Ahh yess but what about all those trillions of dollars in bonds that are owned by the rest of the world. For instance the Central Banks of Japan and China have a few hundred billion dollars invested in our U.S Government bonds that are returning 3-4% interest. If you tell them that the supply of dollars doubled they are going to be really really upset because their bond return is now -50%. They are then going to dump all those bonds and send the U.S dollar into a hyperinflationary tailspin.
Same thing happened in Zimbabwe when Mugabe decided that economics was an invention of the rich to justify their existence and now the government has run out of money to pay for ink to print more currency.
Well I don't read chinese but my clicking instincts are pretty good. Here are some screenshots of the software. Looks just like Office. Very Impressive.. It looks like it runs on KDE.
Before you start thinking of people as more mouths to feed you also have to realize that we would have lots of older people with excellently functioning minds who would have many years of experience in their fields and tremendous amounts of accumulated knowledge. They would no doubt be much more productive than the average person in the field. I think our scientific achievment would increase exponentially.
The problem with all these new "studies" is that they fall under the you can find a downside to anything rule.
Given enough time I could find a downside to anything. For instance, breathing is bad because it increases the amount of CO2 in the air and thus helps global warming, etc. The point is is that just because you can find something bad about something you have to think what is GOOD about something and then weigh the differences. Since we've had light for so long we hardly realize its benefits. Going back to the dawn of electric lighting it was certainly very welcomed in its day. Just like Rouseau or many philosophers before and after, we realize that we are unhappy and we look back to some idealized vision of the past (where people had half the life expectancy they do now) and think that they were happier, but really, they weren't.
Well anyway, as for this article, video conferencing and internet access is helpful for economic development can make it easier for local production to be competitive and market their products to other localities, etc.
Most people think that before you can produce anything economically you need clean drinking water, affordable housing, and modern hospitals. I mean most people who pontificate about all this say, "We have all that infrastructure and I can barely get a job making lattes at starbucks for just above minimum wage! How are they going to do anything productive without all of we have?". So what do I say to them:
WRONG.
Before you get all of the above which are very very expensive, as in 100s of millions of dollars. You have to find some sort of way to be productive like sewing textiles or above subsitance farming or factory production, etc. Any successful development story starts with the fact that the country or region in question made something first that people wanted and then it developed. If you build all this infrastructure wherever, as soon as the money stops flowing in, and it would have to flow in permanently and forever, it would all fall apart. This has happened over and over again in Sub-Saharan African and else where.
The *Real* Problem with X11 and the unix desktop
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ok guys. I really have to tell you, I have been using Unix on the desktop 8 hours a day everyday for about the last 3 years and though things have gotten better there is one issue I have with X and the whole Linux desktop that everybody ignores but fundamentally makes it inferior to Mac and Windows. Not that it's not good enough to be quite usefull but this is just a glaringly huge hole in the UI that doesn't get enough press.
The problem is The Clipboard (Drag And Drop, Cut and Paste Etc). It only does text! I can't cut and paste from Gimp to Open Office or Mozilla to Open Office. Here we have the two most important linux desktop application and dragging a gif from mozilla to open office doesn't work. It's just text!
I know this would be tough to implement with X Remote desktop since two applications being displayed on your X Server might be on different machines but can't we set up a drag and drop daemon on each machine that lets them talk to each other so open office on machine a could except some paste information from the machine that was running Mozilla via a xclient to xclient connection or from a low level cut and paste service that communicated from server to server? Anyway.. I hope somebody in KDE or Gnome land is listening here.
Wow.. This isn't the first attack on Open Source and Java today. Take a look at this thread on the server side between a commercial vendor and the Hibernate open source project. It degenerates into legal threats and wild accusations. I have rarely seen a flamewar this severe.
The idea that someone will work for cheaper than you will is usually a result of them either being able to do more in their country with less money or that they are more desperate for work than you are.
