Think about all the poor platforms that just couldn't make it. And think of all the poor companies that had to fold cause their platform didn't make it. It's actually kinda sad sniffle, sniffle
It's somewhat annoying we only have one representative for all of North America on ICANN. ICANN needs to be a truly international organization, but it needs to be representative of people. Its constituents are users of the Internet, i.e. everyone. So its leadership should be elected by everyone.
We don't let corporations or activist organizations or unions appoint representatives to national legistlatures just because they have some interest in policymaking. Why should ICANN, the de facto government of the Internet, be any different.
In any case, it doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to read the above statement from the US Constitution and see that Orrin Hatch's proposal is unconstitutional, since it deprives the artist of exclusive rights.
I don't think so. What about fair use? That clearly limits the rights of artists. Furthermore, the Constituion authorizes copyright protection. It doesn't require it. Congress could abolish copyright if it so chose. The copyright clause is listed among those things which "Congress shall have the power to:" in Article 2.
Furthermore, under modern interpertations of the Constitution, Congress can regulate the music business in any manner it wants under the commerce clause. (I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, I'm just saying it's the Supreme Court's interpertation of said clause from 1930-2001, whith minimal exceptions.)
Ah, ha! But how much software is niche, internal, special purpose? These are the programmers that will ALWAYS obtain 5-6 figure salaries, as open source generally serves the "general" software market (web/mail/ftp servers, OS's like Linux, etc..) The real money is often in support and admin anyway, which Open Source can't solve -- you need man-hours instead.
Don't remember where I read it, but about 85% of software is developed for in-house projects. It doesn't matter if you have IP protection in these cases. Stuff that's useful to everybody will get generated for free. Once you factor in support - from helpdesk to high-priced consultants - only a miniscule fraction of IT wages come from developing closed proprietary projects. The original poster would have you believe that Apache is screwing over all those webserver admins and so forth.
1) Start giving money to the EFF, the EPIC, the FSF, et al. very fast.
2) There are people who are supposed to condemn these kind of statements - they're called Congress. They're supposed to launch investigations into this kind of shit. If nothing else, they're supposed to know that millions of people will be royally pissed off if they vote for anti-Open Source legistlation. Here are all the email addresses for the Senate Tech Committee:
Some of the stuff we're talking about isn't very high-tech. What's going to stop Jurgen Q Publik from buying blank CDRs by the hundred from a mail order company in Hong Kong? I mean, we're talking about blank media here. If you tax it enough people will circumvent the taxes. I'll invest in pricewatch2.co.hk as soon as it's in business.
Proof? Canada taxes the shit of cigarettes, more than the US. 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border, so smokers come south every now and then and take quite a few cartons of cigarettes back. There's a small yet lucrative undergound industry of smuggling cigarettes across the border around here. Just think globalization...
I don't think anyone agrees that patents should be completely abolished
Some people would disagree.
Either way, the real issue is the predatory practice. I patent something, wait until everybody else uses or develops the same technology and then I slap them with an infringement lawsuit.
This is pretty much blackmail, because it's not like the defendants can change the technology. They invested an awful lot of money in a technology they can't use anymore and they'll have to pay through the nose in 'royalties' to the so-called innovator.
This may not be the case here, but there are way too many examples. Rambus allowed SDRAM to become a memory standard and then decided it had a patent on it. AltaVista has just discovered it owns the very concept of a search engine. BT has decided after decades that it invented hyperlinks and is entitled to compensation from everybody. Gaming the system has gotten out of hand. Anytime some company sues the entire industry there's something suspicious up.
If you take a look at Barbarians led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside (ISBN: 0805057552), which is now a couple years old, you'll see the same thing. It's a great book about Microsoft written by one of their of their former top coders. It explains how Windows managed to be as poor as it is - Gates constantly changes his demands for what Windows should be, there's no long-term plan, ans so forth. The book does lose a lot of detail around the time the antitrust case begins because the author leaves MS at that time but its description of Microsoft up to 1997 is a great read.
Same story, different take. Parts of it are hillarious, others are downright scary.
Extrapolate this to employment. We really could end up with a genetic underclass. If I have bad genes, I can't get a decent job because I'm an employment/inusrance risk, and then I live in a miserable existence. I can only reproduce with similarly disposed individuals, and then I end up with kids who are even more likely to be victims of discrimination. Downward spiral here....
These people won't die off, but they'll just be the scum of the earth.
The IDSA truly is evil. No other entertainment industry has ever been this chicken. They're going overboard to avoid shadow regulations which would most definitely be unconstitutional.
You can find R-rated movies advertised on TV and in publications outside the demographics thresholds they've set. You can find Eminem songs on MTV. This is taking "protection of children" to an absurd extreme, especially in light of the total lack of objective connection between video games and violence.
The gaming industry will end up like Hollywood. If your masterpiece is likely to get an NC-17 rating you can't make it unless you're willing to gut it because no one will touch NC-17 films. Eyes Wide Shut, Natural Born Killers, and many other films get hacked to death to get an R rating. Our film industry has lost the ability to make anything controversial because no distributor will touch NC-17 material. Now gaming, after a youthful period of great creativity, is headed down the same path, only even faster. Hope you like Mario, because he's all you're ever gonna see again.
