So let's say they do find an alien civilization, would SETI get to copyright and patent the material that they gleen from the alien civilization?
Amusing how this would play out. I can't see that current copyright or patent law would apply because the original author or inventor is the owner of the intellectual property, not some yahoo who just happens to pick it up on his radio set.
But how feasible is that approach for those who already have substantial investment in the physical plant?
All sorts of scenarios are possible from selling the physical plant to hybrids where certain admin functions are outsourced and others are maintained in house. Most large companies these days have a variety of outsourced functions like help desk, 24x7 network monitoring, unix admin, combined with in house expertise that bridges business functions to IT.
Granted, they could still be outsourced to a local outsourcing firm, but not offshore.
The outsourcing companies often provide a mixture of a local presence plus offshore resources - local resources are used when hands-on maintenance is needed, offshore when it isn't (like for remote admin).
Incomprehensible to me, given the physical nature of network administration.
Maybe somebody has to be there to physically install/maintain equipment, but that doesn't mean this physical requirement can't be outsourced to either a data center, colo site, IT services company or whatever.
The stock portfolio did not suffer a loss in any of the 685 separate 20-year holding periods. In every period, the annual rate of return for the stock portfolio was greater than the inflation rate. At the same time, the bond portfolio outpaced inflation in only 317 of the 685 20-year holding periods -- by a much lower margin."
So in other words, you are wrong - in more than 1/2 of the baseline 20 year periods bonds DID NOT outpace inflation.
Real Estate is even worse - it is illiquid to the extreme and subject to severe price fluctuations as a result of interest rate variations. The real estate bubble of the 90's pretty much put an end to the concept of real estate as a reasonable approach for personal investing. The upcoming retirement of the baby boomers along with sales of homes implicit in this will place a severe secular downward pressure on real estate.
Actually the stock market has been the best place to invest one's money over the last 70 years. No other investment actually outpaces inflation.
Remember when the grid went down this past summer? I would have suspected major losses then, but somehow it wasn't that bad?
When your predictions don't come true, it's time to re-evaluate your assumptions.
Glitches are bound to happen.
Yup. The question is what happens afterwards - do they get corrected and people move on, or do not get corrected and people lose confidence?
The former seems to have happened here showing that the system has a degree of failure tolerance.
Look at all the ads for investing these days. They all suggest that you trust them to make you money, and they have as selling points, how easy it is to make money. The easier it is, the more moot it is, imho.
As you well know, advertisements and reality are two different things. Making money by investing it is hard work, requires intelligence, wisdom and perserverence. If you let yourself be driven by fads and ads, well you are one of the people PT Barnum was talking about.
When I began looking for a job, I purposely avoided big companies due to prior experience.
I spent a lot of my career working in a branch office of a very large corporation. I found it nearly ideal because the branch had enough autonomy so we could operate like a smaller shop, however we got the great benefits associated with a larger company, and when we needed them, we could draw on the resources of the large company.
The only problems we had were turf wars - certain types of projects drew the attention of corporate level groups wanting to assert their ownership of parts of what we were doing. Generally though they made themselves look stupid and expensive when they did this. Eventually they went away because they were too expensive and business managers didn't want to pay for them.
but as one who manages both developers and admins, I must respectfully ask whose duties are most easily shipped offshore.
My experience is that it is the admins who are easier to outsource. It is much less critical for the admin to have domain knowledge than the developer.
I was let go when the money got tight, under the exspectation that the developers would take over my position in their spare time.
I think that is exactly correct. I've had to wear both hats, and hated it. The company I worked for had me doing both, and I was unhappy about it.
What's worse, many of them just didn't have the skill set or the mindset needed to be an admin.
I can do the work; and in fact I think my skills as an admin are very valuable when I am doing development - planning deployment, troubleshooting an application that isn't doing what it should be, etc.
What I don't think fits for me is the customer service mentality that a good administrator has, especially when it comes to dealing with end users with very low computer skill levels. I tend to lack the patience needed when a salesman asks me to sort his email, or installs some piece of buggy shareware that brings his system down.
Fortunately I was able to get management to hire a sysadmin. The result is that I get to focus on development, and the systems run better, and end users are served much better.
