Sky TV combined digibox/PVR (although I think it was probably on the way out before then, partly down to high prices at launch).
I've got M$ mice at both home and at work and have never had a problem with the wheel. As for the button, several apps are configured so that wheel with no button press means scroll up/down and wheen with middle button pressed means zoom in/out. When working with big diagrams/documents, this is unbelievably useful.
That's great until you're travelling and away from your computer for weeks. I love the convenience of deciding on the spur of the moment, while sat in some foreign airport, that I fancy listening to pretty much whatever track I fancy, and knowing that it will take me seconds to find it.
Okay, here's one that is lighter and within a few percent of the iPod's size
I've got one of those, and it's great (cheaper, better sound quality), but to claim that it's within a few % of the iPod size is stretching it a bit. Every time I see someone's iPod on their desk at work, I think "Ooh, that looks small".
If I remember correctly, the case was dropped by Apple when Xerox threatened to sue them, so it wasn't a case of them not being able to sue someone for look and feel similarities, it was more the fact that they didn't create it in the first place.
With the explorer in WinXP, as you type into the address bar, or Run window, both of which you can launch via keyboard shortcuts, you get a selectable list of available files/directories matching the letters that you've entered.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the phrase "serious and current threat" is a direct quote from the British government when referring to Iraq in 2002.
Try reading a liitle more widely before calling bullshit.
You really think we are "a helluva lot safer"? There's now even more people in the Middle East that hate the West. There's little evidence that the Iraqi government was training terrorists before the war(the supposed Al Qaeda related training camp of the Ansar al-Islam that was quoted in evidence prior to the war was actually in the Kurdish controlled region - and the UK/US are now so desperate for links that they are using the fact that the Iraqi government didn't try to clamp down on this camp as proof of their support for it, depsite the fact that if they had moved into Kurdish territory, this would have been seen as an act of agression by the west and justification for war).
Evidence from other "terrorist" situations around the world (Palestine, Northern Ireland etc) show that by simply trying to use violence to stop terrorism doesn't work.
imagine if on agust 15, 2001, the fbi had rounded up 20 suspected terrorists, all saudi men, and accused them of plotting an attack on a scale never before seen?
If they had actual evidence, I don't think there would have been much of an outcry. This kind of thing happens on a regular basis - people arrested for conspiracy to commit a crime. Imagine, instead, if they started to arrest everyone who they suspected of possibly having the urge to commit a crime in the future. The difference is, there wasn't any clear evidence for WMD in Iraq. The UN inspection teams had been telling the world that Iraq had been "fundamentally disarmed" of WMD since 1996, and had found little or nothing subsequently to suggest otherwise. Invading countries on a hunch is not a good precedent to set.
And as for the deaths, the one thing that we do know is that the number of deaths as a result of the Iraq war has now passed 10,000.
You really ought to stop just toeing the government line and start thinking for yourself.
However, I'm British and the phrase "serious and current threat" is a direct quote from the introduction to the British government's September dossier which was used as the first part of the justification for war.
Make a small hole in one end before putting the egg in the microwave. If you're lucky, you end up with a nice circle of scrambled egg sprayed around the inside.
The correct question is "who the hell can afford not to do this in a real job?"
Our IT department (one of the largest credit card companies in the UK - so a "real job") adopted unit testing as part of the development process on everything from Java to Cobol about 2 years ago. Quality has increased significantly, and I don't think any of the developers would feel comfortable coding without it now.
I got over 14 hrs out of my Creative Zen Xtra last week while travelling back from Northern Finland to Nottingham.
The beauty of the 10,000 tracks is that -
a) during the time I was away I probably listened to at least part of around 80 different albums. Even assuming that I was using my old Net MD walkman (that my wife now has), that would have been around 20 minidiscs that I would have had to carry with me (and sort through every time I fancied a change).
b) I didn't have to decide at the start of the trip which 80 albums it was going to be. I just selected whatever I was in the mood for at that point.
c) hopefully, I can stop buying a second copy of a CD I've already got (which I've done more than once on trips to our local cheap CD shop), as I can now just look it up on the player to see if I already have it.
But you've already got that in a 2d film, and your eyes can probably interpret this 'depth' better than a computer, so what would be the point?
Same old oversimplistic arguement
on
Kazaa Offices Raided
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From the article...According to MIPI, there are around three million users simultaneously online and connected to the Kazaa network at any one time sharing around 573 million files. Over 850,000 tracks are made available by over 2,500 Australian users. If each downloaded track was purchased for US$0.99 the total would be over US$2 billion per month globally.
This is the same level of arguement as claiming that people browsing magazines in newsagents is killing the magazine publishing industry because everyone who reads without having paid is robbing from the publisher - at the very simplistic level this is sort of true. Yet most newsagents have figured out that althought there are some lost sales due to people having read the article that they were interested in, this is more than balanced out by people that would not have bought the mag if they had not had a chance to see what was in it first (and most of the people that read it and didn't buy it, would not have bought it anyway).
