To think that the use of profanity is an automatic mark of idiocy and immaturity is, in my opinion, a rather idiotic and immature thought.
Profanity, when used with thoughtfully and with moderation, can be an amazingly powerful thing. It is true that the vast majority of profanity use is heavy-handed and ineffectual, and is spouted for the sake of sensationalism; to suggest, however, that the very utterance of a profane word reduces an individual to idiocy smacks of intellectual eletism. To infer that profanity exists only in the realm "potty and shock humor" is akin to thinking that anybody with a classic New England drawl owns a summer house in the Hamptons.
Language is what the speaker makes of it, and profanity is but another form of expression at the speaker's disposal. It is quite difficult to use properly (and all too often abused,) but can be used to formulate powerful, powerful statements in the proper circumstances. In this individual's case, the profanity is intended neither to offend nor sensationalize; it is merely a matter of coincidence that it is part of an inside joke. Suggesting that this cause is infantile and unworthy of notice simply because he wishes to register a profanity in his domain name is absurd.
Your making note your low Slashdot number is just about as impressive as people who point out that their ancestors were royalty, or were amongst the original pilgrims in America. What do you prove by lording your holy four-digit status over us six-digit chattle? Do you somehow think that one is incapable of insightful commentary if one's user account is higher than 9,999? Could we silly six-digiters not possibly grasp the breadth of knowledge you four-digiters are endowed with? Do you enjoy smacking of aristocratic eletism?
So Slashdot isn't the ivory tower it was back when it was just you and your 2,374 best friends. Poor you. May I suggest you take a page from your own book: if you don't like it anymore, start your own Slashdot. If Taco et al. really cared about keeping your mental playground free of us riff-raff, they'd have closed the doors ages ago.
Well? Go on. Scram, ya fucking dolt. You've got a website to build.
I don't want one of these things inside me taking a wrong turn, and ending up dropping drugs in the wrong place, or even worse, puncturing a capillary, or other body organ.
Good point. Why, just last week, I punctured more capillaries than I could count when I accidentally sat on a thumbtack. The experience was horrible and frightening enough in and of itself, but the worst came when my insurance provider just laughed and hung up on me when I tried to file a claim!
Scientists have yet to succeed in teaching bacteria how to ride a nano-bicycle, yet these researchers actually think they can get these things to drive nano-subs? Who do they think they're kidding?
Actually, there are quite a number of ways to "recycle" your old computer. The National Safety Council has a few basic guidlines for way in which you can recycle your old computers. To paraphrase the link:
Donation of Computers to Schools, Charities, and Nonprofit Organizations. This is a good option if you're about to get rid of your old Pentium-100 system for a new one. Today's used computers make great tools for schools and nonprofits, charities, and other organizations, since they can all pretty much run a word processor, web browser, and more without any trouble. You can also get a tax break, if you're American! (dunnot about other countries, but I wouldn't be surprised to see similar incentives...)
Reuse. The type of recycling that is being discussed by most people on this post. Sure, the old components aren't terribly useful to your average Slashdotter, but again, todays computers are wuite powerful enough to serve a wide array of uses. Those "obsolete" mobo components or boards can be put to work in other systems that don't require huge amounts of power or complex circuitry.
Recycling. The hard core reuse, this is when they actually start melting things down to get at the trace amounts of lead, gold, platinum, copper, etc. that can be melted out of a system. Hazardous and hard to do if you try it yourself; less challenging if you give it to a company that specializes in it. These companies do, in fact, exist.
Is there a market for recycling computers? You bet. Look at automobile recycling. I've seen countless successful junkyards filled to the gills with POS vechicles which are, quite frankly, completely and utterly worthless to the average person. Yet somehow, these companies continue to exist, do business, grow, and even thrive. There's money to be made in recycling, and given something like a computer (where you have a very high value to size ratio,) you can bet that an enterprising organisation can make a pretty penny off of computer recycling.
Having a glue that allows parts to be melted off in a basic oven would considerably reduce the costs of recycling the components of a computer. Yes, a lot of components cost only a penny. These aren't the components they're interested in; if possible, they get hucked in the smelting pot. Things like CPUs, memory, and other more complex circuits (if you think nobody is saving those CPUs when computers get recycled/discarded, guess again) have a great deal of value to a computer recycler, though. The estimate of "hundreds of dollars" per computer may be a tad inflated (perhaps for discarded servers or high-end machines), but there is still very real income potential for recycling home computers, easily in the $50-100 range. If a company can squeeze an extra $15 of saved labor out of each computer, that's a serious boost to profitability.
Well, there's a simple solution for how to respond to this sort of treatment:
Switch ISPs, immediately, and fire off a letter to the old ISP explaining what you have done, why you have done it, and why you will go out of your way to tell others to never use their service. If the ISP is a local outfit, you'll likely get a response, apology, and possibly even a rather favorable re-subscription offer if your letter is well thought-out and well-written. If it's a national ISP, chances are you won't get any response at all (beyond the form auto-mail). Of course, chances are equally good that the ISP woun't take any corrective action whatsoever to accomodate your needs (and may just continue deleting your files at will), so regardless of whether or not you put ripples in the pond, you're better off leaving.
Now, if your local selection of ISPs is too limited for this approach, and you're quite serious about being able to put your files in place, pay the local office a visit in person. If you can, get an appointment; otherwise, just go on in and ask to see the person in charge. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it can't beat the influence of a visit in person. Show them that you exist, are serious about your content, and expect service from them, and even if it's a national ISP, you'll stand a good chance of at least getting -some- form of response.
You're right that most PHB's don't regard Darwin as the "important stuff" for Apple to be working on, and you're also right that anyone who knows better, well, knows better. Erm.
The point the article is making, though, is that the Open Source community, for the most part, isn't really doing that much with Darwin. Yes, OS X may end up sucking as much as (insert your least favorite OS here), but the sad thing here is that the culprit of the bad OS would not be the closed-source, corporate controlled GUI, but rather the Open Source, everybody take a look BSD core. The author of the article spends a good deal of time scratching his head, wondering when the "community" is going to actually start contributing seriously to Darwin.
Now if, as you have speculated, OS X turns out to be a massive failure because Darwin wasn't up to snuff, which camp ends up the worse for the wear: the corporate GUI folks who managed to put together a more-or-less solid user interface; or the Open Source community, that basically ignored an entire operating system for whatever reason? Sure, there's no mandate for anybody to look at the code, much less contribute to it, but rest assured that if Darwin ends up being the downfall of OS X, the Apple spin team will be itching to find somebody to pin it on. Three guesses as to what they might say...
All that said, I'm still itching to see what Apple releases next year. I absolutely loved NeXT, and I'm hoping that OS X takes off like a rocket.
$ man reality
Re:Get out of the petri dish or die in the waste
on
On Asteroid Mining
·
· Score: 2
Good morning, Mr. Malthus!