1. BT discovered that they had a patent on hyperlinks only after they were in wide use.
2. Altavista has just determined that it has a patent that covers all types of searching.
3. Nintendo, Atari (or whoever owns their assets) and other abandonware makers have all tried to make a fairly lucrative business out of extorting abandonware distributors.
The above-mentioned examples are reactive exploitations of the very broken intellectual property system. These guys are just being proactive about exploiting the system.
Heck, if you tried to patent "IP squatting" as a business model, there would far too much prior art to get the patent approved.
Firstly, we need to to step up manned operations abroad, especially in known trouble spots. We'll need to recruit more people to do this, which means increasing budgets.
This might not work. How do you infiltrate a terrorist organization made up of people who are relatives? How do you infiltrate a terrorist organization in a country where most of the residents are at least somewhat sympathetic to the groups goals? Bear in mind that HUMINT has a pretty shitty track record. Investing in HUMINT is like investing in a dotcom - you may be wasting your money or you might get a huge payoff. Getting Congress to approve large cash payouts to shifty characters could be awfully difficult, especially in light of the Iran-Contra debacle not too long ago.
And in the event that all of this fails, we're going to need the much-maligned national missile defence folks. When you don't know in advance what's coming, you have to be able to protect yourselves! It's no different from soldiers wearing a bulletproof jacket, and in these times when nuclear proliferation is a fact of life, America needs that jacket.
Ouch! Head hurts! NMD = very stupid.
Why would anyone launch a missile at the US when much better delivery systems are available? The World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma federal building bombing, and so forth all involved very sophisticated car bombs. The USS Cole was hit by another boat, not a missile. There is no reason why any terrorist would use a missile as a delivery system - they're expensive, and it appears sneaking up on your target works just fine.
Some may say, well, just because a missile defense would not protect us against some attacks isn't a reason to build it. Implicit within this claim is a couple things:
1) Terrorists are fairly smart, they can build high-yield conventional weapons and possibly NBCs.
2) Terrorists are extremely stupid, if we build a missile defense system they will abadon in rental trucks and boats as delivery systems and switch to ballistic missiles.
I pray for the day MS windows becomes subscription only and veryfiable via the internet:-)
It's already here. According to a presentation about Whistler I saw you will have to register copies of new MS OSes with Microsoft or they will stop working within x days. Each CD key will be allowed exactly one usage. Microsoft is really serious about making people who own more than one computer pay for more than one copy of windows. I don't think people will put up with being forced to buy Windows and Office again every time they replace their computer (or the HD goes crap)for very long.
Furthermore, with sub-$500 machines, removing the cost of MS software becomes significant awfully fast. The price difference between a Linux and Windows box could be substantial enough to entice bargain hunters to use Linux, if only we could actually make it useable.
Though seems unlikely that an unknown person might find the counterexample, it's a bad idea to dismiss it as "impossible" or "funny", because one day, in some mathematical field or another, it'll happen.
It has happened before, and could happen again. Higher mathematics is a fascinating field - every now and then you end up with interesting character. Erdos was a crazy vagabond but he is one the most prolific and insightful mathematicians of modern times. Ramajun (sp?) was an Indian college dropout who made made significant contributions in analysis with little formal training in math. He wasn't big on proof, and some of his 'thereoms' were just stated as truths, and not rigorously justified (or dejustified) until after his death.
RSA's biggest fear just might be some modern day Ramajun. The big 'R' should be understandably apprehensive whenever some guy off the street emails and says he's broken RSA - because it just could be true.
I know this is an old hat, but I think we won't see Linux on desktops anytime soon.
I saw a demo of the user interface for MS Whistler last night. From Joe User's perspective, it's at least a decade ahead of GNOME or KDE. There's no way we're gonna see Linux on user desktops anytime soon, with Apple and MS going all out here. Add in a couple million dollars of research on making the thing intuitive (even if all the research is crap) and you've got a tough cookie to crack. Whistler finally allows remote login, just like Unixes have decades, but it sure seems neat to non-geeks that you can access your computer from home.
That said, geeks will never want to use this system. It has hundreds of wizards, IE 6 has a dancing puppy dog who will "fetch" your searches, etc. MS has made their consumer OS so hard for high-end users to work with that any geek who runs Win9x now will run away screaming in terror, possibly to Linux (but more likely to Win2K).
"Prior Art" depends not only on the existence of the "art", but on attempts to patent it.
Utter nonsense. The USPTO guide makes reference to examples of things that are non-patentable in a attempt to explain the obviousness and prior art standards. Examples used in a brochure from a few use back:
-You can't patent a new coffee cup handle, even if it's ergonmically designed. Coffee cup handles haven't been patented, nor has any sane person tried to patent them, but they still constitute prior art.
-You can't patent a widely used or distributed idea, regardless of whether the initial innovator asked for a patent. I can't patent the compiler because although the idea is pretty intriguing, it's in such wide use. The fact that the original innovator failed to apply for a patent has no effect.
A related trend is setting "patent traps". You wait until a technology is considered an open standard or public domain before you bring out your dubious patent. Then you claim that everyone who used this previously free technology owes you whatever royalty you see fit to charge. BT pulled the same stunt with the hyperlink patent. Amazon did the same with 1-click shopping.
