So I hear the US is having some problems with wealth redistribution? Luckily: the First World has been developing a solution which we think would really help your organization. The solution is called Socialism and our customers have been happily running it for decades.
Your share holders are making profits from their investments in US companies which are outsourcing all their labour; this results in un- and under-employment. However if you activate Socialism's Capital Gains Tax module, then you can redirect some of the stock profits to help the unemployed. Socialism will also directly increase employment by requiring larger government infrastructure.
WARNING: running the Capital Gains Tax module can result in emmigration of share holders unless your organization deploys Incentives. We recommend you study our successful customers' Incentive implementations, for example: Canada's primary Incentive is Natural Beauty, Japan relies on Distinct Culture, and France has Cheese.
We think you'll be really pleased with Socialism, so please take the time to read more about it and consider what it can do for your organization.
This is the first post I've seen which finds the narrow edge between laissez-faire and protectionism. The purpose of governments in a capitalist society is to smooth out the highs and lows of the market and provide a social safety net to ensure that workers don't die (because if physical needs aren't being met, a large enough market crash would be unrecoverable).
If the US government turns to protectionism, then in a few decades you'll have Admiral Pehri opening the domestic software industry to bootstrapped Indian companies. Instead, the government should devote resources to retraining tech workers for more competitive positions while at the same time enacting legislation that slows the outsourcing to a managable pace. They should also consider ways of making US tech jobs more cost-effective such as socialist post-secondary education and health care.
Finally, many/. posters seem particularly put-off that a company can outsource its entire workforce but keep its headquarters in the US. If there is value to basing companies in these jurisdictions, as they imply, then the government needs to start increasing corporate tax to reflect that value.
Yet another reason why the open source communit needs to make SMIL a top-priority: Flash-style projects with the tall drink of water that is ECMAscript instead of the tub of excrement that is ActionScript.
While I disagree with the grandparent that we should include all people without jobs in the unemployment rate, the way it is calculated now does ignore people who would like to have a job but are not actually looking. When people give up, the unemployment rate goes down -- does that really make sense?
Even worse is how fully employed workers are counted equally with underemployed (read: part-time when they want to be full-time) workers and temps. Part-time work is rarely enough income to be above the poverty level, yet the statistics treat these people as if they're just fine.
The fact is: more than 5.7% of the population is unhappy with their employment status.
Other than porting and optimization, software "results" should never need to be duplicated. That's the whole point of bits: once your "experiment" is successful, you ship it. So if people were to agree with you that novel software should not be outsourced, then almost no software would be outsourced.
Or are you talking about "process" as in a design process in which case you're suggesting something like: invent a development model at home, then outsource the applications of that model?
(It seems to me that you're trying to apply matter manufacturing philosophy to software and I'm just not getting it.)
Why did the management degree fees go down? Does the government dictate tuition even for private universities? Or does India not have private universities?
In North America, very few families can afford to pay for their child's entire education, so either most Indian engineers are the children of rich families, or the universities are more heavily subsidised than here. Which is it?
How much better is an overseas technical degree perceived to be compared to India's best schools?
While I agree with you that the UN General Assembly suffers from a lack of moral clarity, I think you are confusing the GA with the entire UN System of Organizations.
It is highly unlikely that if the UN were given administrative control of the Internet that the General Assembly would be dealing with day-to-day policy. Instead, the GA would draft a charter for a UN organization, which would then be given somewhat free reign to manage and implement those policies. UN organizations are frequently endowed with very strongly pro-human-rights-and-democracy charters and are not obviously controlled by any particular country.
So while I agree with you that the UN is an imperfect organization, its track record is largely positive (which, of course, isn't newsworthy) and therefore I would be more comfortable giving control of the Internet to them than any other body proposed so far.
And just as companies profiting from the Holocaust have paid reparations after the war, so too should Microsoft and Cisco pay once there is a democratic regime in China. So it's in the long-term interest of businesses to follow the Human Rights Norms.
The employees are unlikely to suffer any penalty for participating in the human rights abuses, but if I were an employee of one of these companies I'd still think long and hard about whether I should keep working for them.
The Crucible is obtuse because it's really about McCarthyism but Miller can't criticise it explicitly. RMS isn't going up against an authoritarian regime (yet) so he can be more direct.