Okay...so....6 billion people...expanding geometrically...regressive regimes that refuse to curb birth rates or educate people...massive pollution...hmm...I'm sure everything will be fine for a few thousand more years...
Wrongo.
Wrongo, says you. You'll forgive me if I put just as much stock in your own doomsday vision of How Our Race Will End(tm) as I do in my own version (read: not much.) Let's go into a bit of an analysis of your proposed salvation of humanity:
1. Educate people enough to stop over-reproducing (shouts removed.) Thr trouble with this is, you can't educate reproductive habits. Truth be told, having a buttload of kids is a hard, taxing endeavor; people, when given an environment where they have things like life insurance, stable jobs and *gasp* Social Security, no longer feel the need or desire to crank out 12 or 13 kids to help run the farm and care for them in their old age. Education, while it runs pretty much statistically parallel to the number of children per family, is not a means for reducing population growth; rather, it is a result of higher quality of life in general, just as lower birth rates are. In a poor, underdeveloped country, each child born equals another opportunity to have some hope of care if and when you age, and will help reduce the amount of work you need to do once they are old enough to help with the household tasks. Education and birth rate are related, but the one cannot be used to directly influence the outcome of the other.
2. Distribute resources to feed the billions already on this planet. Why, so they can go and keep reproducing? The fact that we've already gotten so good at distributing the world's food supply is part of why there are so many of us now. (question: how long have banannas been a staple entry in virtually every American/European grocery store? That is some serious distribution of tropical fruit!) If you want to effectively lower the number of people on this planet, the last thing you want to do is supply every last one of them with food to eat! (Note: this sounds like a really shitty thing to say. It is; it's also true. True things can be amazingly shitty, but that fact does not invalidate them.)
3. Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points. This obviously necessitates the acquisition of asteroid raw materials. That is, indeed, an excellent idea. Of course, setting up a viable space station of international collaboration capable of supporting a regular crew over long periods of time is an essential early step in this mass exodus of the manufacturing industry to the final frontier; perhaps we should start with this first. Oh, wait--we're already working on this. Well hell, let's get those factories up there, then! And while we're at it, we'll instantiate a unified global government and unify people of all faiths and races in harmony! Chop chop, folks--no, don't bother me with the details, just do it!
Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development. I'm not talking about 20 guys in Berkely zapping a molecule of tritium every 18 months. We need Manhattan Projec[t] importance attached to this. Another good idea, but again, the need isn't urgent enough. If humanity ends up being a full 200 years in developing fusion power to a viable level (which I sincerely doubt will be the case), do you really think that it will have made that big of a difference 2000 years later? If you want to look at the long term effects of a problem, you need to step away from the "as soon as physically possible" delivery schedule for the solution. Humanity has a whole mess of things that "need their immediate and undivided attention" if we apply this same mindset to every other long term problem humanity is facing; you'll find that fusion power falls neatly into a big-ass clump of things that we can't possibly put off until tomorrow.
Nature has, does and will continue to adapt to humanity; it just may not be in ways we particularly like (mass famine, plague, loss of farmable land, costal flooding, etc.) What's more, while nature is perfectly capable of trimming us down to size when we outgrow our bounds, it's quite unlikely that nature will see fit to completely wipe us off the planet.
I agree that licensing mania was a deciding factor in the fall of FIF, but as I recall, there were other issues at play, as well--one of these was that compression times tended to skyrocket the higher level of compression you chose. Another was that certain types of images would compress better than others--that is, a picture of a tree worked far better than a picture of a skyline because of the shapes involved in the images, because the fractal encoding worked better on the "natural" shape of the tree than it did on the straight-edged, blocky skyline.
Last I used it (on a 486 laptop, mind,) I could compress a JPG image in about five seconds to the FIF's 150 seconds or more. The images were comprable in quality--FIF did a visibly better job on some photos, but not so much of a difference that it justified the extra effort of encoding them.
Again, this is all from pretty old experience; the compressors may be far better now, and there's also the fact that an open source format/non-licensed technology approach would have likely resulted in better compressors. Any more recent info on how FIF fares, performance-wise?
[posted by Carnage4Life, author of article submission:] Hemos took a lot of liberty with my submission including changing the title as well as cutting of some technical analysis at the end of my submission.
Then I feel doubly sorry for you, as you're pretty clearly approaching this issue from a rational standpoint. I thought that this might be the case, and thus was careful to avoid pointing fingers at you the author, but rather at the/. editorial staff.
Having said that, a granular permissions model would be a decidedly better approach to this kind of problem than the all-or-nothing model Whistler will evidently implement. Sadly, this message was nowhere to be found in what finally got posted under your name. I'd be raising holy hell if I were you.
Knowing that this wasn't your intent in the first place makes me feel even angrier at/. than I did before. It's one thing to post zealous articles by zealous authors; it's another thing entirely to edit zealotry into them. Absolutely shameful.
..."Whistler To Refuse To Run All Unsigned Code"? Oh, come on, Slashdot. -10, ÜberTroll.
Y'know, this kind of crap doesn't help the Geek Community At Large overcome the image of being a bunch of fanatical morons. Every time I think that Slashdot just might be making the transition into mature, thoughtful news reporting, this kind of rubbish appears on the front page. It's an OPTION. you can turn it OFF. I don't recall seeing healines of "Linux Installs Insecure By Default" because several distros automatically installed and configured an insecure WU-FTP...
When am I going to be able to read Slashdot without feeling like I'm listening to a bunch of pre-teen 133t k1dd13z taking shots at The Man on #haX0rzC3ntRa1?
All i can think is, what an intense waste of brainpower. Instead of spending 15 or 20 years working on walking robots and fighting male pattern baldness, wouldn't this mental exertion be better served eradicating poverty, preserving endangered wildlife and habitats and developing cures for diseases like cancer?
...and all I can think is, what on Earth is someone of this mindset doing reading Slashdot? Talk about your intense waste of brainpower...
But, on a more serious note: What happens if Honda gets to the point where they produce a robot capable of digging wells and planting crops in underdeveloped, potentially hazardous countries? What happens if Honda manages to develop a robot that can act as a lab assistant, routinely, tirelessly and accurately performing a wide range of menial yet necessary tasks in a lab environment? Sure, it's too advanced to be able to accurately predict something like this coming along today, but the very essence of science is the pursuit of being able to do and understand things we currently cannot do or understand. Today, this thing is just a prototype that can saunter across a studio floor. Another fifty years, it may be able to run for weeks on end with minimal human intervention, able to do a huge array of tasks that would require fairly heavy human intervention today.
Just as the pioneers of computing could have no way of accurately predicting the impact computers would have on the world fifty years later, the Honda engineers can have no way of knowing what will become of their robot in another 50 years. Rest assured, though, that they, like the computing pioneers, are serious scientists and serious dreamers...