The cost of replacing these employees with offshore workers will be easily offset by the slave-level wages paid to said offshore workers.
When the employer finds out the offshore workers are pissing off the customers and bring the jobs back onshore, they will lose far more in lost customers _and_ the process of recruiting and retraining the new workers.
You think it takes less than a 37th of a bit to represent each digit?
Pretty simple - binary math - each place of a binary number is a power of two. Since this number is 2^20996011 - 1, it can be represented in binary form as 20996010 1's, thus 21 KB. It's also why you can count to 2^10 - 1 on your fingers if you use each finger as a binary digit. If you try counting in ASCII base 10 digits on your fingers you can only count to 9, or 2^3 + 1.
India will be at western standards in less than twenty years.
You are extrapolating in a linear fashion based on the highest growth rate recorded this century. That is VERY unlikely to be valid. It is much more likely that the rate of change will decrease as literacy increases due to the difficulty of inclusion of all groups.
Western Europe and the US have literacy rates circa 95%. Some relatively homogeneous countries like Norway and Korea are 99%+. Since India has a highly diverse population it may in fact be harder to achieve 95% than my guess.
Makes you think with all the outsourcing and stuff maybe America's century is coming to an end and this century will belong to India or China.
I don't think so. Both of these countries have political issues that interfere with their reaching their economic potential.
Both countries have severe educational, economic and political problems. India has a deeply entrenched bureaucracy and strong Marxist political elements. India has an illiteracy rate about 70%.
China has similar problems, perhaps even worse including rampant corruption. The literacy rate in China is lower that the US rate of people granted post-graduate degrees.
Here is an article in Forbes describing some of the issues with China:
You didn't answer the question about the Library of Alexandria.
And what question was that? A burning? At best that story is now regarded as somewhat dubious. More likely it was political forces that led to the loss of the data held therein, and perhaps just the entropy of time. Do we think that digital media would have faired better over 2000 years? I highly doubt it.
Data on paper is just as easily lost.
In what meaning of the word 'lost'. Sure, we can lose data on paper due to mistreatment, but well treated data on paper is proven to have durability in the range of millenia. No digital medium can claim that kind of durability.
Not to mention that it was blind luck that the Rosetta Stone survived and was found.
Nah. The Rosetta Stone was only one of several inscriptions that enabled translation of hieroglyphics. While it was the most important it was be no means sufficient on it's own, and there have been other discoveries since that would have led to translation of hieroglyphs even if the stone had never been found.
If you want something to survive for a long time, it seems to me that the best strategy is to make as many copies as possible, in as many formats as possible.
That is rather self-evident wouldn't you say? And certainly some of those formats should not be digital.
One of the most interesting efforts underway at the momemnt is to preserve some historical music, being done by the Library of Congress. Do you know how they are doing it? Not digital for sure. They are cutting analog LPs on shellac disks. They don't have anything else that they think will last more than 100 years.
Perhaps Linus has a case for defamation, but I would thing that the case for fraud would be much stronger. SCO is trying to get people to pay them licensing fees based on a set of claims that are clearly false. While I am not a lawyer, it would seem to me this is very much fraudulent, and some state's (Utah especially) should take an interest in this.
Slashdot Mirror
Combination cell phone, EZ-Pass and RFID jammer.
I predict a booming market in shielded wallets.
So let's say they do find an alien civilization, would SETI get to copyright and patent the material that they gleen from the alien civilization?
Amusing how this would play out. I can't see that current copyright or patent law would apply because the original author or inventor is the owner of the intellectual property, not some yahoo who just happens to pick it up on his radio set.
But how feasible is that approach for those who already have substantial investment in the physical plant?
All sorts of scenarios are possible from selling the physical plant to hybrids where certain admin functions are outsourced and others are maintained in house. Most large companies these days have a variety of outsourced functions like help desk, 24x7 network monitoring, unix admin, combined with in house expertise that bridges business functions to IT.
Granted, they could still be outsourced to a local outsourcing firm, but not offshore.
The outsourcing companies often provide a mixture of a local presence plus offshore resources - local resources are used when hands-on maintenance is needed, offshore when it isn't (like for remote admin).
