Hell, my eyes have been slowly irradiated into mush from decades of CRT usage, so I assume I'll be able to hold that phone two inches from my face without seeing any pixels.
Getting the code to work right is not the tough part. Hell, making the code scalable to millions of users isn't even the tough part. Getting enough people to use your social network so that you reach the critical mass Facebook has is the tough part.
Re:Gartner is shilling
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If XP is still supported, and it's doing the job well for you... why switch?
The problem is, at 9 years old, XP won't be supported for very much longer. Any responsible company should be looking at a migration plan, identifying legacy apps that need to be updated, and starting up projects to do so. Companies have a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to figure this stuff out and then end up being forced to run old out of support software because they didn't give sufficient time or resources to updating their legacy internal apps that won't work right on the new platform. This is how we end up with so many companies still using IE6.
The amount is obviously ridiculous, but it's been pretty obvious for years now that the only people who use limewire are people who are pirating music and people who are distributing viruses in order to create botnets using the computers of people who are pirating music. Limewire basically makes money from other peoples' desire to do something that the courts have repeatedly ruled is illegal, and unless they have some really amazing lawyers they're probably going to lose. They won't pay $1.5 trillion of course, but the RIAA doesn't really want the money, they want to shut down the service (and the company) for good, or at least turn it into a pathetic music industry puppet like Napster became after it lost its court cases.
Of course, Limewire basically makes its money by loading up its users' computers with spyware and other assorted nastiness, so it's not like it would be a huge loss to see them go away.
That's why Hitler and Stalin were so so gay for each other.
I thought it was their mutual love of mustaches.
Indeed. In fact, the real reason Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 was because he could no longer contain his jealousy over Stalin's thick luxurious mustache which was so much nicer than his own. If only Rogaine had been available millions of lives could have been saved.
If you drink beer for the taste, rather than to get drunk, then you will not enjoy really high alcohol beers at all. Good beer has a lot of complex and subtle flavors in it, and at a certain point the taste of the alcohol itself starts to overwhelm all of them. IPAs are generally in the 7-9% range, and in my experience that's about as high as you can go before you really start to taste the alcohol itself.
On the other hand, the fact that the essentially tasteless but cheap macrobrews are so popular leads me to believe that the market for people who drink beer purely to get drunk is large enough to make money from this.
It's something you do, like touching your nose or scratching your head, while playing poker that lets other people know what kind of hand you have and whether or not you're bluffing. Please try to keep up.
I don't think that was his point at all. His point was that "linked open data" would be the next big thing on the web. Basically multiple related datasets all linked to each other to make things like research much easier. In other words, he thinks the next evolution of the web will be what everyone thought would just naturally happen when the concept of hyperlinks was first adapted to the Internet, but turned out to be much harder than anticipated: the ability to easily find data related to whatever dataset you were looking at.
This is essentially an extension of Berners-Lee's "Semantic Web" concept. First, the Semantic Web comes along and somehow enables an automated way to figure out what documents on the web are "about", presumably through something more sophisticated than the much-abused meta keywords of yore. Once you can tell what every individual page is about, you can use this linked open data concept to link all of the different pages that are about related things. Presumably, you could eventually link everything to everything else in a giant mesh sorted by topic. This is different from the search engine-based topology we have now wherein multiple pages get linked to from a search engine, but are usually not in any way linked to each other.
It's all a very interesting concept but seems much harder than Berners-Lee might think to actually implement. Our ability to computationally glean the topics covered by any given data set is primitive at best, and even if we could figure out how to do that reliably you'd still have the same problems we've had with every other similar system: Lack of cooperation between entities, entities trying to game the system to their own ends, and good old fashioned vandalism. I'd like to think that eventually something like this could exist, because it would basically bring into being the vision of what the web could become when it was first introduced. Right now it's little more than an abstract idea, though.