I've been casually following Honda's progress with their humanoid robot program, and this latest development seems to include at least the following (though I may have missed certain things, and certain other things may be a few months old now):
Greatly improved user-robot interface. Last I saw, the robot required a fairly intricate computer interface and some fairly serious developer guidance to work properly. Now, they seem to have the bulk of it hooked up to a wearable PC and game pad. Additionally, the robot is now completely wireless, which I believe wasn't the case earlier this summer. Quite the improvement over the old method.
Greatly improved motor control software. This model actually moves in a fluid, almost natural way. The turning is vastly improved (the robot used to be able to only execute spot turns) and they seem to pretty much have the basics of the counter-balancing swing down.
Improved robot design? It appears that they've tweaked the design of the robot somewhat, most noticably in the robot's backpack, which used to tower over it's shoulders like an astronaut's spacesuit. The current model looks much more "approachable" (for lack of a better way of quantifying it) and seems to have a few other cosmetic changes added (the hands, I believe, were less hand-like in the previous model, for example.) I'm not seeing the tech specs readily available in English, so I'll assume that the prototype is pretty much the same physically as the previous one, save for (quite non-trivial) space optimizations and otherwise more modern components. The fundamental design appears the same.
Overall Humanness. This robot actually moves in a way that I could call human-like. Yes, there are still the herky-jerks, and the arms don't quite seem to swing right, but the movement flows right. It can walk pretty much in whatever fashion it chooses, can vary it's walking pace and step length, can walk sideways and backwards, can "swing" from a side step into a front step, and does it all with stunning grace for a machine. What's more, it's moving fast now--we're talking a brisk walking pace, no more of this ponderous mechanized trudging. The old videos from this summer were impressive because the robot could successfully walk in a straight like, lean to compensate for tilting floors, and navigate up and down staircases without falling over and with minimal programmer intervention. Today, this thing's strutting around like it owns the place.
This is some serious progress from the good folks at Honda. I'm really excited to see what the next version brings.
Sure it looks nice on paper but that energy isn't created from nothing.
You're absolutely right. Most major energy sources available to man are derived from the accumulation of solar energy on our planet--fossil fuels, wind power, wave power, hydro power, and a number of others. (the only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power; feel free to add/change if you think of others.)
I take issue with the notion that energy isn't free, however. Quite the contrary--energy is perfectly free. How much does it cost you to use the sun to warm your body? How much does it cost you to sail a boat? How much does it cost a plant to perform photosynthesis? Energy is perfectly free; it's our methods of extracting and using that energy that cost money. Thus, if we can come up with a method that's cheap and easy to implement, inexpensive to maintain, and able to generate large amounts of power, we can have energy so cheap that it's virtually free for the home user. The Wavegen technology looks like it would be a perfect solution for small costal communitites, and once this technology is further refined, it could provide energy on a much greater scale.
I'm far from a tree hugger
We can see that,
but when I see alternative energy sources mentioned, I never see any discussion of the impact. It's as if people think that anything that doesn't burn fossil fuels is automatically eco-friendly.
Well, I'd argue that comparatively, there are precious few methods less eco-friendly than burning fossil fuels. If you're inferring, as I think you are, that the Wavegen people feel that their solution is flawless, I'd argue that while it isn't flawless, I can't think of many ways of generating this amount of power in a more environmentally friendly manner.
Judging by the images on the Wavegen site, it would appear that one of their LIMPET units takes up maybe 50-100 feet of shoreline. Considering that I've seen costal floodwalls running the entire length of a city before, I cannot help but consider this to be quite an ecologically sound method for energy production. In addition, the LIMPET modules can be designed to be part of a city's costal floodwall, thus doubling it's utility as generator and protective barrier. The LIMPET could also be used in this method to build artificial harbors (which are built today using concrete or stone walls and jettys.)
If costal space isn't available or is too ecologically valuable to be disturbed, the Wavegen OSPREY units are designed to operate up to one kilometer out to sea (in up to 15 meters of water) and can generate four times the energy as the LIMPET, causing virtually no environmental impact whatsoever.
The LIMPET units are analogous to costal development and floodwalls. Yes, too much costal development will endanger the health of the costal ecosystem, but it is perfectly possible for humans and costal ecology to co-exist. What's more, costal structures such as floodwalls and harbor walls already exist and serve an absolutely vital function for costal communities. Why not double up your investment and get ultra-inexpensive power at the same time?
Make no mistake, there are indeed environmental factors to consider when building a system such as a LIMPET generator. To question the eco-friendliness of such a system in the face of traditional combustion-based fossil fuel power plants, however, is laughable. The ocean contains vast amounts of power that basically end up going entirely to waste; it would be nice to utilize some of it instead of clogging our atmosphere with more human-released smoke, sulfur and carbon dioxide.
The problem is not inherently that of using paper ballots, which can be incredibly accurate when designed properly. The problem is the fact that since every single voting district is given control over how their own voting mechanism should work, there's a huge discrepancy between balloting methods, and quite often a ballot can be difficult to understand or fill out properly. Palm Beach County's ballot is a great example of this; I could go over the problems with it again, but I'm pretty sure we're all fairly familiar with the commentary on it by now. If a UI designer ever tried to sneak something like this into a software interface, he/she'd be drummed out of the company in an instant. The notion that Florida is going to be able to give us a final ballot accurate to within 0.02% of the actual will of the voters is really quite ludicrous; because of this, whoever ends up "winning" the state will be for the most part arbitrarily chosen, as the end result will likely fall well within the bounds of a statistical tie.
Now, if we were to implement a federal standard for the proper layout of a paper ballot and ballot reading mechanisms, we could do away with the vast majority of problems surrounding our current polling discrepancies. Some Iowa counties use an on-site ballot reader that verifies if your ballot is properly filled out or not; it saved my own mother's vote (she accidentally double-marked a category because of the way her bifocals distorted the form; the machine beeped; she got another ballot.) Implementation of a similar, standardized system across the US would result in far less confusion and inaccuracy in voting procedures. There exist low-cost, highly accurate modern polling machanisms that put the old punch-hole butterfly ballots to absolute shame. There is no reason, short of indifference or poor fiscal management, to not update such ancient systems with affordable, accurate ones; further, there is no reason to keep letting individual counties duplicate the efforts of every single other county in the nation on things such as designing, considering, approving and acquiring a plethora of mismatched ballots and voting mechanisms.
There's no need for touch screens and computer voting, and there won't be until such a time as they can be proven more tamper resistant and accurate than a good paper system; furthermore, there exist many paper systems that can provide amazingly accurate results for very little expense (in some cases, even less than it costs to maintain those mammoth mechanical punch systems.) What we need in the wake of this election is a nationally standardized ballot format with clear, easy to use ballots, an inexpensive and portable ballot verification system that can be used before a ballot gets submitted, and efficient and accurate high-speed counting machines for use at the central polling office for the final count of the paper ballots.