Therefore, the fact that these jobs are spreading out is caused by the fact that A. The U.S and other countries currencies are overvalued and the same standard of living can be bought for less in a country with undervalued currency or B. The people living in these lower wage countries have big families to provide for and not so great living conditions and would really like to move one step up the standard of living ladder which means moving the person who lost their job in the high wage country a step down on the ladder. Of course with comparative advantage this is not always a zero sum game.
This is all a big process of equalization of living standards that takes place once people started embracing free market economies and free trade a bunch of years ago. The only thing that makes any difference now is immovable capital like infrastructure and the quality of the legal system.
I've had a sidekick for about 4 months and I like it. Sure the phone isn't the greatest but I got it for super cheap thanks to an amazon rebate offer and am quite happy with it.
I like the PIM applications a lot. They are very well designed
The tiny camera was great until I Broke it:(
I love the web synchronization. I can go to the tmobile web site and see all my pim data from my sidekick there. I can edit it and it is instantly synched with the phone which is very very cool.
Keyboard is great for typing.
Email app is great and can view attachments
Web browsing actually works. I can look at slashdot, quote.yahoo.com, maps, google, etc. No javascript but I read news all day while walking around town. The fonts are actually readable without a lot of zooming and horizontal scrolling.
AOL instant messenger works well.
I get unlimited data for the first year!
As a phone this thing is a bit of a drag, mainly because T-Mobile has such lousy coverage but when it works its awesome.
I had a Zaurus. It just wasn't that usefull and the fonts were way to small and this 802.11 stuff barely works even if you get a plan. Sidekick reformats pages so you can actually read them on its screen. Anyway.. Go get one they are worth it, especially with all the rebates I got.
It's a little known fact that in the 1970s a dam project in Henan Province of China was responsible for the deaths of more than 200,000 people. This was in fact the biggest technological diaster of all time. Here's some more information about this and other dam collapses.
150 year old and probably older observation being rehashed again as brand spanking new cutting edge insight. The concept of a "false consciousness" has been a mainstay of marxist thought since it's inception and seems to be rehashed frequently as some sort of new discovery.
The argument is made that capitalist ideology establishes itself as false conciousness over the working class; purporting to be the natural order of things in order to justify the relationship between classes. So ideology dominates and justifies its own domination, thereby preventing the working class from asserting itself. For Marx and Engels ideology is a deeply problematic term.
Social Psychology 101 for Congressional Hearings
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
A well researched principal in social psychology is that the way someone who has been throughly discredited can gain credibility is for them to appear to be speaking against their own interest. For instance, a known world class con-artist who would never be trusted, no matter what he said, would suddenly become trusted when testifying in support of strengthening fraud laws. How do you know this spammer guy isn't getting let off from prosecution by testifying for tougher spam laws, or even getting a cash renumeration from AOL or whomever? Perhaps the spam law is badly designed and makes his life easier?
Java Data Objects are nice but Hibernate is Better
on
Java Data Objects
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I looked into JDO and was excited. Here was a much simpler alternative to EJB. In EJB there are many many things that can go wrong during deployment of beans which leads and quite a bit of replication. YOu define your object once in the bean, once in the remote interface, once in the local interface, etc. It seems to take a while to debug. JDO is better but it requires a class file enhancer. Hibernate is a lot better. There is 1 config file that defines your whole object model and it requires no special class file enhancer. That and unlike EJB it supports inheritance in object models well.
We have ultra density. Will the next standard be called "extreme density"? And after that "unbelievable density"? They are going to start running out of adjectives in a little while. Quick! Somebody start a adjectives standards body!
I have owned a t-mobile sidekick for a while. It renders HTML very well, with images. The backend I think is mozilla based. It does aol instant messenger well and email. It is truely several steps ahead of all the pathetic wap based browsers. I use it all the time, when I am in the bookstore I look up the reviews on amazon.com. When I am waiting for a bus here in San Francisco I use the take transit trip planner website to find out when the next bus is coming. I never buy a paper again I just read the news on cnn on my sidekick.