Unlike trademarks, which expire if not enforced, patents can left lying around, waiting for an unspecting society to "violate" them. It would seem that if you have a universally appicable idea, or see one that hasn't been patented, you should:
1) Obtain a patent
2) Wait 3-10 years until everyone uses it
3) Extort money from all the supposed infringers
This is a much more profitable business model than licensing your patent from the outset. Somebody needs to stop it. Uneforced patents should expire immediately. The duration of patents of patents and copyrights must be dramatically reduced. This has just gone too far.
It's pretty sad to see all the "the Holy Corporation is entitled to all the money in the world because it's so fucking special and the Free Market isn't just a means to an end, it is intrinsically and absolutely good."
Are these abstract principles of property so absolute that we can't make any exceptions, even in the hardest of cases? Are your hearts really that hard? Is helping people really evil? When a woman with AIDS dies because her husband who she was forced to marry transmits the disease to her and she can't get any treatment, is it still wrong to make an exception?
I'm most definitely not religous, but a brief bible passage, which I read many years ago, came to mind:
If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be.
I know, helping others is utopian socialism, the end of property rights, the ultimate wrong, etc.. I know that if we don't let drug companies have all the profits from government funded research, they won't accept government funded research anymore, and we'll all be plummeted back into the dark ages. Of course the free market accurately models the behaviors of multinational pharmeceuticals, I can go start one with the money in my pocket tommmorrow...
Let's remember that all this intellectual property is actually a grant from the government. It's a giant social construct. It has it limits. Get off your pedestal, develop a heart, and live in the real world.
The president's party always loses seats in both houses of Congress in midterm elections. Poli Sci types call it the "Iron Law" because it has only 2 exceptions since the Civil War - 1934 and 1998.
You *can*, however, FTP your source code to another country and have programmers there work on it. India has benefitted greatly from this practice and companies under pressure from stockholders to cut costs/raise profits will certainly be looking at the cost and control differences between an arrogant, demanding US union and cheap foreign labor. It'll all just move offshore.
I read somewhere that a lot of Indian software workers were ridiculously underskilled - people who had learned multimedia animation in one week from less-than-reputable institutes.
Simply put, there's no where to go. In order to even learn to write software, you need the following skills:
1)Literacy
2)Algebra (int a = b)
3)A really good grasp of the elusive concept of a 'function'
4)Logic skills
5)Pre-calc ideas (needed to understand anything about efficiency)
6)Discrete math
7)Calculus
8)etc.
1-4 are absolutely essential for even the most trivial coding. If you want to do anything remotely sophisticated you need more.
You're assuming that there are a sizable number of people in some country with these skills who don't currently have any use for them. Assuming this place exists, a software company has to teach these people how to code and then deal with a crew of novice programmers. Only then it can pay them peanuts to turn out code. Even if you could find large chunks of people inclined to learn to code, the return on investment is just terrible in the short-to-mid-term in teaching someone how to code from scratch who has never seen a computer. Sure, companies will pay to send their coders to a week-long course on JavaWidgets3001.6, but what company could jusify teaching someone C from square zero?
The only thing you can do remotely without these skills is simple HTML. Based on my university experience, I don't think India is up to the task of writing millions of pages of English-language web pages. And less-challenging code is generally more language-based - someone in Elbonia can code a new algorithm up and Americans will use it, but I don't think Elbonians will be writing JavaScript pages or VB GUIs unless they happen to speak English too.
Where do you find a massive number of literate, mathematically trained folks? First-world countries, where governments have invested in compulsory education. There's nowhere you can find people with the requisite background who will work for nothing. Western Europe's out, Japan's out, Canada's out. They all have heavily organized workforces, min wage laws, etc. Eastern Europe and Russia, maybe, but what sane business would want to move its primary production there right now?
I was at my local library recently and I browsed the computer section for entertainment. It had a 1990 book entitled "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" and it claimed that by 2000 all the programmers in America would be unemployed, having been replaced by harder-working Indians. American programmers were supposedly 1)lazy, 2)overpaid, 3)inefficient, 4)overeducated, 5)stupid.
Strangely, US programmers are doing quite well, even though their salaries have been jacked through the roof (albeit not by unions). It appears #4 turned out to be a real benefit - US folk have shown a better ability to adapt to new technology. It looks like the sky has been falling for a while.
I guess if you take my argument to its logical extreme it is Functionalism (which is distinct from Marxism, but now I'm using that philosophy minor to split hairs). But it's really more of a free-market Functionalism - techies are the critical irreplaceable segment of an IT company. They're skills are unique and a finite number of people can do their job at all, therefore, like executives, they should be generously compensated (obviously less so than senior managment - but the point is that both groups are critical). Support departments tend to be a different story. However, techies, like blue-collar folk, tend to be isolated from management and most likely to be subjected to unfair treatment (I don't know any Marketdroids who worked 70 hrs/wk for two weeks to meet a deadline only to get laid off the next morning when the project got done on time). This is where some form of representation comes in.
This sounds racist to me.
There's plenty of documented cases of employers abusing the H1-B system. It has no checks and balances - these people often get fucked. You can read other comments here or the original stories for examples. (I wish to plead laziness for not supplying links.) There was absolutely no attempt by tech workers to lobby Congress on these issues, so suprise, we got shitty, one-sided legistlation. Until we live in a world with absolute free trade with a truly global market (never) restrictions on outsourcing employment are justified.