The Grapes of Wrath is putting a (fictional) human face on the statistics of the Depression -- the target audience is people who know the information but are not swayed by it alone. Perhaps if things continue to slide, and therefore people are not convinced by The Right to Read, someone will write a dystopia of novel-length.
The Canadian government, at least, would officially ask the British government to withdraw the nomination. It is the policy of our government that citizens, even joint citizens, may not accept foreign honours.
A few years ago, Conrad Black, a joint British-Canadian citizen, was nominated to be knighted. It might have had something to do with him being arch-nemesis of the Prime Minister of Canada at the time, but the knighting was blocked. So Conrad renounced his Canadian citizenship and went on to become Lord Black of Crossharbour.
If I have to look at one more piece of software that doesn't mention what license it's published under, I'm going to kick your ass.
You sucker kids into creating content linked to your shitty libraries, then even provide some kind of hosting scam, and in the end all they're left with is a few cents in their PayPal account, right? While you "adults" keep all their blood, sweat, and tears in little plastic vials.
Considering that the software doesn't even have a disclaimer of liability, maybe I should just sue your ass because it doesn't accurately reflect my dreams or some trump charge like that? Get a clue: we live in a litigatious world, the least you can do is tell people what they're buying into or you might find yourself checking out.
Culture is not race, culture is a real difference, it's acceptable to criticise culture -- otherwise we should let the Arabs do whatever they want with their women. Cultural differences certainly lead to civil engineering differences, why can't they also effect code?
Language is not race, language is a real difference, it's acceptable to criticise pronounciation -- otherwise we should let school kids speak English however they want. Pronounciation may not be as big a language barrier as syntax or semantics, but it's still some kind of barrier.
Maybe you should be blaming your legislators that gave the companies tax breaks without getting the quid pro quo in writing? The only thing the companies are obliged to do is make profit for their shareholders (most of whom are still American), and the people who proposed and implemented the tax breaks knew that.
And why do you guys seem to think that these companies would have such a hard time if their HQ was offshore? I don't see Americans having any qualms about buying foreign cars, electronics, food, and energy -- why would software or IT services be any different?
Depends how you define "poverty". Personally, I define it as having the ability to exercise your rights as specified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (or some similar quality of life specification). Under my definition, it's okay if the rich get richer, so long as the least wealthy are having all their needs (ie: Maslow's Hierachy of Needs) fulfilled.
So when it comes to things like the necessities of life, a space program, or any other R&D funding, can certainly help. The less time and effort everyone is required to spend on their fundamental needs, the more time and effort they can spend on things like self-actualization. And technology is the mechanism by which their time and effort shall be saved.
I would sacrifice every single person currently on welfare if it meant that poverty would be permanently eliminated. However, I believe a strong social safety net is necessary for the development of technology that will decrease the cost of that net in the future. So for the time being, our resources must be carefully balanced between social welfare and technological progress.
Aren't Riceboys a valid subset of consumers? Somebody should cater to them...
Seriously, why did companies start locking SMP in the first place? Did Intel really think that some Fortune 500 would decide to use overclocked Celerons instead of Xeons in their next mission critical server?
Because if they have spam filters, then they're not used to seeing spam! Therefore, each spam has that much more impact on the victim. And the spammers who manage to get through the filters, will gain an edge over those who don't.
This is especially important for spammers offering new products because the first one to get past some guy's filter is that much more likely to become that guy's source for Viagra^prime or whatever.
My little brother got a Rahkshi Kaita Vo Kit for Christmas and I had the opportunity to play with it for an hour or two. The kit contains the pieces to make three functionally identical models, which seems pretty useless to me, but since you can buy them separately I'll blame the person who bought it for him.
Yes, many of the fixed pieces are overly specialized. However, the characters also have novel motion features, which would be difficult to design with general pieces and need to be light weight. By far the most interesting aspect of the whole kit is that the articulation of the limbs is due entirely to ball and socket joints, so although the "bones" appear only stylistically different, when you actually start building with them you realise that the attachment of balls and sockets at slightly different angles makes a big difference.
So the Bionicles don't just look organic, but incorporate organic design principles. And that could be way more educational than yet another civil engineering simulator!
