Around 1960, just after the slide in industrial employment began (industrial employment as a percentage of labor force dropped below 50% for the first time in 1956), the consensus was that the future was a service economy where only low-paying foodservice jobs and the like would be available.
[This is primarily directed at those who claim to be libertarians and then bitch about H1B's or offshore IT work.]
Quit your whining. This is a good thing people and it's an example of what makes capitalism great.
Read up on Joseph Schumpeter, arguably the most brilliant economist to come out of Austria. One's inability to see that the move of IT labor offshore is a good thing is largely due to a failure of most people to understand Schumpeter.
Schumpeter's primary focus was on capitalism as a dynamic system. It continually evolves through creative destruction. There are countless examples of this phenomenon.
A 120 years ago, most Americans were living on farms. With little mechanization, hard manual labor was the order of the day. As mechanization began to become more prevalent, thousands upon thousands of farm workers were surplus to requirements. Doom and gloom predictions that the move from an agricultural economy to a non-agricultural economy would lead to the collapse of America were common. Politicians ran on platforms aiming to keep the family farms solvent and prevent greater mechanization (for instance by taxing production of goods that could be used for farm mechanization).
However, mechanization and consolidation took place in the agricultural business. Today, less than 3% of Americans are farmers, and there are far fewer farmers today than there were then. If static economic analysis, from the perspective of the past, was used to look at the economy today (or during the boom years of the late 1990's), the only conclusion would be that the US was in a total depression, because the vast majority of the old farm jobs were gone.
So why wasn't it the case that the US went on to enjoy even better economic times than in the late-19th century? Why isn't there 90% unemployment (since from the 19th century perspective, 90% of the jobs that existed then are gone today)?
What no one saw was that freeing up the most important capital, human labor, from inefficient application to the task of growing food for other purposes. What those who looked at the farms failing and saw disaster were missing was that now the farmer was able to go to the city and be basically as well off working in a factory, and that the farmer's children would go on to become doctors or lawyers or engineers or skilled laborers. Indeed, the industrialization could not have happened without the farm failures.
For a more recent example, look at the state of heavy industry over the last 30 years. In the 1950's, 50% of Americans worked in industrial occupations, creating physical products. Nowadays, it's less than 20% (IIRC). You would expect there to be massive (>30%) unemployment, wouldn't you?
But there's not 30% unemployment. The children of factory workers went to college and became clerks or salesmen or scientists. Think about what your grandparents did for a living. With few exceptions (I'm one of them; my grandmother was one of the early programmers of ENIAC-type machines), they weren't computer scientists, sysadmins, or electrical engineers. They were probably factory workers, or day laborers, or housewives, or maybe a clerk at some large industrial concern.
By freeing up human capital from making cars and clothing and other labor intensive tasks, financial services, creative services, IT itself could be spawned.
IT arose out of the collapse of an old economic model; it will collapse as a major player. It is inevitable. In 20 years, the jobs held by the readers of this site will have demand levels at a fraction of what they were before. In a century, we'll be looked at as the farmers; while there will still be demand for the tasks we perform, it will be nowhere near what it is today (and nowhere near what it was a few years ago).
The core of what I'm saying is that we don't know what will come next (though it is most likely happening below our noses). T
If anything the Chinese were pulling for us in Vietnam. Who was the next country to declare war on the Chinese after the US? That's right, it was the PRC.
People have this illusion that the various Marxist nations were lovey-dovey as part of the quest for International Socialism. The reality is that, while most were Soviet satellites, the Chinese were displeased with the USSR for a long time. There are dozens of recorded instances of territorial infractions, shots fired, and planes shot down between the PRC and the USSR. The Chinese basically took a neutral position on the issue of a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact war; their hope was that both sides would nuke each other into cinders.
Any solution that boils down to "adopt IPv6" and it's solved" is not realistic.
Better solution, IMO, is to essentially rewrite the law (at least in the US) to say that common carrier cannot be a defense in matters of civil law (ie spam, copyright infringement, DoS, etc.). If WorldCom is routing the packets from the spam zombies in Korea to your server (and you haven't signed a contract stating that you won't sue them), you sue WorldCom for the spam.