The necessary and proper clause just says they get to make laws deemed necessary to carry out their various duties as outlined in the Constitution. Every Congressional bill is implicitly backed by the necessary and proper clause because it's the only thing that gives them the ability to pass laws at all. However, in order to be Constitutional the law they pass has to be necessary and proper to carry out one of their enumerated Constitutional powers. Regulating interstate commerce is one of their enumerated powers, and happens to be one that's vague enough that you could claim all sorts of things are necessary and proper for carrying it out.
So, a law being backed by the interstate commerce clause means that the Congress has deemed that law "necessary and proper" for carrying out their duty to "regulate interstate commerce".
Apparently their main gripes centered around not being able to easily scribble notes in the margins. While I personally don't like writing on my textbooks, my experience buying used books tells me most students apparently do. So, if they want to be able to reach the textbook market they're going to have to come up with a way to easily write all over the pages of whatever book is being read.
This seems likely, which of course has the very desirable (for Google) effect of locking website owners into Google Analytics. Of course, if you're a website owner who wants to run some other stats package, this is very bad news.
OSI was purely a product of the Internet boom. It was designed to "mainstream" Open Source by encouraging businesses to open source their stuff. At a time when businesses were scrambling to make sense of this whole Internet thing, the OSI came along and tried to convince them that open source was a big part of embracing the Internet. To do this, they basically bent the definition of what "open source" was so they could get businesses who were highly suspicious of it on board. Any business that gave even lip service to open source was basically allowed to carry the label in the name of expanding the movement, even if their licenses amounted to little more than "you can look at some of the source, but only between 2-3pm on alternating Thursdays when the moon is full, and you can't copy any of it." That's an exaggeration of course, but it seems clear now that the over-eagerness to get businesses on board and the lengths that were taken to get them on board seriously watered down both the definition and the spirit of what open source is supposed to be.
While Bruce Perens has managed to spin all of this into a lucrative career, and Eric S. Raymond managed to famously become a temporary Internet paper millionaire before his big mouth made him a pariah to the movement, the OSI's eagerness to shape (some would say distort) open source in order to appease businesses has been a major point of friction between them and the FSF. While many businesses today use open source, and some even contribute to it, it seems for the most part the fruit of OSI's labor is that many businesses learned how to use open source software to reduce their own development and/or licensing costs while giving nothing back to the community that produced it.
So yes, from the perspective of many of the businesses, it was a big sham meant to give them an "open source stamp of approval" while remaining largely closed source and proprietary. The OSI, however, ignored that in the name of "spreading the movement", which happened to work out well for their own personal finances (if only temporarily, in Raymond's case).
The problem is not with kludges themselves, but with the fact that IT management does not stress documentation and proper change control procedures enough. If a kludge works, is documented, was implemented with proper change controls, and can be repeated, is it really a kludge anymore? IT has to screw around with stuff to make it work, that's what they (we) get paid for. If all we ever had to do was click on an install button and have everything work perfectly from there, what would be the purpose of an IT department at all? Off-the-shelf software and hardware can never be made to work perfectly for everyone's requirements. IT folks are paid to get non-unique components to work for unique requirements.
The problem is not with these fixes, it's that nobody ever documents what they did, and documentation is not readily available when needed. So, these kludges become tribal knowledge, and people only know about them because they were around when they were implemented or they've heard stories. When this happens, these wacky fixes can come back and bite you in the ass later when something mysteriously crashes and no one can get it to work like it did because nobody remembers what was done to make it work before. As people come and go, and institutional knowledge of older systems slowly erodes, we end up in a situation where everyone thinks the current system is crap, nobody knows why it was built that way, and everyone figures the only way out is to nuke the site from orbit and start over. The trick is keeping it from getting to that point.
Of course, nobody likes jumping through all these hoops like filing change control requests or writing (and especially maintaining!) documentation, so it gets dropped. IT management is more worried about getting things done quickly than documenting things properly, so there's no incentive for anyone to do any of it. Before long, you get a mass of crap that some people know parts of, but nobody knows all of, and nobody knows how or where to get information about any of it except by knowing that John Geek is the "network guru" and Jane Nerd is the "linux guru".