If they screw you, you leave.
That gets hard if everyone is colluding to screw you. It's true that some software isn't made by a couple oligopolies like cars are - yet. Despite this fact, anti-consumer initiatives like SDMI, CSS, etc. have managed to get universal support. It may only be a matter of time before everybody's management gets their act together to suppress developer wages. I'm not saying they would be wrong in trying to do so - that's their job, minimize expenses. The purpose of a union is to provide a counterbalancing institution - at least in theory. Someone needs to be looking out for your interests.
I'm not gonna play long-term predictor, but the dotcom shakeout indicates we might be seeing a world with relatively few software/networking/whatever companies. Most industries tend to consolidate as they mature, and there's no reason software would be an exception. If and when all software is made by Apple-Microsoft-Intel-NBC or IBM-Redhat-Sun-AOL-TimeWarner and three other companies, leverage would shift substantially away from the workforce to the employers. If you think this is absurd, bear in mind we once had dozens of automakers in America, we now have exactly two (Chrysler doesn't count). Troll-preempt: This an exagerrated example, please don't tell me Apple belongs in the second megacorp or something like that. (Somewhat OT, while I'm not a Marxist, he did predict consolidation decades before it happened. Rest assured, I hate communism as much as you, just should give credit where it's due.)
Three of the five groups you mentioned have recently pulled or are pulling strikes about bullshit issues and making ridiculous demands. It cuts both ways. Counterexample: Pepsi workers where I live had shitty wages, pension plans, disability pay, etc. The union came up with a proposal that would have compensated Pepsi workers slightly less than local Coke workers with equivalent jobs. The company made a ridiculously low offer and then refused to negotiate "on principle." Who's the idiot here? All a strike indicates is an inability to reach an agreement - it isn't automatically the union's fault.
I may be going out on a limb by suggesting that we trust a system with a rather shady history. But we may have the solution to the problem of advocates who don't advocate well - the Internet. Rank and file union members have set up websites criticizing bad union leadership and company management alike. The NWA flight attendant contract (big issue when you have one airline like we do in Minneapolis) was scuttled by an independent website which claimed it didn't really benefit members.
In the olden days, all organizations had to be hierarchial - you had to have literal "bosses" even in unions. Today, you can set up a discussion site where anyone with a stake in the issues can voice their opinion. If flight attendants can use the net to prevent abuses of the union system tech workers should have no difficulty. It's awfully difficul to bullshit a large group of people who have the ability to communicate on a discussion system. I just can't see a traditional crooked union popping up when all the members can post comments.
It's a basic truth of economics that increased prices will result in decreased demand.
It is also a basic truth of physics that bodies move in accordance with Newton's laws and relations derived from these laws. Any so-called "basic truth" or "law" is valid only under a finite set of circumstances. Just as the laws of classical mechanics only accurately describes the world at relatively low speeds, the law of supply and demand only accurately describes the world in markets where all information is available to all actors, the number of actors is large, all actors meet the formal defition of efficiency, and the barriers to entry and exit approach zero.
Just as Newton's laws stop working well as we approach.1 * c, the law of supply and demand stops working well when we move away from ideal free market conditions. Good and bad results that the free market system couldn't predict happen. Somehow, unionized industries are able to have real wage increases without massive layoffs. Somehow, Microsoft has been able to retain control of entire markets with substandard products in the face of substantial competition. Examples of results opposite what supply and demand would predict abound.
These so-called "laws" become become less useful in describing behavior as we move away from the hard sciences to the soft ones, like economics and political science - even the Iron Law of Political Science has two exceptions (1930 and 1998) and social scientists still call it the "Iron Law" because relative to their other laws it's done an awfully good job.
Stock options are going down the tubes. If you're betting on stock options to make it anymore you're awfully gutsy. Raw salaries are the way for any company that wants to attract good people to go anymore - even Microsoft has figured this out.
Unions that can't strike exist - one of the largest unions of all, the AFSCME, is a union of govt employees who are legally prohibited from striking. Transportation unions can have their strikes cancelled by presidential action. But both of these groups manage to leverage pretty sweet benefits by being organized even though their ability to strike is limited or nonexistent. I assume a union could coexist with stock options - a smart one would agree to a no-strike clause in return for options that aren't ridiculously overpriced. It could be a win-win situation for employees.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about all the poor platforms that just couldn't make it. And think of all the poor companies that had to fold cause their platform didn't make it. It's actually kinda sad sniffle, sniffle
It's somewhat annoying we only have one representative for all of North America on ICANN. ICANN needs to be a truly international organization, but it needs to be representative of people. Its constituents are users of the Internet, i.e. everyone. So its leadership should be elected by everyone.
We don't let corporations or activist organizations or unions appoint representatives to national legistlatures just because they have some interest in policymaking. Why should ICANN, the de facto government of the Internet, be any different.
Oh yeah: First post!
In any case, it doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to read the above statement from the US Constitution and see that Orrin Hatch's proposal is unconstitutional, since it deprives the artist of exclusive rights.
I don't think so. What about fair use? That clearly limits the rights of artists. Furthermore, the Constituion authorizes copyright protection. It doesn't require it. Congress could abolish copyright if it so chose. The copyright clause is listed among those things which "Congress shall have the power to:" in Article 2.