Incomprehensible to me, given the physical nature of network administration.
Maybe somebody has to be there to physically install/maintain equipment, but that doesn't mean this physical requirement can't be outsourced to either a data center, colo site, IT services company or whatever.
From http://www.axaonline.com/rs/3p/sp/5015.html:
The stock portfolio did not suffer a loss in any of the 685 separate 20-year holding periods. In every period, the annual rate of return for the stock portfolio was greater than the inflation rate. At the same time, the bond portfolio outpaced inflation in only 317 of the 685 20-year holding periods -- by a much lower margin."
So in other words, you are wrong - in more than 1/2 of the baseline 20 year periods bonds DID NOT outpace inflation.
Real Estate is even worse - it is illiquid to the extreme and subject to severe price fluctuations as a result of interest rate variations. The real estate bubble of the 90's pretty much put an end to the concept of real estate as a reasonable approach for personal investing. The upcoming retirement of the baby boomers along with sales of homes implicit in this will place a severe secular downward pressure on real estate.
The stock market is frail, and a fool's playpen.
Actually the stock market has been the best place to invest one's money over the last 70 years. No other investment actually outpaces inflation.
Remember when the grid went down this past summer? I would have suspected major losses then, but somehow it wasn't that bad?
When your predictions don't come true, it's time to re-evaluate your assumptions.
Glitches are bound to happen.
Yup. The question is what happens afterwards - do they get corrected and people move on, or do not get corrected and people lose confidence?
The former seems to have happened here showing that the system has a degree of failure tolerance.
Look at all the ads for investing these days. They all suggest that you trust them to make you money, and they have as selling points, how easy it is to make money. The easier it is, the more moot it is, imho.
As you well know, advertisements and reality are two different things. Making money by investing it is hard work, requires intelligence, wisdom and perserverence. If you let yourself be driven by fads and ads, well you are one of the people PT Barnum was talking about.
When I began looking for a job, I purposely avoided big companies due to prior experience.
I spent a lot of my career working in a branch office of a very large corporation. I found it nearly ideal because the branch had enough autonomy so we could operate like a smaller shop, however we got the great benefits associated with a larger company, and when we needed them, we could draw on the resources of the large company.
The only problems we had were turf wars - certain types of projects drew the attention of corporate level groups wanting to assert their ownership of parts of what we were doing. Generally though they made themselves look stupid and expensive when they did this. Eventually they went away because they were too expensive and business managers didn't want to pay for them.
Of course people want new features AND stability.
Pretty funny.
but as one who manages both developers and admins, I must respectfully ask whose duties are most easily shipped offshore.
My experience is that it is the admins who are easier to outsource. It is much less critical for the admin to have domain knowledge than the developer.
I was let go when the money got tight, under the exspectation that the developers would take over my position in their spare time.
I think that is exactly correct. I've had to wear both hats, and hated it. The company I worked for had me doing both, and I was unhappy about it.
What's worse, many of them just didn't have the skill set or the mindset needed to be an admin.
I can do the work; and in fact I think my skills as an admin are very valuable when I am doing development - planning deployment, troubleshooting an application that isn't doing what it should be, etc.
What I don't think fits for me is the customer service mentality that a good administrator has, especially when it comes to dealing with end users with very low computer skill levels. I tend to lack the patience needed when a salesman asks me to sort his email, or installs some piece of buggy shareware that brings his system down.
Fortunately I was able to get management to hire a sysadmin. The result is that I get to focus on development, and the systems run better, and end users are served much better.
The cost of replacing these employees with offshore workers will be easily offset by the slave-level wages paid to said offshore workers.
When the employer finds out the offshore workers are pissing off the customers and bring the jobs back onshore, they will lose far more in lost customers _and_ the process of recruiting and retraining the new workers.
You think it takes less than a 37th of a bit to represent each digit?
Pretty simple - binary math - each place of a binary number is a power of two. Since this number is 2^20996011 - 1, it can be represented in binary form as 20996010 1's, thus 21 KB. It's also why you can count to 2^10 - 1 on your fingers if you use each finger as a binary digit. If you try counting in ASCII base 10 digits on your fingers you can only count to 9, or 2^3 + 1.