I was also happy to see that many of the pieces included connection points that weren't used in the default models. So reuse might not be as high a priority at Lego as it used to be, but its still considered a virtue.
While I'd be the first to agree that Tribes is one of the greatest games every made, I question how much fun 99% of the maps would be with 4-7 players.
And as someone else mentioned here, it is not easy to run under Linux.
Just because grads happen to give some significance to powers of ten doesn't automatically make them metric. They're far too arbitrary to enter the league of extraordinary units that is the SI.
Why use "sols" which are, of course, highly variable, when we already have the metric unit "second"? Yes, seconds are rather arbitrary, but at least they're rigorously defined (by the decay of Cesium-133).
<aside>
I'd like to take this opportunity to propose changing the specification of a "second": one of the design goals (possibly back-specified) of the metric system is the ease of calculating the base units at home. So, in keeping with the SI obsession with water, I propose that the base unit of time be the length of time it takes for 1 litre of water to reach 100 Centigrade with the application of 1 newton of energy, or something like that... </aside>
The problem with every system of proposed time is that it will either be inconvenient for days or years (as the Julian calendar is now), if nothing else. So I think our best bet is to change the Earth's orbit so revolutions are a round number. Actually, if the orbit was held at a fixed duration, then "sol" would be just fine as a unit.
They're called radians. They're the metric equivalent of degrees. They make geometry easy. Therefore our geometric overlords discourage their use.
They could be used for time, the base unit ("one-pi radian") would be half a revolution, or two Quarters. Of course all systems of time based on natural phenomena will have a problem with either years or days because they just don't add up. Therefore we need to change the Earth's orbit.
There are only two possible explanations for this phenomenon:
Humans evolved on another planet.
The Earth had a different orbit for a significant period of our recent evolution.
I'd say either one strongly implies that aliens have been seriously messing with us before the advent of civilization. There are certainly many mythological cosmologies that feature humans arriving from somewhere else -- are there any that could be taken to imply a change in the Earth's orbit?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, in a few years maybe she can start dating the Linux boy.
So I hear the US is having some problems with wealth redistribution? Luckily: the First World has been developing a solution which we think would really help your organization. The solution is called Socialism and our customers have been happily running it for decades.
Your share holders are making profits from their investments in US companies which are outsourcing all their labour; this results in un- and under-employment. However if you activate Socialism's Capital Gains Tax module, then you can redirect some of the stock profits to help the unemployed. Socialism will also directly increase employment by requiring larger government infrastructure.
WARNING: running the Capital Gains Tax module can result in emmigration of share holders unless your organization deploys Incentives. We recommend you study our successful customers' Incentive implementations, for example: Canada's primary Incentive is Natural Beauty, Japan relies on Distinct Culture, and France has Cheese.
We think you'll be really pleased with Socialism, so please take the time to read more about it and consider what it can do for your organization.
This is the first post I've seen which finds the narrow edge between laissez-faire and protectionism. The purpose of governments in a capitalist society is to smooth out the highs and lows of the market and provide a social safety net to ensure that workers don't die (because if physical needs aren't being met, a large enough market crash would be unrecoverable).
If the US government turns to protectionism, then in a few decades you'll have Admiral Pehri opening the domestic software industry to bootstrapped Indian companies. Instead, the government should devote resources to retraining tech workers for more competitive positions while at the same time enacting legislation that slows the outsourcing to a managable pace. They should also consider ways of making US tech jobs more cost-effective such as socialist post-secondary education and health care.
Finally, many /. posters seem particularly put-off that a company can outsource its entire workforce but keep its headquarters in the US. If there is value to basing companies in these jurisdictions, as they imply, then the government needs to start increasing corporate tax to reflect that value.
Yet another reason why the open source communit needs to make SMIL a top-priority: Flash-style projects with the tall drink of water that is ECMAscript instead of the tub of excrement that is ActionScript.
While I disagree with the grandparent that we should include all people without jobs in the unemployment rate, the way it is calculated now does ignore people who would like to have a job but are not actually looking. When people give up, the unemployment rate goes down -- does that really make sense?