We will never get hardware and software that works together exactly the way we want them to. We will always have to tweak things to get them to work right for us. Citing lack of budgets or bug-ridden software may be perfectly valid, but those problems are never really going to be solved. Having our own house in order does not mean fixing all the bugs or being able to refresh our technology every 6 months. Having our own house in order means we know exactly what we did to make each system work right, we can repeat what we did, and everyone knows how to find information on what we did and why.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
It was a good show, and the ending was fitting, but it's still frustrating for the creators to basically say that all of the mysteries never really mattered.
I think this is what really angered me about how the show ended. These people gave us all these mysteries, and repeatedly promised us there would be an explanation, and at the end the explanation was "the mysteries don't matter." Who are they to tell me what matters and what doesn't? They told me these things would be explained, and they weren't. They kept us watching for years on the promise that things would be made clear, and at the end they weren't. They created a brand new mystery in the penultimate season (the sideways universe) and solved that one, and dismissed everything else as "unimportant".
Basically the whole finale was "we can't figure out how to wrap all this stuff up, so we're going to try and convince you that none of it is important anyway so you won't hate us." Didn't work for me.
These days with RAM being so cheap, your swap space is basically a warning that things are going terribly wrong. You want your swap on slow storage because slow storage is cheap and your swap should see very few writes under normal operation. If your machine starts hitting swap like crazy, you'll know immediately because your performance will go straight down the crapper as it feverishly tries to write to slow storage. This is your cue to figure out what's wrong and fix it ASAP so your machine will stop thrashing.
Re:Should I watch it?
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I have never seen a single episode, it the whole series worth watching, now that it is over?
In a word, no. The show barely made sense watching it over the past 6 years as it was released. We continually got some hints that things might make sense eventually, but they never did. Inconsistencies from vaguely remembered episodes of 2 or 3 years ago kept popping up and giving this little feeling in the back of one's mind that the writers had no idea what they were doing. I suspect if you watched it all back to back it would make even less sense because the inconsistencies and utter nonsense would be that much more obvious.
I watched it from beginning to end, but I have absolutely no desire to watch it again, and I certainly won't be wasting money on the DVDs.
I remember the producers of Lost saying at some point either during or at the end of the first season that the mysteries of the island would all end up being explainable scientifically. Not necessarily pure science, but at least the sort of semi-plausible science-like stuff most sci-fi is built on. For most of the first two or three seasons they were flailing around, but for the most part it still seemed there could be a plausible explanation for everything. The introduction of Faraday and all of his scientific mumbo jumbo lent credence to that idea.
Then, over the past two seasons, the show took a sharp turn into religious territory and it became increasingly obvious they were going to take the easy way out and make it all into some ridiculous religious/spiritual allegory of some kind, albeit one so confused that no one would ever be able to make any real sense out of it. It reminded me of the Matrix, where the first movie was more sci-fi and the second and third were all a bunch of confused pseudo-religious nonsense.
I was primarily disappointed with their complete abandonment of any attempt to explain anything scientifically, and instead lean on a literal Deus Ex Machina by making the whole thing into a spiritual "God (or some other spiritual entity) did it". That sort of thing has been done to death. Hell, Battlestar Galactica was explicitly a religious allegory from the very beginning, and even it explained more stuff pseudo-scientifically than Lost did. Regardless of what they may say now, I think the Lost creators started out with a show that would have been much more scientifically based, but ended up having to extend it beyond what they thought they would. After wandering in the wilderness for much of seasons 2 through 4, they were backed into a corner and took the easy way out by waving the magic religion wand to "explain" everything away.