K & E Decilon for me.
Since when does it take a byte to represent a base 10 digit?
This number takes more like 21 KB to represent.
When a scientist says that something is possible, he is most probably right. When he says that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
- Arthur C. Clarke
While I think that quantum tunneling effect is likely to place limits on the size of electronic gates, who says we have to use electronic gates?
India will be at western standards in less than twenty years.
You are extrapolating in a linear fashion based on the highest growth rate recorded this century. That is VERY unlikely to be valid. It is much more likely that the rate of change will decrease as literacy increases due to the difficulty of inclusion of all groups.
My guess would be something like:
2011 - 74%
2021 - 81%
2031 - 86%
2041 - 89%
2051 - 92%
2061 - 94%
2071 - 95%
Western Europe and the US have literacy rates circa 95%. Some relatively homogeneous countries like Norway and Korea are 99%+. Since India has a highly diverse population it may in fact be harder to achieve 95% than my guess.
So why is Indiana joining this consortium?
Or is it the Indians? I read today that there was some ceremony regarding the deification of Sakakejewa in Washington? Is that what this is about?
Makes you think with all the outsourcing and stuff maybe America's century is coming to an end and this century will belong to India or China.
a .h tml
I don't think so. Both of these countries have political issues that interfere with their reaching their economic potential.
Both countries have severe educational, economic and political problems. India has a deeply entrenched bureaucracy and strong Marxist political elements. India has an illiteracy rate about 70%.
China has similar problems, perhaps even worse including rampant corruption. The literacy rate in China is lower that the US rate of people granted post-graduate degrees.
Here is an article in Forbes describing some of the issues with China:
http://www.forbes.com/2003/11/14/cz_rm_1114chin
You didn't answer the question about the Library of Alexandria.
r e_ 1216161.html
And what question was that? A burning? At best that story is now regarded as somewhat dubious. More likely it was political forces that led to the loss of the data held therein, and perhaps just the entropy of time. Do we think that digital media would have faired better over 2000 years? I highly doubt it.
Data on paper is just as easily lost.
In what meaning of the word 'lost'. Sure, we can lose data on paper due to mistreatment, but well treated data on paper is proven to have durability in the range of millenia. No digital medium can claim that kind of durability.
Not to mention that it was blind luck that the Rosetta Stone survived and was found.
Nah. The Rosetta Stone was only one of several inscriptions that enabled translation of hieroglyphics. While it was the most important it was be no means sufficient on it's own, and there have been other discoveries since that would have led to translation of hieroglyphs even if the stone had never been found.
If you want something to survive for a long time, it seems to me that the best strategy is to make as many copies as possible, in as many formats as possible.
That is rather self-evident wouldn't you say? And certainly some of those formats should not be digital.
One of the most interesting efforts underway at the momemnt is to preserve some historical music, being done by the Library of Congress. Do you know how they are doing it? Not digital for sure. They are cutting analog LPs on shellac disks. They don't have anything else that they think will last more than 100 years.
http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/featu
Perhaps Linus has a case for defamation, but I would thing that the case for fraud would be much stronger. SCO is trying to get people to pay them licensing fees based on a set of claims that are clearly false. While I am not a lawyer, it would seem to me this is very much fraudulent, and some state's (Utah especially) should take an interest in this.
I don't want to think about how you propose cataloging all the paper data you want kept.
Librarians solved that problem hundreds of years ago.
Or about the way you'd ensure the data's backed up.
Just like anything else, another copy.
Or about how you would propagate a change through your enormous cross-indexed mirrored filing cabinets.
I am sure that removing an index card isn't that hard.
Yes, long term storage of electronic data could be a problem
Not "could be". It is a problem. It's a problem because the technology is so new people don't know what works, and what doesn't.
I agree completely. Ed Tufte is LOL.
Google is tracking clicked URLs by making the links all redirect to the destination site THROUGH a Google page.
Really? It sure doesn't do that when I do a Google search unless I click on something like cached or similar pages that HAVE to go back to Google.