But it doesn't run linux, does it?
on
TiVo++ from India
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Well I can't buy a piece of consumer electronics equipment that doesn't run Linux. I mean why waste money on something you can't put in a Beowolf cluster, like my beowolf enabled Sharp Zaurus and Tivo.
March 17 -- A computer intruder armed with a secret, particularly effective attack tool recently took control of an Army Web server, MSNBC.com has learned. Both Microsoft and the CERT Coordination Center released hastily-prepared warnings about the vulnerability that led to the attack on Monday. But it was a disturbingly successful attack, experts say, because the intruder found and exploited a flaw that took security researchers completely by surprise.
Are they any better than the alternatives?
on
Salon Asks for Help
·
· Score: 1
There are lots of opinion newspapers out there, thousands. Is Salon really that much better than all the rest that we need another one? There are thousands of websites that advertise with banner ads out there. Is Salon really that much better than all of these that it needs to survive? It appears that this is not the case.
The people who buy ads and magazine subscriptions in this world think that they would rather buy other magazines, many of them free and advertise in other mediums that have much better return on investment than Salon. The reporters are demanding certain salaries, their lawyers, accountants, etc demand certain salaries, if there are not enough people interested in the product that they are creating they might as well go to work for other people. There are a lot of other opinion magazines that probably do better than Salon and a lot better run that these lawyers, reporters,etc should go work for.
Yes, I am sure that any government that is not an ally of the United States is going to want to use this DRM service given that the NSA will be able to read their documents, monitor who they send them too, who reads them, who prints them,etc, etc all through the centralized passport server
A synthesis of the capitalism/socialism dialectic?
on
The Linux Uprising
·
· Score: 1, Troll
So the great debate has always been between people like Walker who want capital -- in this instance software -- to be free.
Walker's fresh, earnest face tells all: He's an idealist. He believes in sharing his software innovations with others. "I'm not comfortable with selling the things I do and making money from them," Walker says during a stopover at his parents' home in New Hampshire.
and capitalists like Birnbaum who think that the market, communicating via the price system to capitalists must dictate the most productive uses of capital by transfering the power over that capital based on who makes the most productive use of it. Productive meaning, the gap between the price of the inputs vs the price of the outputs of their business activity, otherwise known as profits.
Walker has an unlikely soul mate. Jeffrey M. Birnbaum, 37, is managing director for computing at brokerage giant Morgan Stanley's Institutional Securities Div. He's so buttoned-down that he wears a suit on Casual Friday. You would think this cog in the capitalist machine would have nothing in common with young Walker.
So with open source every one has free capital. Those who can make the most productive use of it make money off of it. But the capital is denied to noone, and both are at a much more equal starting point in terms of access to capital then they would be in the case of the capital to start a chemical factory. That's because the resources are not scare so who gets access to them is not a point of political contention.
Unfortunately this has little application to the world of physical goods because duplicating a chemical plant has far more dis-utility to those who have to perform the work than duplicating a piece of software. Therefore, people choose to work for the most productive utilizer of capital.
You spend most of your adult life at work. Make sure that you choose very carefully the people you work for and with because you'll waste a lot of your life with them.
More importantly, make sure there is something you can learn from them. It's always better to work with people more experienced than you are who teach you things.
Well if a Fox is "destined" to eat small rodents and it's "purpose" is to keep rodent populations under control, and its "role" is to be at the top of the food chain than I guess the understanding of that is a religion. How do you know the fox isn't just going to start doing something completely different, like digging for truffles tomorrow except that you believe in the "religion" of a constant order in nature.
I am simply propsing that we have a specific role in the earth's ecosystem just as many have documented the role and purpose of many other plants and animals in their respective eco-system. Some people think that humans are an accident and a disruption to the worlds eco-system and are separate from all the other natural processes ocurring. I tend to think otherwise. I think that we are the reproductive system for the eco-systems of earth.
Every civilization has been fasinated with exploring and the stars, this instinct is built into us to make us fulfill our destiny of serving as the reproductive system of the earth. This is the real purpose of humans in the eco-system. It's a shame more people haven't realized this and think that humans are somehow outside the earth's eco-system. Just like a fox doesn't know what its role in the eco-system is, so neither is it obvious to us.