Of course, eliminating "irregularities" is impossible. There will always be someone stupid enough to outdumb the simplest of voting methods. However, claiming that the current system is sufficient is a stance of dubious merit, at best. Is it really acceptable that 19,000 ballots were discarded outright from a single district simply because they had been improperly filled, when systems exist in other states that would have sounded an alarm before the ballots had even been submitted? I, for one, condsider this wholly unacceptable.
No country as wealthy, modernized and powerful as the United States should have such a sorry hodge-podge of obsolete, confusing voting processes. If we, as Americans, actually do fancy each person's right to vote as important, I think it's time we took a good look at how good a job our current voting system does with that goal.
that's the sound of my normal, everyday breathing.
With any luck, they'll have incorporated all the current Mozilla bug fixes by Netscape Communicator 6.097g Cesium Edition PR1 (Now with HappyChannelBars!(TM)).
Or better, look at it this way: if AOL/Netscape came out tomorrow and announced that AOL 6.0 was going to rely heavily on a major open-source community codebase, would you be excited to use it?
It's been the job of the green propaganda machine to entrench the message that "A vote for Nader is _not_ a vote for Bush; they're both the same, and suck, at that." To this end, I have something to say.
While both major parties have been appealing more and more to centrist views, it is still true that the Democrats lean left and the Republicans lean right. Gore is an experienced statesman with a good bit of intelligence, and despite his problems, he has decidedly more "little people" support in his veins than his Republican counterpart, who lacks Gore's experience and intelligence (but, apparently, makes up for the difference with charisma and bravado, and a slew of decidedly conservative advisors.)
Of the people who voted Nader, exit polls show that 25% would simply not have voted, while of the remaining 75%, 5 out of every 6 people would have voted for Gore. Had Nader stepped down, Gore would have won the election soundly, no questions asked. There's the only statistic I'll quote: It ain't one to one, but it's closer to that than the supposed "half-vote" notion that's become popular as of late.
For those of you who voted for Nader because Nader was the candidate who best supported your views, you bet on a losing horse from the start, and now stand a good chance of having an underqualified marionette serving a rightist adgenda in the White House. Politics is compromise, and without compromise, the other side will win.
For those of you who voted Green to help bolster their federal matching funds, I must insist that casting a vote in the interest of financial gain strikes me as very much against the platform of the Green Party.
For those of you who cast a vote for Nader because you're sick and tired of the system and think both major parties are incurably corrupt, congratulations. You have accomplished -nothing- beyond satisfying your own smug little idealistic worldview. You might as well have written in MC Hammer, Snoopy, or the Magic School Bus, because nobody besides the two major candidates had any chance of winning the election, and protest votes are historically forgettable.
Finally, for those of you who wanted to send a message to the Democratic Party, I think you've succeeded; they now stand a good chance of losing a major election that would otherwise have easily been in the bag. Sadly, if Dubya wins, it'll be a good while before they can actually do anything about it, as the US will effectively have a one party government (they have the Legislative Branch still, they'll have the Executive branch, and would soon have the Judicial branch, as well.)
Nader had a very real impact on this campaign. Should Dubya win, Nader's campaign will have been a major factor in his getting there. Unless you truly and wholeheartedly believe that both Gore and Bush are equally evil, unfit to govern and not representative of your views, chances are, this will upset you somewhat.
So the election has come down to the state of Florida. For those of you who don't know, voter fraud is epidemic in Florida. Generally, it's for small-time stuff, primarily influencing the outcomes of local elections, but the state of Florida is sufficiently corrupt and lax enough in voter registration that there's an excellent chance of some fairly large-scale voter fraud taking place there.
There's an interesting little paper on voter fraud in Florida that discusses some of the weaknesses of the Florida system, including:
Lax "Motor Voter" registration and absentee voting which allows for easy manipulation of absentee voting;
The ability to register to vote with very minimal credentials, which hasa generated a problem with non US Citizens registering and voting in Florida;
Vote buying
Absentee voter assistance fraud, where a third party submits an individual's ballot for them, often without the individual knowing who was voted for (especially bad in Florida because of the high number of senior citizens).
Add to this the fact that Florida politics are about as rotten as they come, and you've got a potential political minefield to tiptoe through. It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of this, seeing as the state is now the deciding factor in who wins the presidency. I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing some heavy federal investigation of Florida's political beast.
And [Canadian healthcare] is not as good as the health care in the united states, because the best doctors in the world will go to the place where they can be paid the most in the world.
I question both your logic and your conclusion. The best doctors in the world will go where they have the greatest opportunity to utilize their skills and make a lasting improvement in the lives of as many people as they can. The doctors who want to make the most money go where they can be paid the most. Some of the best doctors in the world work in the field for non-profit organizations in countries that you, my friend, wouldn't even dream of setting foot in, their level of squalor and poverty being so high. Others earn educator's wages at research labs in state universities. At the same time, I've been treated by a number of highly paid "doctors" that either wouldn't or couldn't answer any of my questions about my condition, or insisted on prescribing unnecessary (and potentially addictive) painkillers despite my requesting them not to.
By your reasoning, Bill Gates would be the "best" geek in the world, seeing as he's made the most money. Linus certainly isn't in it for the money; strangely enough, though, most people here hold him in much higher regard than ol' Billy boy. I work in France right now, even though I could easily be making twice what I am in the States (and with fewer taxes); I'm not, though, because no paycheck could equal the cultural and life experience I'm getting right now, period. You'd be surprised by how many people in this world have higher priorities than money.
The economy is good right now--very, very good. So good that We The Programmers can often dictate the terms of our employment.
Being human, we get greedy. We willingly work unhealthy hours at the promise of scrumptiously high wages. To help us along with being in the office 70 hours/week, employers give us cushy toys and comfy offices.
What happens, though, when the golden days end?
What happens when you wake up one day, find that you don't have the comfy office environment you once did, that there aren't fifty gazillion companies who'd hire you in a second, and, because you've done it so willingly for so long, you're still expected to work the same 70-hour week as before (or stand to lose the job you can't replace in a heartbeat anymore)?
The companies are only your friends now because it's the only way they can keep talent. What do you do when the tech cup no longer runneth over, and you've already willingly committed yourself to a dangerously unhealthy work week?
We're taking the work of generations' worth of workers' rights activists and throwing it all out the window because of a sudden, unexpected, and extremely volatile explosion in the amount of leverage the common tech worker has. We're willingly launching ourselves back into indentured servitude, and it's only going to be to our benefit for as long as the boom lasts...
...and where in my original post did you find a reference to bigotry? Not the "eee-bay-emm-sha!" part; that was from an old IBM commercial in the 90s, back when they started the blue letterbox ads.
Actually, that was it. I'm afraid I didn't catch the reference; in reading your post, however, you might see how one could take issue with the statement if they had never seen the commercial, or not remembered it from nearly ten years ago. My apologies if offense was taken where none was intended.
I maintain that the expansion of IBM into global markets isn't their downfall, though. Globalization is almost always a Good Thing for a company, and even in those cases where a company declines, the globalization is rarely the culprit for the fall. (Now, poor management of the changes needed to go global is another thing, but that's management, not the international marketplace and marketing.)