Furthermore, under modern interpertations of the Constitution, Congress can regulate the music business in any manner it wants under the commerce clause. (I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, I'm just saying it's the Supreme Court's interpertation of said clause from 1930-2001, whith minimal exceptions.)
Ah, ha! But how much software is niche, internal, special purpose? These are the programmers that will ALWAYS obtain 5-6 figure salaries, as open source generally serves the "general" software market (web/mail/ftp servers, OS's like Linux, etc..) The real money is often in support and admin anyway, which Open Source can't solve -- you need man-hours instead.
Don't remember where I read it, but about 85% of software is developed for in-house projects. It doesn't matter if you have IP protection in these cases. Stuff that's useful to everybody will get generated for free. Once you factor in support - from helpdesk to high-priced consultants - only a miniscule fraction of IT wages come from developing closed proprietary projects. The original poster would have you believe that Apache is screwing over all those webserver admins and so forth.
Tip for y'all: It's time to do something!!!
1) Start giving money to the EFF, the EPIC, the FSF, et al. very fast.
2) There are people who are supposed to condemn these kind of statements - they're called Congress. They're supposed to launch investigations into this kind of shit. If nothing else, they're supposed to know that millions of people will be royally pissed off if they vote for anti-Open Source legistlation. Here are all the email addresses for the Senate Tech Committee:
John McCain john_mccain@mccain.senate.gov
Ted Stevens http://www.senate.gov/~stevens/webform.htm
Conrad Burns conrad_burns@burns.senate.gov
Trent Lott senatorlott@lott.senate.gov
Kay Hutchinson senator@hutchinson.senate.gov
Olympia Snowe olympia@snowe.senate.gov
Same Brownback http://www.senate.gov/~brownback/email.html
Gordon Smith http://www.senate.gov/~gsmith/webform.htm
Peter Fitzgerald senator_fitzgerald@fitzgerald.senate.gov
Frizt Hollings http://www.senate.gov/~hollings/webform.html
Daniel Inoyue http://www.senate.gov/~inouye/abtform.html
Jay Rockefeller senator@rockefeller.senate.gov
John Kerry john_kerry@kerry.senate.gov
John Breaux http://www.senate.gov/~breaux/webform.html
Bryon Dorgan http://dorgan.senate.gov/webmail.html
Ron Wyden http://www.senate.gov/~wyden/mail.htm
Max Cleland http://cleland.senate.gov/~cleland/webform.html
Barbara Boxer http://www.senate.gov/~boxer/contact/webform.html
Jean Carnhan senator_carnahan@carnahan.senate.gov
Some of the stuff we're talking about isn't very high-tech. What's going to stop Jurgen Q Publik from buying blank CDRs by the hundred from a mail order company in Hong Kong? I mean, we're talking about blank media here. If you tax it enough people will circumvent the taxes. I'll invest in pricewatch2.co.hk as soon as it's in business.
Proof? Canada taxes the shit of cigarettes, more than the US. 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border, so smokers come south every now and then and take quite a few cartons of cigarettes back. There's a small yet lucrative undergound industry of smuggling cigarettes across the border around here. Just think globalization...
I don't think anyone agrees that patents should be completely abolished
Some people would disagree.
Either way, the real issue is the predatory practice. I patent something, wait until everybody else uses or develops the same technology and then I slap them with an infringement lawsuit.
This is pretty much blackmail, because it's not like the defendants can change the technology. They invested an awful lot of money in a technology they can't use anymore and they'll have to pay through the nose in 'royalties' to the so-called innovator.
This may not be the case here, but there are way too many examples. Rambus allowed SDRAM to become a memory standard and then decided it had a patent on it. AltaVista has just discovered it owns the very concept of a search engine. BT has decided after decades that it invented hyperlinks and is entitled to compensation from everybody. Gaming the system has gotten out of hand. Anytime some company sues the entire industry there's something suspicious up.
If you take a look at Barbarians led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside (ISBN: 0805057552), which is now a couple years old, you'll see the same thing. It's a great book about Microsoft written by one of their of their former top coders. It explains how Windows managed to be as poor as it is - Gates constantly changes his demands for what Windows should be, there's no long-term plan, ans so forth. The book does lose a lot of detail around the time the antitrust case begins because the author leaves MS at that time but its description of Microsoft up to 1997 is a great read.
Same story, different take. Parts of it are hillarious, others are downright scary.
Extrapolate this to employment. We really could end up with a genetic underclass. If I have bad genes, I can't get a decent job because I'm an employment/inusrance risk, and then I live in a miserable existence. I can only reproduce with similarly disposed individuals, and then I end up with kids who are even more likely to be victims of discrimination. Downward spiral here....
These people won't die off, but they'll just be the scum of the earth.
The IDSA truly is evil. No other entertainment industry has ever been this chicken. They're going overboard to avoid shadow regulations which would most definitely be unconstitutional.
You can find R-rated movies advertised on TV and in publications outside the demographics thresholds they've set. You can find Eminem songs on MTV. This is taking "protection of children" to an absurd extreme, especially in light of the total lack of objective connection between video games and violence.