I see milleniums full of humans reproducing the earth on dead planets throughout the universe. We've just got to make sure the earth doesn't die during child birth.
Slashdot Mirror
Same thing happened in Zimbabwe when Mugabe decided that economics was an invention of the rich to justify their existence and now the government has run out of money to pay for ink to print more currency.
Well I don't read chinese but my clicking instincts are pretty good. Here are some screenshots of the software. Looks just like Office. Very Impressive.. It looks like it runs on KDE.
Screenshots
Before you start thinking of people as more mouths to feed you also have to realize that we would have lots of older people with excellently functioning minds who would have many years of experience in their fields and tremendous amounts of accumulated knowledge. They would no doubt be much more productive than the average person in the field. I think our scientific achievment would increase exponentially.
Given enough time I could find a downside to anything. For instance, breathing is bad because it increases the amount of CO2 in the air and thus helps global warming, etc. The point is is that just because you can find something bad about something you have to think what is GOOD about something and then weigh the differences. Since we've had light for so long we hardly realize its benefits. Going back to the dawn of electric lighting it was certainly very welcomed in its day. Just like Rouseau or many philosophers before and after, we realize that we are unhappy and we look back to some idealized vision of the past (where people had half the life expectancy they do now) and think that they were happier, but really, they weren't.
Well anyway, as for this article, video conferencing and internet access is helpful for economic development can make it easier for local production to be competitive and market their products to other localities, etc.
WRONG.
Before you get all of the above which are very very expensive, as in 100s of millions of dollars. You have to find some sort of way to be productive like sewing textiles or above subsitance farming or factory production, etc. Any successful development story starts with the fact that the country or region in question made something first that people wanted and then it developed. If you build all this infrastructure wherever, as soon as the money stops flowing in, and it would have to flow in permanently and forever, it would all fall apart. This has happened over and over again in Sub-Saharan African and else where.
The problem is The Clipboard (Drag And Drop, Cut and Paste Etc). It only does text! I can't cut and paste from Gimp to Open Office or Mozilla to Open Office. Here we have the two most important linux desktop application and dragging a gif from mozilla to open office doesn't work. It's just text!
I know this would be tough to implement with X Remote desktop since two applications being displayed on your X Server might be on different machines but can't we set up a drag and drop daemon on each machine that lets them talk to each other so open office on machine a could except some paste information from the machine that was running Mozilla via a xclient to xclient connection or from a low level cut and paste service that communicated from server to server? Anyway.. I hope somebody in KDE or Gnome land is listening here.
Thread is here
Therefore, the fact that these jobs are spreading out is caused by the fact that A. The U.S and other countries currencies are overvalued and the same standard of living can be bought for less in a country with undervalued currency or B. The people living in these lower wage countries have big families to provide for and not so great living conditions and would really like to move one step up the standard of living ladder which means moving the person who lost their job in the high wage country a step down on the ladder. Of course with comparative advantage this is not always a zero sum game.
This is all a big process of equalization of living standards that takes place once people started embracing free market economies and free trade a bunch of years ago. The only thing that makes any difference now is immovable capital like infrastructure and the quality of the legal system.
I like the PIM applications a lot. They are very well designed
The tiny camera was great until I Broke it :(
I love the web synchronization. I can go to the tmobile web site and see all my pim data from my sidekick there. I can edit it and it is instantly synched with the phone which is very very cool.
Keyboard is great for typing.
Email app is great and can view attachments
Web browsing actually works. I can look at slashdot, quote.yahoo.com, maps, google, etc. No javascript but I read news all day while walking around town. The fonts are actually readable without a lot of zooming and horizontal scrolling.
AOL instant messenger works well.
I get unlimited data for the first year!
As a phone this thing is a bit of a drag, mainly because T-Mobile has such lousy coverage but when it works its awesome.