Even worse is how fully employed workers are counted equally with underemployed (read: part-time when they want to be full-time) workers and temps. Part-time work is rarely enough income to be above the poverty level, yet the statistics treat these people as if they're just fine.
The fact is: more than 5.7% of the population is unhappy with their employment status.
Other than porting and optimization, software "results" should never need to be duplicated. That's the whole point of bits: once your "experiment" is successful, you ship it. So if people were to agree with you that novel software should not be outsourced, then almost no software would be outsourced.
Or are you talking about "process" as in a design process in which case you're suggesting something like: invent a development model at home, then outsource the applications of that model?
(It seems to me that you're trying to apply matter manufacturing philosophy to software and I'm just not getting it.)
Why did the management degree fees go down? Does the government dictate tuition even for private universities? Or does India not have private universities?
In North America, very few families can afford to pay for their child's entire education, so either most Indian engineers are the children of rich families, or the universities are more heavily subsidised than here. Which is it?
How much better is an overseas technical degree perceived to be compared to India's best schools?
While I agree with you that the UN General Assembly suffers from a lack of moral clarity, I think you are confusing the GA with the entire UN System of Organizations.
It is highly unlikely that if the UN were given administrative control of the Internet that the General Assembly would be dealing with day-to-day policy. Instead, the GA would draft a charter for a UN organization, which would then be given somewhat free reign to manage and implement those policies. UN organizations are frequently endowed with very strongly pro-human-rights-and-democracy charters and are not obviously controlled by any particular country.
So while I agree with you that the UN is an imperfect organization, its track record is largely positive (which, of course, isn't newsworthy) and therefore I would be more comfortable giving control of the Internet to them than any other body proposed so far.
And just as companies profiting from the Holocaust have paid reparations after the war, so too should Microsoft and Cisco pay once there is a democratic regime in China. So it's in the long-term interest of businesses to follow the Human Rights Norms.
The employees are unlikely to suffer any penalty for participating in the human rights abuses, but if I were an employee of one of these companies I'd still think long and hard about whether I should keep working for them.
The Crucible is obtuse because it's really about McCarthyism but Miller can't criticise it explicitly. RMS isn't going up against an authoritarian regime (yet) so he can be more direct.
The Grapes of Wrath is putting a (fictional) human face on the statistics of the Depression -- the target audience is people who know the information but are not swayed by it alone. Perhaps if things continue to slide, and therefore people are not convinced by The Right to Read, someone will write a dystopia of novel-length.
Arbitrage is cool!
I know it's your sig, but does it have something to do with outsourcing, anyway?
The Canadian government, at least, would officially ask the British government to withdraw the nomination. It is the policy of our government that citizens, even joint citizens, may not accept foreign honours.
A few years ago, Conrad Black, a joint British-Canadian citizen, was nominated to be knighted. It might have had something to do with him being arch-nemesis of the Prime Minister of Canada at the time, but the knighting was blocked. So Conrad renounced his Canadian citizenship and went on to become Lord Black of Crossharbour.
If I have to look at one more piece of software that doesn't mention what license it's published under, I'm going to kick your ass.
You sucker kids into creating content linked to your shitty libraries, then even provide some kind of hosting scam, and in the end all they're left with is a few cents in their PayPal account, right? While you "adults" keep all their blood, sweat, and tears in little plastic vials.
Considering that the software doesn't even have a disclaimer of liability, maybe I should just sue your ass because it doesn't accurately reflect my dreams or some trump charge like that? Get a clue: we live in a litigatious world, the least you can do is tell people what they're buying into or you might find yourself checking out.
Culture is not race, culture is a real difference, it's acceptable to criticise culture -- otherwise we should let the Arabs do whatever they want with their women. Cultural differences certainly lead to civil engineering differences, why can't they also effect code?
Language is not race, language is a real difference, it's acceptable to criticise pronounciation -- otherwise we should let school kids speak English however they want. Pronounciation may not be as big a language barrier as syntax or semantics, but it's still some kind of barrier.
Maybe you should be blaming your legislators that gave the companies tax breaks without getting the quid pro quo in writing? The only thing the companies are obliged to do is make profit for their shareholders (most of whom are still American), and the people who proposed and implemented the tax breaks knew that.