Holy false dichotomy, Batman! The choice is not, nor has it ever been, between pure unregulated capitalism and Soviet-style communism. What China has now is basically a political oligarchy that controls the people with an iron fist while allowing corporations to practice almost completely unrestricted capitalism.
The Gilded Age, in which a small group of elites grew enormously rich and powerful on the backs of people who remained incredibly poor, and the multiple market crashes and panics that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, taught us that unrestrained capitalism is not a sustainable economic model. Since then, we've struggled to find the right level of regulation that will encourage stability and maintain a robust middle class while enabling growth. Different people have different theories on how much and what type regulation is the most effective, but the idea that unrestrained capitalism is the way to go takes an almost willful ignorance of history.
This is unregulated capitalism in action. China is like the US or Britain during the height of the Industrial Revolution. Demand for manufactured product from China has skyrocketed over the past couple of decades, and the Chinese have a seemingly unending supply of unskilled labor to do the work. Companies can work employees to death with no particular worries, since there are lots of people to replace those workers with and the government doesn't seem to care. Many of the worst abuses of 19th century Western labor are present today in China.
Hopefully someday the Chinese government will enact (and enforce!) the kind of health and safety regulations that put an end to this sort of thing in the Western world (for the most part), but it will take sustained pressure both from inside and outside the country to get it done. Unfortunately, the Chinese government ruthlessly puts down dissent internally, and the external forces with the power to stop it are too busy counting their profits to care about it. Consumer pressure could play a big role in forcing change, but most people seem too enamored with their cheap Chinese-made crap to care about the people who make it.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but until the Chinese government can be persuaded to regulate its industries we'll continue to see stories of this nature (the ones that aren't suppressed, anyway).
I just assumed you meant that humanity would at some point finally give up our weapons and beat our swords into plowshares...then we would beat each other to death with those plowshares.
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Hell, my eyes have been slowly irradiated into mush from decades of CRT usage, so I assume I'll be able to hold that phone two inches from my face without seeing any pixels.
Hell, with modern drones they can even precision bomb us from those things! I bet you won't be cheating on your taxes this year!
You're thinking of the wrong scumbag. Mark Pinkus, CEO of Zynga (FarmVille and other annoying Facebook games) said that.
They can't afford decent website designers?
Getting the code to work right is not the tough part. Hell, making the code scalable to millions of users isn't even the tough part. Getting enough people to use your social network so that you reach the critical mass Facebook has is the tough part.
If XP is still supported, and it's doing the job well for you... why switch?
The problem is, at 9 years old, XP won't be supported for very much longer. Any responsible company should be looking at a migration plan, identifying legacy apps that need to be updated, and starting up projects to do so. Companies have a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to figure this stuff out and then end up being forced to run old out of support software because they didn't give sufficient time or resources to updating their legacy internal apps that won't work right on the new platform. This is how we end up with so many companies still using IE6.
The amount is obviously ridiculous, but it's been pretty obvious for years now that the only people who use limewire are people who are pirating music and people who are distributing viruses in order to create botnets using the computers of people who are pirating music. Limewire basically makes money from other peoples' desire to do something that the courts have repeatedly ruled is illegal, and unless they have some really amazing lawyers they're probably going to lose. They won't pay $1.5 trillion of course, but the RIAA doesn't really want the money, they want to shut down the service (and the company) for good, or at least turn it into a pathetic music industry puppet like Napster became after it lost its court cases.
Of course, Limewire basically makes its money by loading up its users' computers with spyware and other assorted nastiness, so it's not like it would be a huge loss to see them go away.
That's why Hitler and Stalin were so so gay for each other.
I thought it was their mutual love of mustaches.
Indeed. In fact, the real reason Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 was because he could no longer contain his jealousy over Stalin's thick luxurious mustache which was so much nicer than his own. If only Rogaine had been available millions of lives could have been saved.
Actually he was created in 1987 for the Tracey Ullman Show, which makes this choice just that much more ridiculous.