The gaming industry will end up like Hollywood. If your masterpiece is likely to get an NC-17 rating you can't make it unless you're willing to gut it because no one will touch NC-17 films. Eyes Wide Shut, Natural Born Killers, and many other films get hacked to death to get an R rating. Our film industry has lost the ability to make anything controversial because no distributor will touch NC-17 material. Now gaming, after a youthful period of great creativity, is headed down the same path, only even faster. Hope you like Mario, because he's all you're ever gonna see again.
I think this is ironic justice. Consider:
1. BT discovered that they had a patent on hyperlinks only after they were in wide use.
2. Altavista has just determined that it has a patent that covers all types of searching.
3. Nintendo, Atari (or whoever owns their assets) and other abandonware makers have all tried to make a fairly lucrative business out of extorting abandonware distributors.
The above-mentioned examples are reactive exploitations of the very broken intellectual property system. These guys are just being proactive about exploiting the system.
Heck, if you tried to patent "IP squatting" as a business model, there would far too much prior art to get the patent approved.
Time had an interview with him a while back. Found it here . He skirts questions about his culpability. A lot of it is still scary.
Either way, it is true that the US govt frequently claims that Bin Laden is the source of all evil with little to no evidence.
Firstly, we need to to step up manned operations abroad, especially in known trouble spots. We'll need to recruit more people to do this, which means increasing budgets.
This might not work. How do you infiltrate a terrorist organization made up of people who are relatives? How do you infiltrate a terrorist organization in a country where most of the residents are at least somewhat sympathetic to the groups goals? Bear in mind that HUMINT has a pretty shitty track record. Investing in HUMINT is like investing in a dotcom - you may be wasting your money or you might get a huge payoff. Getting Congress to approve large cash payouts to shifty characters could be awfully difficult, especially in light of the Iran-Contra debacle not too long ago.
And in the event that all of this fails, we're going to need the much-maligned national missile defence folks. When you don't know in advance what's coming, you have to be able to protect yourselves! It's no different from soldiers wearing a bulletproof jacket, and in these times when nuclear proliferation is a fact of life, America needs that jacket.
Ouch! Head hurts! NMD = very stupid.
Why would anyone launch a missile at the US when much better delivery systems are available? The World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma federal building bombing, and so forth all involved very sophisticated car bombs. The USS Cole was hit by another boat, not a missile. There is no reason why any terrorist would use a missile as a delivery system - they're expensive, and it appears sneaking up on your target works just fine.
Some may say, well, just because a missile defense would not protect us against some attacks isn't a reason to build it. Implicit within this claim is a couple things:
1) Terrorists are fairly smart, they can build high-yield conventional weapons and possibly NBCs.
2) Terrorists are extremely stupid, if we build a missile defense system they will abadon in rental trucks and boats as delivery systems and switch to ballistic missiles.
Pick one or the other folks, it can't be both.
I pray for the day MS windows becomes subscription only and veryfiable via the internet :-)
It's already here. According to a presentation about Whistler I saw you will have to register copies of new MS OSes with Microsoft or they will stop working within x days. Each CD key will be allowed exactly one usage. Microsoft is really serious about making people who own more than one computer pay for more than one copy of windows. I don't think people will put up with being forced to buy Windows and Office again every time they replace their computer (or the HD goes crap)for very long.
Furthermore, with sub-$500 machines, removing the cost of MS software becomes significant awfully fast. The price difference between a Linux and Windows box could be substantial enough to entice bargain hunters to use Linux, if only we could actually make it useable.
Though seems unlikely that an unknown person might find the counterexample, it's a bad idea to dismiss it as "impossible" or "funny", because one day, in some mathematical field or another, it'll happen.
It has happened before, and could happen again. Higher mathematics is a fascinating field - every now and then you end up with interesting character. Erdos was a crazy vagabond but he is one the most prolific and insightful mathematicians of modern times. Ramajun (sp?) was an Indian college dropout who made made significant contributions in analysis with little formal training in math. He wasn't big on proof, and some of his 'thereoms' were just stated as truths, and not rigorously justified (or dejustified) until after his death.
RSA's biggest fear just might be some modern day Ramajun. The big 'R' should be understandably apprehensive whenever some guy off the street emails and says he's broken RSA - because it just could be true.
I know this is an old hat, but I think we won't see Linux on desktops anytime soon.
I saw a demo of the user interface for MS Whistler last night. From Joe User's perspective, it's at least a decade ahead of GNOME or KDE. There's no way we're gonna see Linux on user desktops anytime soon, with Apple and MS going all out here. Add in a couple million dollars of research on making the thing intuitive (even if all the research is crap) and you've got a tough cookie to crack. Whistler finally allows remote login, just like Unixes have decades, but it sure seems neat to non-geeks that you can access your computer from home.
That said, geeks will never want to use this system. It has hundreds of wizards, IE 6 has a dancing puppy dog who will "fetch" your searches, etc. MS has made their consumer OS so hard for high-end users to work with that any geek who runs Win9x now will run away screaming in terror, possibly to Linux (but more likely to Win2K).
"Prior Art" depends not only on the existence of the "art", but on attempts to patent it.