What then happens? Two things:
First, ISPs will include in their customer contracts the right to sue their customers for network abuse that resulted in the ISP's paying a settlement or judgment. So, in the spam from Korea case, WorldCom sues whatever ISP in Korea bought bandwidth from them to recover the losses. If this suit fails, insurance premiums for any Tier One ISP routing packets to Korea will skyrocket; thus ISPs doing business with Korea will increase their prices for Korean customers; in theory it could hit a point where there's one ISP willing to route packets from Korea to North America, and they're charging exorbitantly for the privilege. Regardless, we end up with a system where the ultimate user of the IP is entirely civilly responsible for the traffic originating from their system.
Second, there being now a quanitifiable financial damage, insurance now becomes a possibility. I envision a case where most hosts on the net sign insurance policies covering the use of their systems as DDoS zombies or spam relays, for instance. The insurance company takes a detailed inventory of what you're running (unpatched NT4? hello massive insurance premiums!) and maybe runs the occasional test attack.
End result: a much better network quality. We solve the copyright infringement issue (that's civil law). We solve DoS attacks. We solve spam.
Try 2 successive rips of the same track, on the same computer. I'll lay better than even odds that they'll be different WAVs and result in different MP3s or Vorbis's.
There's no guarantee that even two rips from the same CD in succession will be bit-identical.
CDDA has error-detection that's unbelievably minimal (since it doesn't have to be bit perfect); IIRC, it's barely above the level of a parity bit. Toss in jitter and so forth and you've got different WAVs every time. The question then becomes how much of each flaw is lost in the encoding process to a lossy medium. However, even then, I would be willing to bet that, in the vast majority of cases (vast enough to meet the "preponderance of probabilities" standard of a civil case), you would get a file that was different in at least one bit. One bit's difference would generate a different MD5.
I wish I could find the website of some idiot college student in Canada who thought that, since he was using one of the BSD's that he was a genius. He was seriously proposing to compress data using the MD5 algorithm...
Then the RIAA files suit against her for that. At this point, she's got three choices:
Take the fall from KaZaa, pay big settlement and have credit ruined for a fairly long time (thanks to a bankruptcy filing).
Take the fall for being the source on Napster, pay a big settlement and have credit ruined for a fairly long time (thanks to a bankruptcy filing).
Be found to have perjured herself and spend a while in prison, with a criminal record to match (which damages any future employment prospects she's got).
3 is not mutually exclusive of the other 2 options.
The article of course, doesn't mention whether it was possible for them to plant the evidence, which it would've been if they were simply allowed to possess her hard drive
AFAIK, the hard drives haven't been taken. The files have been gotten through the P2P networks.
Think about it this way: they're creating a massive leech-fest for the P2P apps. If enough people who are sharing large amounts of music from high-speed connections decide (possibly after getting sued) that this isn't worth it and set KaZaa to not share anything, guess what happens: you get the same number of people trying to download from fewer sources, which means slower downloads and increases the hassle factor.
Although FastTrack is reasonably resistant to attack and decentralized, the same does not necessarily follow on a network using that protocol, if you hit a case where a small portion of the nodes are doing much of the work (even if they self-organize and all that); take a decent portion of them out of play and you bring the network to its knees.
Yeah, sometimes I can get that way... for some reason it happens around this time of year and in late February and early March. It's gotta be Mandrake's release schedule...;o)
Journalists tend not to blindly run press releases. Even then, they're clearly tagged. This one wasn't.
Apart from the largest circulation sources (ie the NY Times, WSJ, et al), you'd be amazed how many times a press release gets printed with only cursory editing (generally just for length). In the magazine world, it's standard operating procedure to go from press releases.
The same thing happened about 5 years ago to the LA Times. They ran a story about the staples center, new home of the Lakers, near a story about the lakers. The Staples story was bought. It wasn't labeled as such. The LA Times was lambasted by the major journalism associations. They later apologized.