Eventually, the music business will come round to the fact that they are increasing sales to people like me. I regularly download tracks from Kazaa, but if I discover something that I like, I will almost certainly go out and buy the actual album.
The Dead Kennedys did something remarkably similar years ago with the tape version their "In God We Trust Inc" album. The statement that they had was 'Home taping is killing big entertainment industry profits; we left side two blank so you can help'
Lemonade Stand was the first thing that I ever used on a computer - a mate's dad's Apple II - must have been about 1980, when I was 9 or 10, - it got me fascinated by computers, and I've never looked back.
If it stops 1000 people from buying other players, Apple just made $250,000 instead of $0.
Only they didn't.
Firstly, Apple don't receive 100% of the price (tax/shop markups).
Secondly, some people will be ones that would have bought a big iPod instead, so they will have lost money on that.
Thirdly, the thing isn't free to develop/build/market. They will be making considerably less than $250 on each mini iPod sold, and the first thing that any money will go towards paying for R&D, advertising etc.
This is not to say that they won't make money on it (no idea on the actual cost/revenue/sale figures for the iPod), but I'm reasonably certain that selling only 1000 would not result in an overall profit for Apple.
Kazaa Lite doesn't (as far as I'm aware) include any spyware. Can't remember whether it's Open Source or not, and unfortunately I can't check at work as I'll hit our web filter if I head to their site.
obviously secondary reasons why you will continue to tolerate being coerced by the government
Or - there's nowhere else to go. Not liking my own government's support for the rights of corporations over those of the employees etc doesn't mean that it's much better elsewhere.
Plus, I might want to stay and fight (metaphorically) for a more just society as opposed to quitting and just letting them win.
Slashdot Mirror
Another serious problem with "free trade" is that one of the major reasons corporations carry it out is to circumvent environmental regulations and working conditions. This isn't so much a problem in the tech sector but plays a big role in manufacturing, textiles, and others. In other words, there are many cases where corporations simply move to another part of the world just so that they can hire workers that they can fire at will, pay no benefits, etc.
What passes for "free trade" is coming at the expense of workers. Most leftists would not want to see all the benefits accrued by worker movements in the past to be destroyed.
Too right. I went on a trip to China last year, and part of it involved a tour of a silk factory. The conditions were appalling. It looked like something out of the 19th Century. The heat was stifling (no air conditioning of any description), and this was with 90% of machines off. The noise from the few that were on was deafening, and there was little in the way of safty equipment for the operators. The workers were paid a pittance (even considering the far cheeper local prices), and worked 60+ hrs/week.
And this was in a factory deemed fit for Western visitors. I hate to think what the others must be like.
I'd love to see a website set up which shows how the cost of common goods is actually made up (what % of the revenue for each item sold goes on CEO's salary against what goes on salary for factory workers, and on health and safety in their country etc).
fear of outsourcing is a direct result of people being ignorant of economics.
Or maybe it's based on seeing what happens to areas when their main industries are destroyed by cheaper foreign competition, such as much of the north of England during the '80s.
Whether you believe competition is a basic fact of life or not, that doesn't particularly comfort the millions (yes millions) of people out of work as a result.
I'm pretty certain it's already dead in the UK, killed by Sky+, the Sky TV combined digibox/PVR (although I think it was probably on the way out before then, partly down to high prices at launch).
I've got M$ mice at both home and at work and have never had a problem with the wheel. As for the button, several apps are configured so that wheel with no button press means scroll up/down and wheen with middle button pressed means zoom in/out. When working with big diagrams/documents, this is unbelievably useful.
That's great until you're travelling and away from your computer for weeks. I love the convenience of deciding on the spur of the moment, while sat in some foreign airport, that I fancy listening to pretty much whatever track I fancy, and knowing that it will take me seconds to find it.
Okay, here's one that is lighter and within a few percent of the iPod's size
I've got one of those, and it's great (cheaper, better sound quality), but to claim that it's within a few % of the iPod size is stretching it a bit. Every time I see someone's iPod on their desk at work, I think "Ooh, that looks small".
Apple sued MS a long time ago over Windows
If I remember correctly, the case was dropped by Apple when Xerox threatened to sue them, so it wasn't a case of them not being able to sue someone for look and feel similarities, it was more the fact that they didn't create it in the first place.
With the explorer in WinXP, as you type into the address bar, or Run window, both of which you can launch via keyboard shortcuts, you get a selectable list of available files/directories matching the letters that you've entered.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the phrase "serious and current threat" is a direct quote from the British government when referring to Iraq in 2002.
Try reading a liitle more widely before calling bullshit.
You really think we are "a helluva lot safer"? There's now even more people in the Middle East that hate the West. There's little evidence that the Iraqi government was training terrorists before the war(the supposed Al Qaeda related training camp of the Ansar al-Islam that was quoted in evidence prior to the war was actually in the Kurdish controlled region - and the UK/US are now so desperate for links that they are using the fact that the Iraqi government didn't try to clamp down on this camp as proof of their support for it, depsite the fact that if they had moved into Kurdish territory, this would have been seen as an act of agression by the west and justification for war).