If you drink beer for the taste, rather than to get drunk, then you will not enjoy really high alcohol beers at all. Good beer has a lot of complex and subtle flavors in it, and at a certain point the taste of the alcohol itself starts to overwhelm all of them. IPAs are generally in the 7-9% range, and in my experience that's about as high as you can go before you really start to taste the alcohol itself.
On the other hand, the fact that the essentially tasteless but cheap macrobrews are so popular leads me to believe that the market for people who drink beer purely to get drunk is large enough to make money from this.
It's something you do, like touching your nose or scratching your head, while playing poker that lets other people know what kind of hand you have and whether or not you're bluffing. Please try to keep up.
I don't think that was his point at all. His point was that "linked open data" would be the next big thing on the web. Basically multiple related datasets all linked to each other to make things like research much easier. In other words, he thinks the next evolution of the web will be what everyone thought would just naturally happen when the concept of hyperlinks was first adapted to the Internet, but turned out to be much harder than anticipated: the ability to easily find data related to whatever dataset you were looking at.
This is essentially an extension of Berners-Lee's "Semantic Web" concept. First, the Semantic Web comes along and somehow enables an automated way to figure out what documents on the web are "about", presumably through something more sophisticated than the much-abused meta keywords of yore. Once you can tell what every individual page is about, you can use this linked open data concept to link all of the different pages that are about related things. Presumably, you could eventually link everything to everything else in a giant mesh sorted by topic. This is different from the search engine-based topology we have now wherein multiple pages get linked to from a search engine, but are usually not in any way linked to each other.
It's all a very interesting concept but seems much harder than Berners-Lee might think to actually implement. Our ability to computationally glean the topics covered by any given data set is primitive at best, and even if we could figure out how to do that reliably you'd still have the same problems we've had with every other similar system: Lack of cooperation between entities, entities trying to game the system to their own ends, and good old fashioned vandalism. I'd like to think that eventually something like this could exist, because it would basically bring into being the vision of what the web could become when it was first introduced. Right now it's little more than an abstract idea, though.
The necessary and proper clause just says they get to make laws deemed necessary to carry out their various duties as outlined in the Constitution. Every Congressional bill is implicitly backed by the necessary and proper clause because it's the only thing that gives them the ability to pass laws at all. However, in order to be Constitutional the law they pass has to be necessary and proper to carry out one of their enumerated Constitutional powers. Regulating interstate commerce is one of their enumerated powers, and happens to be one that's vague enough that you could claim all sorts of things are necessary and proper for carrying it out.
So, a law being backed by the interstate commerce clause means that the Congress has deemed that law "necessary and proper" for carrying out their duty to "regulate interstate commerce".
Apparently their main gripes centered around not being able to easily scribble notes in the margins. While I personally don't like writing on my textbooks, my experience buying used books tells me most students apparently do. So, if they want to be able to reach the textbook market they're going to have to come up with a way to easily write all over the pages of whatever book is being read.
This seems likely, which of course has the very desirable (for Google) effect of locking website owners into Google Analytics. Of course, if you're a website owner who wants to run some other stats package, this is very bad news.
OSI was purely a product of the Internet boom. It was designed to "mainstream" Open Source by encouraging businesses to open source their stuff. At a time when businesses were scrambling to make sense of this whole Internet thing, the OSI came along and tried to convince them that open source was a big part of embracing the Internet. To do this, they basically bent the definition of what "open source" was so they could get businesses who were highly suspicious of it on board. Any business that gave even lip service to open source was basically allowed to carry the label in the name of expanding the movement, even if their licenses amounted to little more than "you can look at some of the source, but only between 2-3pm on alternating Thursdays when the moon is full, and you can't copy any of it." That's an exaggeration of course, but it seems clear now that the over-eagerness to get businesses on board and the lengths that were taken to get them on board seriously watered down both the definition and the spirit of what open source is supposed to be.