There's a difference between running a press release and running a paid-for story.
Naturally, this begs the question
Actually, it doesn't. Know what the fuck you're talking about before you post.
was the mandrake thing just a friendly plug, or can those be bought too?
Short answer: yes. IIRC, when the subscription bits were announced yesterday, included with the announcement was that Slashdot would be willing to sell stories (ie pay VA and get the story of your choice posted, provided it met minimal editorial standards).
So it's a week where the public blacklists just turn off in protest of a lack of strong legislation?
Won't work. Only admins that run public blacklists or run a private blacklist, read nanae, and decide it's time to open Pandora's Box will do it; every other admin will blithely continue along. Also, I don't see the admins at any of the major consumer ISPs diabling their blacklists (because of customers' bitching).
As for your second paragraph, escalating it to the point where a spammer hires a killer may be the ticket to getting it strongly outlawed. The question is, who's got the balls to sacrifice their life to stop spam?
Wait until your customer sues your ISP for tortious interference and false advertising. Wait until they sue you the admin personally for a million or so and force you to either pay $250,000 to settle or endure a year with a major yellow flag on your credit record (thanks to having attachments on your assets).
I take it you favor arresting the kid at Mickey D's who sold the bank robber a Big Mac with being an accessory?
I take it you support arresting Tim Berners-Lee, the apache developers, and the mozilla developers for providing child pornographers with an amazingly efficient means of breaking the law?
Raise a stink with your Congresscritter to try and get them to write a letter to the President of the University threatening to remove as much federal funding as possible as soon as possible unless they quit using SPEWS.
As for any university admin who deploys any DNSBL on their network, you deserve summary execution.
Slashdot Mirror
Around 1960, just after the slide in industrial employment began (industrial employment as a percentage of labor force dropped below 50% for the first time in 1956), the consensus was that the future was a service economy where only low-paying foodservice jobs and the like would be available.
Funny how things didn't quite turn out that way.
I actually started writing it when first post was still available (it was the 96th post or so in the article).
[This is primarily directed at those who claim to be libertarians and then bitch about H1B's or offshore IT work.]
Quit your whining. This is a good thing people and it's an example of what makes capitalism great.
Read up on Joseph Schumpeter, arguably the most brilliant economist to come out of Austria. One's inability to see that the move of IT labor offshore is a good thing is largely due to a failure of most people to understand Schumpeter.
Schumpeter's primary focus was on capitalism as a dynamic system. It continually evolves through creative destruction. There are countless examples of this phenomenon.
A 120 years ago, most Americans were living on farms. With little mechanization, hard manual labor was the order of the day. As mechanization began to become more prevalent, thousands upon thousands of farm workers were surplus to requirements. Doom and gloom predictions that the move from an agricultural economy to a non-agricultural economy would lead to the collapse of America were common. Politicians ran on platforms aiming to keep the family farms solvent and prevent greater mechanization (for instance by taxing production of goods that could be used for farm mechanization).
However, mechanization and consolidation took place in the agricultural business. Today, less than 3% of Americans are farmers, and there are far fewer farmers today than there were then. If static economic analysis, from the perspective of the past, was used to look at the economy today (or during the boom years of the late 1990's), the only conclusion would be that the US was in a total depression, because the vast majority of the old farm jobs were gone.
So why wasn't it the case that the US went on to enjoy even better economic times than in the late-19th century? Why isn't there 90% unemployment (since from the 19th century perspective, 90% of the jobs that existed then are gone today)?
What no one saw was that freeing up the most important capital, human labor, from inefficient application to the task of growing food for other purposes. What those who looked at the farms failing and saw disaster were missing was that now the farmer was able to go to the city and be basically as well off working in a factory, and that the farmer's children would go on to become doctors or lawyers or engineers or skilled laborers. Indeed, the industrialization could not have happened without the farm failures.