Evidence from other "terrorist" situations around the world (Palestine, Northern Ireland etc) show that by simply trying to use violence to stop terrorism doesn't work.
imagine if on agust 15, 2001, the fbi had rounded up 20 suspected terrorists, all saudi men, and accused them of plotting an attack on a scale never before seen?
If they had actual evidence, I don't think there would have been much of an outcry. This kind of thing happens on a regular basis - people arrested for conspiracy to commit a crime. Imagine, instead, if they started to arrest everyone who they suspected of possibly having the urge to commit a crime in the future. The difference is, there wasn't any clear evidence for WMD in Iraq. The UN inspection teams had been telling the world that Iraq had been "fundamentally disarmed" of WMD since 1996, and had found little or nothing subsequently to suggest otherwise. Invading countries on a hunch is not a good precedent to set.
And as for the deaths, the one thing that we do know is that the number of deaths as a result of the Iraq war has now passed 10,000.
You really ought to stop just toeing the government line and start thinking for yourself.
However, I'm British and the phrase "serious and current threat" is a direct quote from the introduction to the British government's September dossier which was used as the first part of the justification for war.
It's not me that's getting the facts wrong...
Oh yes. The "imminent threat" that meant that we had to go to war ASAP was that he'd had WMD 15 years ago.
My dad runs a small hardware shop, and the local brewery used to regularly send new people to his shop for "a long weight".
Make a small hole in one end before putting the egg in the microwave. If you're lucky, you end up with a nice circle of scrambled egg sprayed around the inside.
The correct question is "who the hell can afford not to do this in a real job?"
Our IT department (one of the largest credit card companies in the UK - so a "real job") adopted unit testing as part of the development process on everything from Java to Cobol about 2 years ago. Quality has increased significantly, and I don't think any of the developers would feel comfortable coding without it now.
I got over 14 hrs out of my Creative Zen Xtra last week while travelling back from Northern Finland to Nottingham.
The beauty of the 10,000 tracks is that -
a) during the time I was away I probably listened to at least part of around 80 different albums. Even assuming that I was using my old Net MD walkman (that my wife now has), that would have been around 20 minidiscs that I would have had to carry with me (and sort through every time I fancied a change).
b) I didn't have to decide at the start of the trip which 80 albums it was going to be. I just selected whatever I was in the mood for at that point.
c) hopefully, I can stop buying a second copy of a CD I've already got (which I've done more than once on trips to our local cheap CD shop), as I can now just look it up on the player to see if I already have it.
But you've already got that in a 2d film, and your eyes can probably interpret this 'depth' better than a computer, so what would be the point?
This is the same level of arguement as claiming that people browsing magazines in newsagents is killing the magazine publishing industry because everyone who reads without having paid is robbing from the publisher - at the very simplistic level this is sort of true. Yet most newsagents have figured out that althought there are some lost sales due to people having read the article that they were interested in, this is more than balanced out by people that would not have bought the mag if they had not had a chance to see what was in it first (and most of the people that read it and didn't buy it, would not have bought it anyway).
Eventually, the music business will come round to the fact that they are increasing sales to people like me. I regularly download tracks from Kazaa, but if I discover something that I like, I will almost certainly go out and buy the actual album.
The Dead Kennedys did something remarkably similar years ago with the tape version their "In God We Trust Inc" album.
The statement that they had was 'Home taping is killing big entertainment industry profits; we left side two blank so you can help'
Lemonade Stand was the first thing that I ever used on a computer - a mate's dad's Apple II - must have been about 1980, when I was 9 or 10, - it got me fascinated by computers, and I've never looked back.
You can play it online. There goes my afternoon.
Only they didn't.
Firstly, Apple don't receive 100% of the price (tax/shop markups).
Secondly, some people will be ones that would have bought a big iPod instead, so they will have lost money on that.
Thirdly, the thing isn't free to develop/build/market. They will be making considerably less than $250 on each mini iPod sold, and the first thing that any money will go towards paying for R&D, advertising etc.
This is not to say that they won't make money on it (no idea on the actual cost/revenue/sale figures for the iPod), but I'm reasonably certain that selling only 1000 would not result in an overall profit for Apple.
You probably aren't the target audience for a $250 mp3 player, though, are you?
Kazaa Lite doesn't (as far as I'm aware) include any spyware. Can't remember whether it's Open Source or not, and unfortunately I can't check at work as I'll hit our web filter if I head to their site.
It would be no more surprising than the Beatles suing Apple
Do you have any evidence for this?
Or - there's nowhere else to go. Not liking my own government's support for the rights of corporations over those of the employees etc doesn't mean that it's much better elsewhere.
Plus, I might want to stay and fight (metaphorically) for a more just society as opposed to quitting and just letting them win.