By marketing mostly outside the U.S., IBM has effectively alienated its remaining American customers. What's next, a press release saying that the proper pronunciation of IBM is "eee-bay-emm-sha"?
"aaah, you so fuh-nee!"
No, that press release comes after the one saying that the proper pronunciation of "American" is "eye-soh-lay-shun-ist ih-dee-ut". Setting aside, for now, the truly juvenille and mean-spirited nature of your little dig at cultures other than your own, I question exactly how expanding one's market to equal more than just the United States causes people to flee that product.
Take Linux, for example. Funny thing about Linux is, it's written largely by a man living in a little place called Finland. Not only do people not make snide, stupid jokes about having to pronounce it "Lee-nux-a-hur-de-hur-de-hur", it seems to be doing quite well in pretty much any market you look to, despite being marketed mostly on an international basis.
In any case, claiming that a company lost favor because of an increased focus on international marketing and sales is among the most sophomoric business analyses as one could make. It's akin to saying that atheists/ethnic minorities/Harry Potter books/homosexuals/etc. are destroying the Moral Fiber Of America: it's simplistic idiot-mongering at it's finest. Businesses do not rise or fall on one criteria alone.
...and as for the childish "joke", never forget that if you are American, chances are nearly 100% that your family is originally from a country other than the US (probably several countries, at that.) Chances are similarly high that members of your own family were subject to similar demeaning, bigoted treatment on a regular basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Profanity, when used with thoughtfully and with moderation, can be an amazingly powerful thing. It is true that the vast majority of profanity use is heavy-handed and ineffectual, and is spouted for the sake of sensationalism; to suggest, however, that the very utterance of a profane word reduces an individual to idiocy smacks of intellectual eletism. To infer that profanity exists only in the realm "potty and shock humor" is akin to thinking that anybody with a classic New England drawl owns a summer house in the Hamptons.
Language is what the speaker makes of it, and profanity is but another form of expression at the speaker's disposal. It is quite difficult to use properly (and all too often abused,) but can be used to formulate powerful, powerful statements in the proper circumstances. In this individual's case, the profanity is intended neither to offend nor sensationalize; it is merely a matter of coincidence that it is part of an inside joke. Suggesting that this cause is infantile and unworthy of notice simply because he wishes to register a profanity in his domain name is absurd.
Your making note your low Slashdot number is just about as impressive as people who point out that their ancestors were royalty, or were amongst the original pilgrims in America. What do you prove by lording your holy four-digit status over us six-digit chattle? Do you somehow think that one is incapable of insightful commentary if one's user account is higher than 9,999? Could we silly six-digiters not possibly grasp the breadth of knowledge you four-digiters are endowed with? Do you enjoy smacking of aristocratic eletism?
So Slashdot isn't the ivory tower it was back when it was just you and your 2,374 best friends. Poor you. May I suggest you take a page from your own book: if you don't like it anymore, start your own Slashdot. If Taco et al. really cared about keeping your mental playground free of us riff-raff, they'd have closed the doors ages ago.
Well? Go on. Scram, ya fucking dolt. You've got a website to build.
$ man reality
Good point. Why, just last week, I punctured more capillaries than I could count when I accidentally sat on a thumbtack. The experience was horrible and frightening enough in and of itself, but the worst came when my insurance provider just laughed and hung up on me when I tried to file a claim!
$ man reality
Let's not put the cart before the horse, people.
$ man reality
- Donation of Computers to Schools, Charities, and Nonprofit Organizations. This is a good option if you're about to get rid of your old Pentium-100 system for a new one. Today's used computers make great tools for schools and nonprofits, charities, and other organizations, since they can all pretty much run a word processor, web browser, and more without any trouble. You can also get a tax break, if you're American! (dunnot about other countries, but I wouldn't be surprised to see similar incentives...)
- Reuse. The type of recycling that is being discussed by most people on this post. Sure, the old components aren't terribly useful to your average Slashdotter, but again, todays computers are wuite powerful enough to serve a wide array of uses. Those "obsolete" mobo components or boards can be put to work in other systems that don't require huge amounts of power or complex circuitry.
- Recycling. The hard core reuse, this is when they actually start melting things down to get at the trace amounts of lead, gold, platinum, copper, etc. that can be melted out of a system. Hazardous and hard to do if you try it yourself; less challenging if you give it to a company that specializes in it. These companies do, in fact, exist.
Is there a market for recycling computers? You bet. Look at automobile recycling. I've seen countless successful junkyards filled to the gills with POS vechicles which are, quite frankly, completely and utterly worthless to the average person. Yet somehow, these companies continue to exist, do business, grow, and even thrive. There's money to be made in recycling, and given something like a computer (where you have a very high value to size ratio,) you can bet that an enterprising organisation can make a pretty penny off of computer recycling.Having a glue that allows parts to be melted off in a basic oven would considerably reduce the costs of recycling the components of a computer. Yes, a lot of components cost only a penny. These aren't the components they're interested in; if possible, they get hucked in the smelting pot. Things like CPUs, memory, and other more complex circuits (if you think nobody is saving those CPUs when computers get recycled/discarded, guess again) have a great deal of value to a computer recycler, though. The estimate of "hundreds of dollars" per computer may be a tad inflated (perhaps for discarded servers or high-end machines), but there is still very real income potential for recycling home computers, easily in the $50-100 range. If a company can squeeze an extra $15 of saved labor out of each computer, that's a serious boost to profitability.
$ man reality
Switch ISPs, immediately, and fire off a letter to the old ISP explaining what you have done, why you have done it, and why you will go out of your way to tell others to never use their service. If the ISP is a local outfit, you'll likely get a response, apology, and possibly even a rather favorable re-subscription offer if your letter is well thought-out and well-written. If it's a national ISP, chances are you won't get any response at all (beyond the form auto-mail). Of course, chances are equally good that the ISP woun't take any corrective action whatsoever to accomodate your needs (and may just continue deleting your files at will), so regardless of whether or not you put ripples in the pond, you're better off leaving.
Now, if your local selection of ISPs is too limited for this approach, and you're quite serious about being able to put your files in place, pay the local office a visit in person. If you can, get an appointment; otherwise, just go on in and ask to see the person in charge. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it can't beat the influence of a visit in person. Show them that you exist, are serious about your content, and expect service from them, and even if it's a national ISP, you'll stand a good chance of at least getting -some- form of response.
$ man reality
The point the article is making, though, is that the Open Source community, for the most part, isn't really doing that much with Darwin. Yes, OS X may end up sucking as much as (insert your least favorite OS here), but the sad thing here is that the culprit of the bad OS would not be the closed-source, corporate controlled GUI, but rather the Open Source, everybody take a look BSD core. The author of the article spends a good deal of time scratching his head, wondering when the "community" is going to actually start contributing seriously to Darwin.