And why do you guys seem to think that these companies would have such a hard time if their HQ was offshore? I don't see Americans having any qualms about buying foreign cars, electronics, food, and energy -- why would software or IT services be any different?
Depends how you define "poverty". Personally, I define it as having the ability to exercise your rights as specified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (or some similar quality of life specification). Under my definition, it's okay if the rich get richer, so long as the least wealthy are having all their needs (ie: Maslow's Hierachy of Needs) fulfilled.
So when it comes to things like the necessities of life, a space program, or any other R&D funding, can certainly help. The less time and effort everyone is required to spend on their fundamental needs, the more time and effort they can spend on things like self-actualization. And technology is the mechanism by which their time and effort shall be saved.
I would sacrifice every single person currently on welfare if it meant that poverty would be permanently eliminated. However, I believe a strong social safety net is necessary for the development of technology that will decrease the cost of that net in the future. So for the time being, our resources must be carefully balanced between social welfare and technological progress.
Aren't Riceboys a valid subset of consumers? Somebody should cater to them...
Seriously, why did companies start locking SMP in the first place? Did Intel really think that some Fortune 500 would decide to use overclocked Celerons instead of Xeons in their next mission critical server?
Because if they have spam filters, then they're not used to seeing spam! Therefore, each spam has that much more impact on the victim. And the spammers who manage to get through the filters, will gain an edge over those who don't.
This is especially important for spammers offering new products because the first one to get past some guy's filter is that much more likely to become that guy's source for Viagra^prime or whatever.
My little brother got a Rahkshi Kaita Vo Kit for Christmas and I had the opportunity to play with it for an hour or two. The kit contains the pieces to make three functionally identical models, which seems pretty useless to me, but since you can buy them separately I'll blame the person who bought it for him.
Yes, many of the fixed pieces are overly specialized. However, the characters also have novel motion features, which would be difficult to design with general pieces and need to be light weight. By far the most interesting aspect of the whole kit is that the articulation of the limbs is due entirely to ball and socket joints, so although the "bones" appear only stylistically different, when you actually start building with them you realise that the attachment of balls and sockets at slightly different angles makes a big difference.
So the Bionicles don't just look organic, but incorporate organic design principles. And that could be way more educational than yet another civil engineering simulator!
I was also happy to see that many of the pieces included connection points that weren't used in the default models. So reuse might not be as high a priority at Lego as it used to be, but its still considered a virtue.
While I'd be the first to agree that Tribes is one of the greatest games every made, I question how much fun 99% of the maps would be with 4-7 players.
And as someone else mentioned here, it is not easy to run under Linux.
You're wrong.
Just because grads happen to give some significance to powers of ten doesn't automatically make them metric. They're far too arbitrary to enter the league of extraordinary units that is the SI.
Why use "sols" which are, of course, highly variable, when we already have the metric unit "second"? Yes, seconds are rather arbitrary, but at least they're rigorously defined (by the decay of Cesium-133).
<aside>
I'd like to take this opportunity to propose changing the specification of a "second": one of the design goals (possibly back-specified) of the metric system is the ease of calculating the base units at home. So, in keeping with the SI obsession with water, I propose that the base unit of time be the length of time it takes for 1 litre of water to reach 100 Centigrade with the application of 1 newton of energy, or something like that...
</aside>
The problem with every system of proposed time is that it will either be inconvenient for days or years (as the Julian calendar is now), if nothing else. So I think our best bet is to change the Earth's orbit so revolutions are a round number. Actually, if the orbit was held at a fixed duration, then "sol" would be just fine as a unit.
Set your base to accomodate pi?
They're called radians. They're the metric equivalent of degrees. They make geometry easy. Therefore our geometric overlords discourage their use.
They could be used for time, the base unit ("one-pi radian") would be half a revolution, or two Quarters. Of course all systems of time based on natural phenomena will have a problem with either years or days because they just don't add up. Therefore we need to change the Earth's orbit.
There are only two possible explanations for this phenomenon:
I'd say either one strongly implies that aliens have been seriously messing with us before the advent of civilization. There are certainly many mythological cosmologies that feature humans arriving from somewhere else -- are there any that could be taken to imply a change in the Earth's orbit?
Funny, I'd swear that wasn't there last night...