Utter nonsense. The USPTO guide makes reference to examples of things that are non-patentable in a attempt to explain the obviousness and prior art standards. Examples used in a brochure from a few use back:
-You can't patent a new coffee cup handle, even if it's ergonmically designed. Coffee cup handles haven't been patented, nor has any sane person tried to patent them, but they still constitute prior art.
-You can't patent a widely used or distributed idea, regardless of whether the initial innovator asked for a patent. I can't patent the compiler because although the idea is pretty intriguing, it's in such wide use. The fact that the original innovator failed to apply for a patent has no effect.
A related trend is setting "patent traps". You wait until a technology is considered an open standard or public domain before you bring out your dubious patent. Then you claim that everyone who used this previously free technology owes you whatever royalty you see fit to charge. BT pulled the same stunt with the hyperlink patent. Amazon did the same with 1-click shopping.
Unlike trademarks, which expire if not enforced, patents can left lying around, waiting for an unspecting society to "violate" them. It would seem that if you have a universally appicable idea, or see one that hasn't been patented, you should:
1) Obtain a patent
2) Wait 3-10 years until everyone uses it
3) Extort money from all the supposed infringers
This is a much more profitable business model than licensing your patent from the outset. Somebody needs to stop it. Uneforced patents should expire immediately. The duration of patents of patents and copyrights must be dramatically reduced. This has just gone too far.
It's pretty sad to see all the "the Holy Corporation is entitled to all the money in the world because it's so fucking special and the Free Market isn't just a means to an end, it is intrinsically and absolutely good."
Are these abstract principles of property so absolute that we can't make any exceptions, even in the hardest of cases? Are your hearts really that hard? Is helping people really evil? When a woman with AIDS dies because her husband who she was forced to marry transmits the disease to her and she can't get any treatment, is it still wrong to make an exception?
I'm most definitely not religous, but a brief bible passage, which I read many years ago, came to mind:
If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be.
I know, helping others is utopian socialism, the end of property rights, the ultimate wrong, etc.. I know that if we don't let drug companies have all the profits from government funded research, they won't accept government funded research anymore, and we'll all be plummeted back into the dark ages. Of course the free market accurately models the behaviors of multinational pharmeceuticals, I can go start one with the money in my pocket tommmorrow...
Let's remember that all this intellectual property is actually a grant from the government. It's a giant social construct. It has it limits. Get off your pedestal, develop a heart, and live in the real world.
The president's party always loses seats in both houses of Congress in midterm elections. Poli Sci types call it the "Iron Law" because it has only 2 exceptions since the Civil War - 1934 and 1998.
You *can*, however, FTP your source code to another country and have programmers there work on it. India has benefitted greatly from this practice and companies under pressure from stockholders to cut costs/raise profits will certainly be looking at the cost and control differences between an arrogant, demanding US union and cheap foreign labor. It'll all just move offshore.
I read somewhere that a lot of Indian software workers were ridiculously underskilled - people who had learned multimedia animation in one week from less-than-reputable institutes.
Simply put, there's no where to go. In order to even learn to write software, you need the following skills:
1)Literacy
2)Algebra (int a = b)
3)A really good grasp of the elusive concept of a 'function'
4)Logic skills
5)Pre-calc ideas (needed to understand anything about efficiency)
6)Discrete math
7)Calculus
8)etc.
1-4 are absolutely essential for even the most trivial coding. If you want to do anything remotely sophisticated you need more.
You're assuming that there are a sizable number of people in some country with these skills who don't currently have any use for them. Assuming this place exists, a software company has to teach these people how to code and then deal with a crew of novice programmers. Only then it can pay them peanuts to turn out code. Even if you could find large chunks of people inclined to learn to code, the return on investment is just terrible in the short-to-mid-term in teaching someone how to code from scratch who has never seen a computer. Sure, companies will pay to send their coders to a week-long course on JavaWidgets3001.6, but what company could jusify teaching someone C from square zero?
The only thing you can do remotely without these skills is simple HTML. Based on my university experience, I don't think India is up to the task of writing millions of pages of English-language web pages. And less-challenging code is generally more language-based - someone in Elbonia can code a new algorithm up and Americans will use it, but I don't think Elbonians will be writing JavaScript pages or VB GUIs unless they happen to speak English too.
Where do you find a massive number of literate, mathematically trained folks? First-world countries, where governments have invested in compulsory education. There's nowhere you can find people with the requisite background who will work for nothing. Western Europe's out, Japan's out, Canada's out. They all have heavily organized workforces, min wage laws, etc. Eastern Europe and Russia, maybe, but what sane business would want to move its primary production there right now?
I think someone from overseas pointed us to a better model here . Maybe we could get European style unions for techies in America.
I was at my local library recently and I browsed the computer section for entertainment. It had a 1990 book entitled "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" and it claimed that by 2000 all the programmers in America would be unemployed, having been replaced by harder-working Indians. American programmers were supposedly 1)lazy, 2)overpaid, 3)inefficient, 4)overeducated, 5)stupid.
Strangely, US programmers are doing quite well, even though their salaries have been jacked through the roof (albeit not by unions). It appears #4 turned out to be a real benefit - US folk have shown a better ability to adapt to new technology. It looks like the sky has been falling for a while.