While Bruce Perens has managed to spin all of this into a lucrative career, and Eric S. Raymond managed to famously become a temporary Internet paper millionaire before his big mouth made him a pariah to the movement, the OSI's eagerness to shape (some would say distort) open source in order to appease businesses has been a major point of friction between them and the FSF. While many businesses today use open source, and some even contribute to it, it seems for the most part the fruit of OSI's labor is that many businesses learned how to use open source software to reduce their own development and/or licensing costs while giving nothing back to the community that produced it.
So yes, from the perspective of many of the businesses, it was a big sham meant to give them an "open source stamp of approval" while remaining largely closed source and proprietary. The OSI, however, ignored that in the name of "spreading the movement", which happened to work out well for their own personal finances (if only temporarily, in Raymond's case).
The problem is not with kludges themselves, but with the fact that IT management does not stress documentation and proper change control procedures enough. If a kludge works, is documented, was implemented with proper change controls, and can be repeated, is it really a kludge anymore? IT has to screw around with stuff to make it work, that's what they (we) get paid for. If all we ever had to do was click on an install button and have everything work perfectly from there, what would be the purpose of an IT department at all? Off-the-shelf software and hardware can never be made to work perfectly for everyone's requirements. IT folks are paid to get non-unique components to work for unique requirements.
The problem is not with these fixes, it's that nobody ever documents what they did, and documentation is not readily available when needed. So, these kludges become tribal knowledge, and people only know about them because they were around when they were implemented or they've heard stories. When this happens, these wacky fixes can come back and bite you in the ass later when something mysteriously crashes and no one can get it to work like it did because nobody remembers what was done to make it work before. As people come and go, and institutional knowledge of older systems slowly erodes, we end up in a situation where everyone thinks the current system is crap, nobody knows why it was built that way, and everyone figures the only way out is to nuke the site from orbit and start over. The trick is keeping it from getting to that point.
Of course, nobody likes jumping through all these hoops like filing change control requests or writing (and especially maintaining!) documentation, so it gets dropped. IT management is more worried about getting things done quickly than documenting things properly, so there's no incentive for anyone to do any of it. Before long, you get a mass of crap that some people know parts of, but nobody knows all of, and nobody knows how or where to get information about any of it except by knowing that John Geek is the "network guru" and Jane Nerd is the "linux guru".
We will never get hardware and software that works together exactly the way we want them to. We will always have to tweak things to get them to work right for us. Citing lack of budgets or bug-ridden software may be perfectly valid, but those problems are never really going to be solved. Having our own house in order does not mean fixing all the bugs or being able to refresh our technology every 6 months. Having our own house in order means we know exactly what we did to make each system work right, we can repeat what we did, and everyone knows how to find information on what we did and why.
It was a good show, and the ending was fitting, but it's still frustrating for the creators to basically say that all of the mysteries never really mattered.
I think this is what really angered me about how the show ended. These people gave us all these mysteries, and repeatedly promised us there would be an explanation, and at the end the explanation was "the mysteries don't matter." Who are they to tell me what matters and what doesn't? They told me these things would be explained, and they weren't. They kept us watching for years on the promise that things would be made clear, and at the end they weren't. They created a brand new mystery in the penultimate season (the sideways universe) and solved that one, and dismissed everything else as "unimportant".
Basically the whole finale was "we can't figure out how to wrap all this stuff up, so we're going to try and convince you that none of it is important anyway so you won't hate us." Didn't work for me.
These days with RAM being so cheap, your swap space is basically a warning that things are going terribly wrong. You want your swap on slow storage because slow storage is cheap and your swap should see very few writes under normal operation. If your machine starts hitting swap like crazy, you'll know immediately because your performance will go straight down the crapper as it feverishly tries to write to slow storage. This is your cue to figure out what's wrong and fix it ASAP so your machine will stop thrashing.
I have never seen a single episode, it the whole series worth watching, now that it is over?