Now if, as you have speculated, OS X turns out to be a massive failure because Darwin wasn't up to snuff, which camp ends up the worse for the wear: the corporate GUI folks who managed to put together a more-or-less solid user interface; or the Open Source community, that basically ignored an entire operating system for whatever reason? Sure, there's no mandate for anybody to look at the code, much less contribute to it, but rest assured that if Darwin ends up being the downfall of OS X, the Apple spin team will be itching to find somebody to pin it on. Three guesses as to what they might say...
All that said, I'm still itching to see what Apple releases next year. I absolutely loved NeXT, and I'm hoping that OS X takes off like a rocket.
$ man reality
Okay...so....6 billion people...expanding geometrically...regressive regimes that refuse to curb birth rates or educate people...massive pollution...hmm...I'm sure everything will be fine for a few thousand more years...
Wrongo.
Wrongo, says you. You'll forgive me if I put just as much stock in your own doomsday vision of How Our Race Will End(tm) as I do in my own version (read: not much.) Let's go into a bit of an analysis of your proposed salvation of humanity:
1. Educate people enough to stop over-reproducing (shouts removed.) Thr trouble with this is, you can't educate reproductive habits. Truth be told, having a buttload of kids is a hard, taxing endeavor; people, when given an environment where they have things like life insurance, stable jobs and *gasp* Social Security, no longer feel the need or desire to crank out 12 or 13 kids to help run the farm and care for them in their old age. Education, while it runs pretty much statistically parallel to the number of children per family, is not a means for reducing population growth; rather, it is a result of higher quality of life in general, just as lower birth rates are. In a poor, underdeveloped country, each child born equals another opportunity to have some hope of care if and when you age, and will help reduce the amount of work you need to do once they are old enough to help with the household tasks. Education and birth rate are related, but the one cannot be used to directly influence the outcome of the other.
2. Distribute resources to feed the billions already on this planet. Why, so they can go and keep reproducing? The fact that we've already gotten so good at distributing the world's food supply is part of why there are so many of us now. (question: how long have banannas been a staple entry in virtually every American/European grocery store? That is some serious distribution of tropical fruit!) If you want to effectively lower the number of people on this planet, the last thing you want to do is supply every last one of them with food to eat! (Note: this sounds like a really shitty thing to say. It is; it's also true. True things can be amazingly shitty, but that fact does not invalidate them.)
3. Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points. This obviously necessitates the acquisition of asteroid raw materials. That is, indeed, an excellent idea. Of course, setting up a viable space station of international collaboration capable of supporting a regular crew over long periods of time is an essential early step in this mass exodus of the manufacturing industry to the final frontier; perhaps we should start with this first. Oh, wait--we're already working on this. Well hell, let's get those factories up there, then! And while we're at it, we'll instantiate a unified global government and unify people of all faiths and races in harmony! Chop chop, folks--no, don't bother me with the details, just do it!
Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development. I'm not talking about 20 guys in Berkely zapping a molecule of tritium every 18 months. We need Manhattan Projec[t] importance attached to this. Another good idea, but again, the need isn't urgent enough. If humanity ends up being a full 200 years in developing fusion power to a viable level (which I sincerely doubt will be the case), do you really think that it will have made that big of a difference 2000 years later? If you want to look at the long term effects of a problem, you need to step away from the "as soon as physically possible" delivery schedule for the solution. Humanity has a whole mess of things that "need their immediate and undivided attention" if we apply this same mindset to every other long term problem humanity is facing; you'll find that fusion power falls neatly into a big-ass clump of things that we can't possibly put off until tomorrow.
Nature has, does and will continue to adapt to humanity; it just may not be in ways we particularly like (mass famine, plague, loss of farmable land, costal flooding, etc.) What's more, while nature is perfectly capable of trimming us down to size when we outgrow our bounds, it's quite unlikely that nature will see fit to completely wipe us off the planet.
That sort of totality requires a human touch.
$ man reality
Last I used it (on a 486 laptop, mind,) I could compress a JPG image in about five seconds to the FIF's 150 seconds or more. The images were comprable in quality--FIF did a visibly better job on some photos, but not so much of a difference that it justified the extra effort of encoding them.
Again, this is all from pretty old experience; the compressors may be far better now, and there's also the fact that an open source format/non-licensed technology approach would have likely resulted in better compressors. Any more recent info on how FIF fares, performance-wise?
$ man reality
[posted by Carnage4Life, author of article submission:]
Hemos took a lot of liberty with my submission including changing the title as well as cutting of some technical analysis at the end of my submission.
Then I feel doubly sorry for you, as you're pretty clearly approaching this issue from a rational standpoint. I thought that this might be the case, and thus was careful to avoid pointing fingers at you the author, but rather at the /. editorial staff.
Having said that, a granular permissions model would be a decidedly better approach to this kind of problem than the all-or-nothing model Whistler will evidently implement. Sadly, this message was nowhere to be found in what finally got posted under your name. I'd be raising holy hell if I were you.
Knowing that this wasn't your intent in the first place makes me feel even angrier at /. than I did before. It's one thing to post zealous articles by zealous authors; it's another thing entirely to edit zealotry into them. Absolutely shameful.
$ man reality
Y'know, this kind of crap doesn't help the Geek Community At Large overcome the image of being a bunch of fanatical morons. Every time I think that Slashdot just might be making the transition into mature, thoughtful news reporting, this kind of rubbish appears on the front page. It's an OPTION. you can turn it OFF. I don't recall seeing healines of "Linux Installs Insecure By Default" because several distros automatically installed and configured an insecure WU-FTP...
When am I going to be able to read Slashdot without feeling like I'm listening to a bunch of pre-teen 133t k1dd13z taking shots at The Man on #haX0rzC3ntRa1?
$ man reality
But, on a more serious note: What happens if Honda gets to the point where they produce a robot capable of digging wells and planting crops in underdeveloped, potentially hazardous countries? What happens if Honda manages to develop a robot that can act as a lab assistant, routinely, tirelessly and accurately performing a wide range of menial yet necessary tasks in a lab environment? Sure, it's too advanced to be able to accurately predict something like this coming along today, but the very essence of science is the pursuit of being able to do and understand things we currently cannot do or understand. Today, this thing is just a prototype that can saunter across a studio floor. Another fifty years, it may be able to run for weeks on end with minimal human intervention, able to do a huge array of tasks that would require fairly heavy human intervention today.
Just as the pioneers of computing could have no way of accurately predicting the impact computers would have on the world fifty years later, the Honda engineers can have no way of knowing what will become of their robot in another 50 years. Rest assured, though, that they, like the computing pioneers, are serious scientists and serious dreamers...
$ man reality
- Greatly improved user-robot interface. Last I saw, the robot required a fairly intricate computer interface and some fairly serious developer guidance to work properly. Now, they seem to have the bulk of it hooked up to a wearable PC and game pad. Additionally, the robot is now completely wireless, which I believe wasn't the case earlier this summer. Quite the improvement over the old method.