For a more recent example, look at the state of heavy industry over the last 30 years. In the 1950's, 50% of Americans worked in industrial occupations, creating physical products. Nowadays, it's less than 20% (IIRC). You would expect there to be massive (>30%) unemployment, wouldn't you?
But there's not 30% unemployment. The children of factory workers went to college and became clerks or salesmen or scientists. Think about what your grandparents did for a living. With few exceptions (I'm one of them; my grandmother was one of the early programmers of ENIAC-type machines), they weren't computer scientists, sysadmins, or electrical engineers. They were probably factory workers, or day laborers, or housewives, or maybe a clerk at some large industrial concern.
By freeing up human capital from making cars and clothing and other labor intensive tasks, financial services, creative services, IT itself could be spawned.
IT arose out of the collapse of an old economic model; it will collapse as a major player. It is inevitable. In 20 years, the jobs held by the readers of this site will have demand levels at a fraction of what they were before. In a century, we'll be looked at as the farmers; while there will still be demand for the tasks we perform, it will be nowhere near what it is today (and nowhere near what it was a few years ago).
The core of what I'm saying is that we don't know what will come next (though it is most likely happening below our noses). T
Bzzt. Wrong.
If anything the Chinese were pulling for us in Vietnam. Who was the next country to declare war on the Chinese after the US? That's right, it was the PRC.
People have this illusion that the various Marxist nations were lovey-dovey as part of the quest for International Socialism. The reality is that, while most were Soviet satellites, the Chinese were displeased with the USSR for a long time. There are dozens of recorded instances of territorial infractions, shots fired, and planes shot down between the PRC and the USSR. The Chinese basically took a neutral position on the issue of a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact war; their hope was that both sides would nuke each other into cinders.
Any solution that boils down to "adopt IPv6" and it's solved" is not realistic.
Better solution, IMO, is to essentially rewrite the law (at least in the US) to say that common carrier cannot be a defense in matters of civil law (ie spam, copyright infringement, DoS, etc.). If WorldCom is routing the packets from the spam zombies in Korea to your server (and you haven't signed a contract stating that you won't sue them), you sue WorldCom for the spam.
What then happens? Two things:
First, ISPs will include in their customer contracts the right to sue their customers for network abuse that resulted in the ISP's paying a settlement or judgment. So, in the spam from Korea case, WorldCom sues whatever ISP in Korea bought bandwidth from them to recover the losses. If this suit fails, insurance premiums for any Tier One ISP routing packets to Korea will skyrocket; thus ISPs doing business with Korea will increase their prices for Korean customers; in theory it could hit a point where there's one ISP willing to route packets from Korea to North America, and they're charging exorbitantly for the privilege. Regardless, we end up with a system where the ultimate user of the IP is entirely civilly responsible for the traffic originating from their system.
Second, there being now a quanitifiable financial damage, insurance now becomes a possibility. I envision a case where most hosts on the net sign insurance policies covering the use of their systems as DDoS zombies or spam relays, for instance. The insurance company takes a detailed inventory of what you're running (unpatched NT4? hello massive insurance premiums!) and maybe runs the occasional test attack.
End result: a much better network quality. We solve the copyright infringement issue (that's civil law). We solve DoS attacks. We solve spam.
KernelNewbies?
If you have, you may want to consider starting out as a kernel janitor (basically doing assloads of grunt work to build a name for yourself).
Try 2 successive rips of the same track, on the same computer. I'll lay better than even odds that they'll be different WAVs and result in different MP3s or Vorbis's.
There's no guarantee that even two rips from the same CD in succession will be bit-identical.
CDDA has error-detection that's unbelievably minimal (since it doesn't have to be bit perfect); IIRC, it's barely above the level of a parity bit. Toss in jitter and so forth and you've got different WAVs every time. The question then becomes how much of each flaw is lost in the encoding process to a lossy medium. However, even then, I would be willing to bet that, in the vast majority of cases (vast enough to meet the "preponderance of probabilities" standard of a civil case), you would get a file that was different in at least one bit. One bit's difference would generate a different MD5.