I had a Zaurus. It just wasn't that usefull and the fonts were way to small and this 802.11 stuff barely works even if you get a plan. Sidekick reformats pages so you can actually read them on its screen. Anyway.. Go get one they are worth it, especially with all the rebates I got.
150 year old and probably older observation being rehashed again as brand spanking new cutting edge insight. The concept of a "false consciousness" has been a mainstay of marxist thought since it's inception and seems to be rehashed frequently as some sort of new discovery.
A well researched principal in social psychology is that the way someone who has been throughly discredited can gain credibility is for them to appear to be speaking against their own interest. For instance, a known world class con-artist who would never be trusted, no matter what he said, would suddenly become trusted when testifying in support of strengthening fraud laws. How do you know this spammer guy isn't getting let off from prosecution by testifying for tougher spam laws, or even getting a cash renumeration from AOL or whomever? Perhaps the spam law is badly designed and makes his life easier?
I looked into JDO and was excited. Here was a much simpler alternative to EJB. In EJB there are many many things that can go wrong during deployment of beans which leads and quite a bit of replication. YOu define your object once in the bean, once in the remote interface, once in the local interface, etc. It seems to take a while to debug. JDO is better but it requires a class file enhancer. Hibernate is a lot better. There is 1 config file that defines your whole object model and it requires no special class file enhancer. That and unlike EJB it supports inheritance in object models well.
Chinese power philosophy, then and now.
1946:
"All power Eminates From the barrel of a gun"
2003:
"All power Eminates From the most used Internet search engine"
We have ultra density. Will the next standard be called "extreme density"? And after that "unbelievable density"?
They are going to start running out of adjectives in a little while. Quick! Somebody start a adjectives standards body!
I have owned a t-mobile sidekick for a while. It renders HTML very well, with images. The backend I think is mozilla based. It does aol instant messenger well and email. It is truely several steps ahead of all the pathetic wap based browsers. I use it all the time, when I am in the bookstore I look up the reviews on amazon.com. When I am waiting for a bus here in San Francisco I use the take transit trip planner website to find out when the next bus is coming. I never buy a paper again I just read the news on cnn on my sidekick.
Well I can't buy a piece of consumer electronics equipment that doesn't run Linux. I mean why waste money on something you can't put in a Beowolf cluster, like my beowolf enabled Sharp Zaurus and Tivo.
The people who buy ads and magazine subscriptions in this world think that they would rather buy other magazines, many of them free and advertise in other mediums that have much better return on investment than Salon. The reporters are demanding certain salaries, their lawyers, accountants, etc demand certain salaries, if there are not enough people interested in the product that they are creating they might as well go to work for other people. There are a lot of other opinion magazines that probably do better than Salon and a lot better run that these lawyers, reporters,etc should go work for.
and capitalists like Birnbaum who think that the market, communicating via the price system to capitalists must dictate the most productive uses of capital by transfering the power over that capital based on who makes the most productive use of it. Productive meaning, the gap between the price of the inputs vs the price of the outputs of their business activity, otherwise known as profits.
So with open source every one has free capital. Those who can make the most productive use of it make money off of it. But the capital is denied to noone, and both are at a much more equal starting point in terms of access to capital then they would be in the case of the capital to start a chemical factory. That's because the resources are not scare so who gets access to them is not a point of political contention.
Unfortunately this has little application to the world of physical goods because duplicating a chemical plant has far more dis-utility to those who have to perform the work than duplicating a piece of software. Therefore, people choose to work for the most productive utilizer of capital.
More importantly, make sure there is something you can learn from them. It's always better to work with people more experienced than you are who teach you things.
I am simply propsing that we have a specific role in the earth's ecosystem just as many have documented the role and purpose of many other plants and animals in their respective eco-system. Some people think that humans are an accident and a disruption to the worlds eco-system and are separate from all the other natural processes ocurring. I tend to think otherwise. I think that we are the reproductive system for the eco-systems of earth.
I see milleniums full of humans reproducing the earth on dead planets throughout the universe. We've just got to make sure the earth doesn't die during child birth.