- Greatly improved motor control software. This model actually moves in a fluid, almost natural way. The turning is vastly improved (the robot used to be able to only execute spot turns) and they seem to pretty much have the basics of the counter-balancing swing down.
- Improved robot design? It appears that they've tweaked the design of the robot somewhat, most noticably in the robot's backpack, which used to tower over it's shoulders like an astronaut's spacesuit. The current model looks much more "approachable" (for lack of a better way of quantifying it) and seems to have a few other cosmetic changes added (the hands, I believe, were less hand-like in the previous model, for example.) I'm not seeing the tech specs readily available in English, so I'll assume that the prototype is pretty much the same physically as the previous one, save for (quite non-trivial) space optimizations and otherwise more modern components. The fundamental design appears the same.
- Overall Humanness. This robot actually moves in a way that I could call human-like. Yes, there are still the herky-jerks, and the arms don't quite seem to swing right, but the movement flows right. It can walk pretty much in whatever fashion it chooses, can vary it's walking pace and step length, can walk sideways and backwards, can "swing" from a side step into a front step, and does it all with stunning grace for a machine. What's more, it's moving fast now--we're talking a brisk walking pace, no more of this ponderous mechanized trudging. The old videos from this summer were impressive because the robot could successfully walk in a straight like, lean to compensate for tilting floors, and navigate up and down staircases without falling over and with minimal programmer intervention. Today, this thing's strutting around like it owns the place.
This is some serious progress from the good folks at Honda. I'm really excited to see what the next version brings.$ man reality
Sure it looks nice on paper but that energy isn't created from nothing.
You're absolutely right. Most major energy sources available to man are derived from the accumulation of solar energy on our planet--fossil fuels, wind power, wave power, hydro power, and a number of others. (the only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power; feel free to add/change if you think of others.)
I take issue with the notion that energy isn't free, however. Quite the contrary--energy is perfectly free. How much does it cost you to use the sun to warm your body? How much does it cost you to sail a boat? How much does it cost a plant to perform photosynthesis? Energy is perfectly free; it's our methods of extracting and using that energy that cost money. Thus, if we can come up with a method that's cheap and easy to implement, inexpensive to maintain, and able to generate large amounts of power, we can have energy so cheap that it's virtually free for the home user. The Wavegen technology looks like it would be a perfect solution for small costal communitites, and once this technology is further refined, it could provide energy on a much greater scale.
I'm far from a tree hugger
We can see that,
but when I see alternative energy sources mentioned, I never see any discussion of the impact. It's as if people think that anything that doesn't burn fossil fuels is automatically eco-friendly.
Well, I'd argue that comparatively, there are precious few methods less eco-friendly than burning fossil fuels. If you're inferring, as I think you are, that the Wavegen people feel that their solution is flawless, I'd argue that while it isn't flawless, I can't think of many ways of generating this amount of power in a more environmentally friendly manner.
Judging by the images on the Wavegen site, it would appear that one of their LIMPET units takes up maybe 50-100 feet of shoreline. Considering that I've seen costal floodwalls running the entire length of a city before, I cannot help but consider this to be quite an ecologically sound method for energy production. In addition, the LIMPET modules can be designed to be part of a city's costal floodwall, thus doubling it's utility as generator and protective barrier. The LIMPET could also be used in this method to build artificial harbors (which are built today using concrete or stone walls and jettys.)
If costal space isn't available or is too ecologically valuable to be disturbed, the Wavegen OSPREY units are designed to operate up to one kilometer out to sea (in up to 15 meters of water) and can generate four times the energy as the LIMPET, causing virtually no environmental impact whatsoever.
The LIMPET units are analogous to costal development and floodwalls. Yes, too much costal development will endanger the health of the costal ecosystem, but it is perfectly possible for humans and costal ecology to co-exist. What's more, costal structures such as floodwalls and harbor walls already exist and serve an absolutely vital function for costal communities. Why not double up your investment and get ultra-inexpensive power at the same time?
Make no mistake, there are indeed environmental factors to consider when building a system such as a LIMPET generator. To question the eco-friendliness of such a system in the face of traditional combustion-based fossil fuel power plants, however, is laughable. The ocean contains vast amounts of power that basically end up going entirely to waste; it would be nice to utilize some of it instead of clogging our atmosphere with more human-released smoke, sulfur and carbon dioxide.
10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."
10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."
10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."
Now, if we were to implement a federal standard for the proper layout of a paper ballot and ballot reading mechanisms, we could do away with the vast majority of problems surrounding our current polling discrepancies. Some Iowa counties use an on-site ballot reader that verifies if your ballot is properly filled out or not; it saved my own mother's vote (she accidentally double-marked a category because of the way her bifocals distorted the form; the machine beeped; she got another ballot.) Implementation of a similar, standardized system across the US would result in far less confusion and inaccuracy in voting procedures. There exist low-cost, highly accurate modern polling machanisms that put the old punch-hole butterfly ballots to absolute shame. There is no reason, short of indifference or poor fiscal management, to not update such ancient systems with affordable, accurate ones; further, there is no reason to keep letting individual counties duplicate the efforts of every single other county in the nation on things such as designing, considering, approving and acquiring a plethora of mismatched ballots and voting mechanisms.
There's no need for touch screens and computer voting, and there won't be until such a time as they can be proven more tamper resistant and accurate than a good paper system; furthermore, there exist many paper systems that can provide amazingly accurate results for very little expense (in some cases, even less than it costs to maintain those mammoth mechanical punch systems.) What we need in the wake of this election is a nationally standardized ballot format with clear, easy to use ballots, an inexpensive and portable ballot verification system that can be used before a ballot gets submitted, and efficient and accurate high-speed counting machines for use at the central polling office for the final count of the paper ballots.
Of course, eliminating "irregularities" is impossible. There will always be someone stupid enough to outdumb the simplest of voting methods. However, claiming that the current system is sufficient is a stance of dubious merit, at best. Is it really acceptable that 19,000 ballots were discarded outright from a single district simply because they had been improperly filled, when systems exist in other states that would have sounded an alarm before the ballots had even been submitted? I, for one, condsider this wholly unacceptable.
No country as wealthy, modernized and powerful as the United States should have such a sorry hodge-podge of obsolete, confusing voting processes. If we, as Americans, actually do fancy each person's right to vote as important, I think it's time we took a good look at how good a job our current voting system does with that goal.
10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."
that's the sound of my normal, everyday breathing.
With any luck, they'll have incorporated all the current Mozilla bug fixes by Netscape Communicator 6.097g Cesium Edition PR1 (Now with HappyChannelBars!(TM)).
Or better, look at it this way: if AOL/Netscape came out tomorrow and announced that AOL 6.0 was going to rely heavily on a major open-source community codebase, would you be excited to use it?
10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."
10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."