I wish I could find the website of some idiot college student in Canada who thought that, since he was using one of the BSD's that he was a genius. He was seriously proposing to compress data using the MD5 algorithm...
Then the RIAA files suit against her for that. At this point, she's got three choices:
3 is not mutually exclusive of the other 2 options.
AFAIK, the hard drives haven't been taken. The files have been gotten through the P2P networks.
Think about it this way: they're creating a massive leech-fest for the P2P apps. If enough people who are sharing large amounts of music from high-speed connections decide (possibly after getting sued) that this isn't worth it and set KaZaa to not share anything, guess what happens: you get the same number of people trying to download from fewer sources, which means slower downloads and increases the hassle factor.
Although FastTrack is reasonably resistant to attack and decentralized, the same does not necessarily follow on a network using that protocol, if you hit a case where a small portion of the nodes are doing much of the work (even if they self-organize and all that); take a decent portion of them out of play and you bring the network to its knees.
Yeah, sometimes I can get that way... for some reason it happens around this time of year and in late February and early March. It's gotta be Mandrake's release schedule... ;o)
You have no idea what I posted my next-to-last paragraph about, do you?
Hint: google for "beg the question" and you shall be enlightened. Just because you think a phrase means something doesn't mean that it means that.
Try refraining from posting until you have a modicum of understanding of what you're saying.
Idiot.
Have you tried saving an auto-install floppy after the installation? More information can be found here.
Right, but the Club Membership costs Mandrake basically nothing (the same cannot be said of the boxed CDs that you buy from MandrakeStore).
Apart from the largest circulation sources (ie the NY Times, WSJ, et al), you'd be amazed how many times a press release gets printed with only cursory editing (generally just for length). In the magazine world, it's standard operating procedure to go from press releases.
There's a difference between running a press release and running a paid-for story.
Actually, it doesn't. Know what the fuck you're talking about before you post.
Short answer: yes. IIRC, when the subscription bits were announced yesterday, included with the announcement was that Slashdot would be willing to sell stories (ie pay VA and get the story of your choice posted, provided it met minimal editorial standards).
So it's a week where the public blacklists just turn off in protest of a lack of strong legislation?
Won't work. Only admins that run public blacklists or run a private blacklist, read nanae, and decide it's time to open Pandora's Box will do it; every other admin will blithely continue along. Also, I don't see the admins at any of the major consumer ISPs diabling their blacklists (because of customers' bitching).
As for your second paragraph, escalating it to the point where a spammer hires a killer may be the ticket to getting it strongly outlawed. The question is, who's got the balls to sacrifice their life to stop spam?
Tough. As far as I know, the blacklists won every single case.
Care to say what that is?
Wait until your customer sues your ISP for tortious interference and false advertising. Wait until they sue you the admin personally for a million or so and force you to either pay $250,000 to settle or endure a year with a major yellow flag on your credit record (thanks to having attachments on your assets).
I'll be laughing my ass off when that happens.
I take it you favor arresting the kid at Mickey D's who sold the bank robber a Big Mac with being an accessory?
I take it you support arresting Tim Berners-Lee, the apache developers, and the mozilla developers for providing child pornographers with an amazingly efficient means of breaking the law?
Jesus Christ, you're a psychopath.
I suppose you're okay with flying planes into buildings until the US pulls out of Saudi Arabia.
I suppose you're in favor of burning shit until the WTO withers and dies?
I suppose you're in favor of lynching every black man you see until all the niggers leave?
Raise a stink with your Congresscritter to try and get them to write a letter to the President of the University threatening to remove as much federal funding as possible as soon as possible unless they quit using SPEWS.
As for any university admin who deploys any DNSBL on their network, you deserve summary execution.
How do you know that it virtually never blocks legit mail?
Do you hold off on the rejections until after DATA and simply route the mail to a mailbox for occasional perusal? If you do, I feel for you, man.
Or are you simply claiming a low false-positive rate because you don't get complaints?
I take that approach a step further: every week, I remove networks that have behaved for a certain period of time from the list.