Wow, a comment worth reply. :)
.1 * c, the law of supply and demand stops working well when we move away from ideal free market conditions. Good and bad results that the free market system couldn't predict happen. Somehow, unionized industries are able to have real wage increases without massive layoffs. Somehow, Microsoft has been able to retain control of entire markets with substandard products in the face of substantial competition. Examples of results opposite what supply and demand would predict abound.
I guess if you take my argument to its logical extreme it is Functionalism (which is distinct from Marxism, but now I'm using that philosophy minor to split hairs). But it's really more of a free-market Functionalism - techies are the critical irreplaceable segment of an IT company. They're skills are unique and a finite number of people can do their job at all, therefore, like executives, they should be generously compensated (obviously less so than senior managment - but the point is that both groups are critical). Support departments tend to be a different story. However, techies, like blue-collar folk, tend to be isolated from management and most likely to be subjected to unfair treatment (I don't know any Marketdroids who worked 70 hrs/wk for two weeks to meet a deadline only to get laid off the next morning when the project got done on time). This is where some form of representation comes in.
This sounds racist to me.
There's plenty of documented cases of employers abusing the H1-B system. It has no checks and balances - these people often get fucked. You can read other comments here or the original stories for examples. (I wish to plead laziness for not supplying links.) There was absolutely no attempt by tech workers to lobby Congress on these issues, so suprise, we got shitty, one-sided legistlation. Until we live in a world with absolute free trade with a truly global market (never) restrictions on outsourcing employment are justified.
If they screw you, you leave.
That gets hard if everyone is colluding to screw you. It's true that some software isn't made by a couple oligopolies like cars are - yet. Despite this fact, anti-consumer initiatives like SDMI, CSS, etc. have managed to get universal support. It may only be a matter of time before everybody's management gets their act together to suppress developer wages. I'm not saying they would be wrong in trying to do so - that's their job, minimize expenses. The purpose of a union is to provide a counterbalancing institution - at least in theory. Someone needs to be looking out for your interests.
I'm not gonna play long-term predictor, but the dotcom shakeout indicates we might be seeing a world with relatively few software/networking/whatever companies. Most industries tend to consolidate as they mature, and there's no reason software would be an exception. If and when all software is made by Apple-Microsoft-Intel-NBC or IBM-Redhat-Sun-AOL-TimeWarner and three other companies, leverage would shift substantially away from the workforce to the employers. If you think this is absurd, bear in mind we once had dozens of automakers in America, we now have exactly two (Chrysler doesn't count). Troll-preempt: This an exagerrated example, please don't tell me Apple belongs in the second megacorp or something like that. (Somewhat OT, while I'm not a Marxist, he did predict consolidation decades before it happened. Rest assured, I hate communism as much as you, just should give credit where it's due.)
Three of the five groups you mentioned have recently pulled or are pulling strikes about bullshit issues and making ridiculous demands.
It cuts both ways. Counterexample: Pepsi workers where I live had shitty wages, pension plans, disability pay, etc. The union came up with a proposal that would have compensated Pepsi workers slightly less than local Coke workers with equivalent jobs. The company made a ridiculously low offer and then refused to negotiate "on principle." Who's the idiot here? All a strike indicates is an inability to reach an agreement - it isn't automatically the union's fault.
I may be going out on a limb by suggesting that we trust a system with a rather shady history. But we may have the solution to the problem of advocates who don't advocate well - the Internet. Rank and file union members have set up websites criticizing bad union leadership and company management alike. The NWA flight attendant contract (big issue when you have one airline like we do in Minneapolis) was scuttled by an independent website which claimed it didn't really benefit members.
In the olden days, all organizations had to be hierarchial - you had to have literal "bosses" even in unions. Today, you can set up a discussion site where anyone with a stake in the issues can voice their opinion. If flight attendants can use the net to prevent abuses of the union system tech workers should have no difficulty. It's awfully difficul to bullshit a large group of people who have the ability to communicate on a discussion system. I just can't see a traditional crooked union popping up when all the members can post comments.
It's a basic truth of economics that increased prices will result in decreased demand.
It is also a basic truth of physics that bodies move in accordance with Newton's laws and relations derived from these laws. Any so-called "basic truth" or "law" is valid only under a finite set of circumstances. Just as the laws of classical mechanics only accurately describes the world at relatively low speeds, the law of supply and demand only accurately describes the world in markets where all information is available to all actors, the number of actors is large, all actors meet the formal defition of efficiency, and the barriers to entry and exit approach zero.
Just as Newton's laws stop working well as we approach
These so-called "laws" become become less useful in describing behavior as we move away from the hard sciences to the soft ones, like economics and political science - even the Iron Law of Political Science has two exceptions (1930 and 1998) and social scientists still call it the "Iron Law" because relative to their other laws it's done an awfully good job.
Stock options are going down the tubes. If you're betting on stock options to make it anymore you're awfully gutsy. Raw salaries are the way for any company that wants to attract good people to go anymore - even Microsoft has figured this out.
Unions that can't strike exist - one of the largest unions of all, the AFSCME, is a union of govt employees who are legally prohibited from striking. Transportation unions can have their strikes cancelled by presidential action. But both of these groups manage to leverage pretty sweet benefits by being organized even though their ability to strike is limited or nonexistent. I assume a union could coexist with stock options - a smart one would agree to a no-strike clause in return for options that aren't ridiculously overpriced. It could be a win-win situation for employees.