It's been the job of the green propaganda machine to entrench the message that "A vote for Nader is _not_ a vote for Bush; they're both the same, and suck, at that." To this end, I have something to say.
While both major parties have been appealing more and more to centrist views, it is still true that the Democrats lean left and the Republicans lean right. Gore is an experienced statesman with a good bit of intelligence, and despite his problems, he has decidedly more "little people" support in his veins than his Republican counterpart, who lacks Gore's experience and intelligence (but, apparently, makes up for the difference with charisma and bravado, and a slew of decidedly conservative advisors.)
Of the people who voted Nader, exit polls show that 25% would simply not have voted, while of the remaining 75%, 5 out of every 6 people would have voted for Gore. Had Nader stepped down, Gore would have won the election soundly, no questions asked. There's the only statistic I'll quote: It ain't one to one, but it's closer to that than the supposed "half-vote" notion that's become popular as of late.
For those of you who voted for Nader because Nader was the candidate who best supported your views, you bet on a losing horse from the start, and now stand a good chance of having an underqualified marionette serving a rightist adgenda in the White House. Politics is compromise, and without compromise, the other side will win.
For those of you who voted Green to help bolster their federal matching funds, I must insist that casting a vote in the interest of financial gain strikes me as very much against the platform of the Green Party.
For those of you who cast a vote for Nader because you're sick and tired of the system and think both major parties are incurably corrupt, congratulations. You have accomplished -nothing- beyond satisfying your own smug little idealistic worldview. You might as well have written in MC Hammer, Snoopy, or the Magic School Bus, because nobody besides the two major candidates had any chance of winning the election, and protest votes are historically forgettable.
Finally, for those of you who wanted to send a message to the Democratic Party, I think you've succeeded; they now stand a good chance of losing a major election that would otherwise have easily been in the bag. Sadly, if Dubya wins, it'll be a good while before they can actually do anything about it, as the US will effectively have a one party government (they have the Legislative Branch still, they'll have the Executive branch, and would soon have the Judicial branch, as well.)
Nader had a very real impact on this campaign. Should Dubya win, Nader's campaign will have been a major factor in his getting there. Unless you truly and wholeheartedly believe that both Gore and Bush are equally evil, unfit to govern and not representative of your views, chances are, this will upset you somewhat.
So the election has come down to the state of Florida. For those of you who don't know, voter fraud is epidemic in Florida. Generally, it's for small-time stuff, primarily influencing the outcomes of local elections, but the state of Florida is sufficiently corrupt and lax enough in voter registration that there's an excellent chance of some fairly large-scale voter fraud taking place there.
There's an interesting little paper on voter fraud in Florida that discusses some of the weaknesses of the Florida system, including:
- Lax "Motor Voter" registration and absentee voting which allows for easy manipulation of absentee voting;
- The ability to register to vote with very minimal credentials, which hasa generated a problem with non US Citizens registering and voting in Florida;
- Vote buying
- Absentee voter assistance fraud, where a third party submits an individual's ballot for them, often without the individual knowing who was voted for (especially bad in Florida because of the high number of senior citizens).
Add to this the fact that Florida politics are about as rotten as they come, and you've got a potential political minefield to tiptoe through. It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of this, seeing as the state is now the deciding factor in who wins the presidency. I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing some heavy federal investigation of Florida's political beast.I question both your logic and your conclusion. The best doctors in the world will go where they have the greatest opportunity to utilize their skills and make a lasting improvement in the lives of as many people as they can. The doctors who want to make the most money go where they can be paid the most. Some of the best doctors in the world work in the field for non-profit organizations in countries that you, my friend, wouldn't even dream of setting foot in, their level of squalor and poverty being so high. Others earn educator's wages at research labs in state universities. At the same time, I've been treated by a number of highly paid "doctors" that either wouldn't or couldn't answer any of my questions about my condition, or insisted on prescribing unnecessary (and potentially addictive) painkillers despite my requesting them not to.
By your reasoning, Bill Gates would be the "best" geek in the world, seeing as he's made the most money. Linus certainly isn't in it for the money; strangely enough, though, most people here hold him in much higher regard than ol' Billy boy. I work in France right now, even though I could easily be making twice what I am in the States (and with fewer taxes); I'm not, though, because no paycheck could equal the cultural and life experience I'm getting right now, period. You'd be surprised by how many people in this world have higher priorities than money.
The economy is good right now--very, very good. So good that We The Programmers can often dictate the terms of our employment.
Being human, we get greedy. We willingly work unhealthy hours at the promise of scrumptiously high wages. To help us along with being in the office 70 hours/week, employers give us cushy toys and comfy offices.
What happens, though, when the golden days end?
What happens when you wake up one day, find that you don't have the comfy office environment you once did, that there aren't fifty gazillion companies who'd hire you in a second, and, because you've done it so willingly for so long, you're still expected to work the same 70-hour week as before (or stand to lose the job you can't replace in a heartbeat anymore)?
The companies are only your friends now because it's the only way they can keep talent. What do you do when the tech cup no longer runneth over, and you've already willingly committed yourself to a dangerously unhealthy work week?
We're taking the work of generations' worth of workers' rights activists and throwing it all out the window because of a sudden, unexpected, and extremely volatile explosion in the amount of leverage the common tech worker has. We're willingly launching ourselves back into indentured servitude, and it's only going to be to our benefit for as long as the boom lasts...
Yes, but can it tell us how to deal with the most impossible dadline of them all:
"What the hell did you do to the car?!"
Actually, that was it. I'm afraid I didn't catch the reference; in reading your post, however, you might see how one could take issue with the statement if they had never seen the commercial, or not remembered it from nearly ten years ago. My apologies if offense was taken where none was intended.
I maintain that the expansion of IBM into global markets isn't their downfall, though. Globalization is almost always a Good Thing for a company, and even in those cases where a company declines, the globalization is rarely the culprit for the fall. (Now, poor management of the changes needed to go global is another thing, but that's management, not the international marketplace and marketing.)
"aaah, you so fuh-nee!"
No, that press release comes after the one saying that the proper pronunciation of "American" is "eye-soh-lay-shun-ist ih-dee-ut". Setting aside, for now, the truly juvenille and mean-spirited nature of your little dig at cultures other than your own, I question exactly how expanding one's market to equal more than just the United States causes people to flee that product.
Take Linux, for example. Funny thing about Linux is, it's written largely by a man living in a little place called Finland. Not only do people not make snide, stupid jokes about having to pronounce it "Lee-nux-a-hur-de-hur-de-hur", it seems to be doing quite well in pretty much any market you look to, despite being marketed mostly on an international basis.
In any case, claiming that a company lost favor because of an increased focus on international marketing and sales is among the most sophomoric business analyses as one could make. It's akin to saying that atheists/ethnic minorities/Harry Potter books/homosexuals/etc. are destroying the Moral Fiber Of America: it's simplistic idiot-mongering at it's finest. Businesses do not rise or fall on one criteria alone.