In a word, no. The show barely made sense watching it over the past 6 years as it was released. We continually got some hints that things might make sense eventually, but they never did. Inconsistencies from vaguely remembered episodes of 2 or 3 years ago kept popping up and giving this little feeling in the back of one's mind that the writers had no idea what they were doing. I suspect if you watched it all back to back it would make even less sense because the inconsistencies and utter nonsense would be that much more obvious.
I watched it from beginning to end, but I have absolutely no desire to watch it again, and I certainly won't be wasting money on the DVDs.
I remember the producers of Lost saying at some point either during or at the end of the first season that the mysteries of the island would all end up being explainable scientifically. Not necessarily pure science, but at least the sort of semi-plausible science-like stuff most sci-fi is built on. For most of the first two or three seasons they were flailing around, but for the most part it still seemed there could be a plausible explanation for everything. The introduction of Faraday and all of his scientific mumbo jumbo lent credence to that idea.
Then, over the past two seasons, the show took a sharp turn into religious territory and it became increasingly obvious they were going to take the easy way out and make it all into some ridiculous religious/spiritual allegory of some kind, albeit one so confused that no one would ever be able to make any real sense out of it. It reminded me of the Matrix, where the first movie was more sci-fi and the second and third were all a bunch of confused pseudo-religious nonsense.
I was primarily disappointed with their complete abandonment of any attempt to explain anything scientifically, and instead lean on a literal Deus Ex Machina by making the whole thing into a spiritual "God (or some other spiritual entity) did it". That sort of thing has been done to death. Hell, Battlestar Galactica was explicitly a religious allegory from the very beginning, and even it explained more stuff pseudo-scientifically than Lost did. Regardless of what they may say now, I think the Lost creators started out with a show that would have been much more scientifically based, but ended up having to extend it beyond what they thought they would. After wandering in the wilderness for much of seasons 2 through 4, they were backed into a corner and took the easy way out by waving the magic religion wand to "explain" everything away.
The blame on the users is in the very next sentence of my post (about people too enamored with their cheap Chinese-made crap to care).
Holy false dichotomy, Batman! The choice is not, nor has it ever been, between pure unregulated capitalism and Soviet-style communism. What China has now is basically a political oligarchy that controls the people with an iron fist while allowing corporations to practice almost completely unrestricted capitalism.
The Gilded Age, in which a small group of elites grew enormously rich and powerful on the backs of people who remained incredibly poor, and the multiple market crashes and panics that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, taught us that unrestrained capitalism is not a sustainable economic model. Since then, we've struggled to find the right level of regulation that will encourage stability and maintain a robust middle class while enabling growth. Different people have different theories on how much and what type regulation is the most effective, but the idea that unrestrained capitalism is the way to go takes an almost willful ignorance of history.
This is unregulated capitalism in action. China is like the US or Britain during the height of the Industrial Revolution. Demand for manufactured product from China has skyrocketed over the past couple of decades, and the Chinese have a seemingly unending supply of unskilled labor to do the work. Companies can work employees to death with no particular worries, since there are lots of people to replace those workers with and the government doesn't seem to care. Many of the worst abuses of 19th century Western labor are present today in China.
Hopefully someday the Chinese government will enact (and enforce!) the kind of health and safety regulations that put an end to this sort of thing in the Western world (for the most part), but it will take sustained pressure both from inside and outside the country to get it done. Unfortunately, the Chinese government ruthlessly puts down dissent internally, and the external forces with the power to stop it are too busy counting their profits to care about it. Consumer pressure could play a big role in forcing change, but most people seem too enamored with their cheap Chinese-made crap to care about the people who make it.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but until the Chinese government can be persuaded to regulate its industries we'll continue to see stories of this nature (the ones that aren't suppressed, anyway).
I just assumed you meant that humanity would at some point finally give up our weapons and beat our swords into plowshares...then we would beat each other to death with those plowshares.