You analogy fails, this is not the case of destroying your shoes to encourage the economy.
Free trade is valuable for those interested in weath concentration. Bill's model is far more about wealth distribution. No one gets rich doing piece work, they get enough to survive, perhaps quite well, but not rich. If you want to get rich you need to corner the market by finding a (by local standards) slave workforce in another market that you can exploit to create product for you which you can sell at a higher profit and yet undercut your local competitors massively. This does not benefit the country, this benefits the individual.
The free trade model taken to it's ultimate end will see a massive concentration of wealth in a tiny fraction of the world population and everyone else will be serfs; it's not like the US has a God given right to be wealthy and the rest of the world will lag behind forever, in fact you can't be wealthy unless there is poor and the Chinese might behind at the moment, but they're catching you at a breathtaking pace (http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:CHN&dl=en&hl=en&q=china+gdp - I'd call that an exponential curve).
In any case, I hope you're one of the 1% Clark, otherwise you're proselytizing for your masters based on the "everyone can be rich in the US" fallacy.
It's an interesting data point, but it doesn't show "Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all" any more than "OMG it's farking cold this morning" shows that the planet is cooling.
Most of the content I've watched already has CC... to be honest this sounds more like you'll see some content pulled until the content providers supply CC.
This is a wash for the deaf, they get no new content.
The hearing lose.
I'm all for them making some kind of "from now on" decision, but to kill off the back catalogue is nothing short of petty and vindictive.
No sensible employer will keep a number 2 employee beyond year 1 and I don't like to switch jobs that often. In fact if number 2 was a serious option I would expect you were going to axe me after 12 months for a total spend of ~$66k rather than keep me for 24 months at a total spend of $268 million. Meanwhile I'd need to keep myself in ramen noodles for the first 10 months while living in my parent's house.
Yup. I find the strangest part of that is they're still (as I understand it) supporting the existing authentication infrastructure they had before, so they still have all the cost of supporting that, but removed the choice for new customers to use it.
I think they swear up and down they get no FB kickbacks (doesn't make it true I realise), but they certainly don't seem to care that "improving the user experience" is losing them paying customers.
Maybe that's what G+ is doing wrong, they should insist you have a Facebook account and crosspost everything to that account:)
I tried to give Spotify my money recently. They tried to get me to sign up with Facebook and rely on an external service to provide the authentication, a service that would have no financial motivation to solve my problems if there was an issue.
Needless to say, they didn't get my money. Perhaps you can find a better example.
Nice rant, but this would be the antithesis of how Linux has grown.
Yes, you have issues with backward compatibility, but it also means things like not being stuck with a 640Kb memory limit for 10+ years.
I did particularly enjoy how you held out that you run a 4 year old video driver as a strength of Windows and and (nVidia's?) Windows drivers, when in fact it's likely it "interacts better with the software you perfer to use" because it's broken in unique ways that software worked around and now updating the driver would break the fixes. OMG, wait, that's __exactly__ what you're complaining about in Linux.
BTW, referring to the rest of us as folks twice makes you sound like a politician trying to sell us reintroducing prima nocta as a "return to the good old days".
What you want, and who you think can deliver it, are worlds apart.
The thing that's mostly going to affect your kids is becoming 2nd class to China, but keep hold of that dream that business has your best interests as a nation at heart and that they won't ditch your sorry ass the moment they can make more money elsewhere.
Unfettered capitalism is just as retarded as pure socialism.
The heaven side convinces the 99% to accept their fate, the hell side warns them what happens if they don't.
Unfortunately, Christianity has a get out of jail free card so you get the occasional douchbag that takes "I am the truth, the way, and the light" literally and screws everyone they can. This seems pretty common in those that are super Catholic, and less so in casual Christians. YMMV.
I think if the rationalists take over you would see a steep rise in vigilantism... but if an armed society is a polite society then I think it follows that a society that doesn't believe you will get what's coming to you "eventually" will be a cautious society.
I use HDD as a catch all synonym for "the local mass storage device", but I cede to your pedantry. The soldered in was an error misreading that it was all hardwired like the good old days when Apple used proprietary everything allowing crazy gouging on upgrades/spares (post things like Apple ][ where Woz was actually engineering their own kit)
I bought an iBook G4, I liked it, until I needed to replace the HDD (omg, do I need to say what the form factor and connection type was or can we just let that go?) which was an incredibly tedious operation involving words I'd never seen before, like "spudge".
It seems to be mostly the creatives that are complaining about the form of the new MacBook; the Linux/Android crowd are laughing up their sleeves at it like everything else that comes out of Apple, they could care less about the details. The ad hominem just makes you sound like the fanboi you're accusing "us" of being though.
I think most iPad buyers admit that it's a toy, why would it need to be upgradable beyond it's purchase specs when people that buy them get a new one everytime they're released?
People aren't ready to admit that their Mac laptop is a toy, and a small percentage of them use it for actual work so they're even justified.
From my point of view, soldered in HDD == tears about data loss when the laptop breaks, since there's _no_ repair company on the planet that will warrant your data when you send the machine in for repair and I suspect apple would just be replacing the entire internals rather than soldering anything; so perhaps that will happen for battery replacement as well.
The whole thing seems to be a massive fuck you to the types of people that allowed apple to survive between the ][c and the iPod.
As a small company you simply agree that your company will support the software in perpetuity, then disband that company when the support costs hit a pre-determined point, and start a new one with the same people. The liability for the support dies with the old company.
If I have a company that turns over 5 million a year, pays 4 million to "news" organisations to publish my "facts" and me 1 million a year in salary, it's a not-for-profit.
Check out what the CEOs of most of the big charities make (other than the Salvos).
I'm thinking this guy is a senior manager who would normally ask his IT drones to attempt to solve this problem. Like the one I had in my youth that wanted backup of his laptop to happen automatically for the random 4 hours a day it was connected to the corporate network, without impacting the performance of the laptop by doing anything too heavy like, you know, syncing files across the network.
I'm at a loss as to why people answer these kinda questions, if it was your own family you'd tell them to stop being such a lazy ass and remember to hit dropbox or whatever whenever they have a link.
You assume OSX is perfect then? For example, their choice to make the maximise window button not maximise the window, that's ideal?
The aluminium and liquid look is still fresh?
FTA, this one made me LOL: "Many PC owners were still using Windows 98, unwilling to become early adopters of Windows XP after the Windows Millennium Edition debacle, and resorted to using various skinning programs to make their computers look more like Macs."
Someone alert Oxford, "many" has now been redefined as "the infintessimal overlap of the sets, 'have technical skills' and 'value aesthetics over function'."
I guess what I mean is people don't feel aggrieved if you go into a 33 meter (100 foot) gap.
If I read what you're saying correctly there's never a gap big enough to enter unless the road in question only has 2 cars on it, which is not realistic. i.e. you're maintaining that there needs to be at least a 70+ meter gap. If that was the case, I'd have to enter the dual carriageway when I leave work from the right hand side, and drive about 20 miles past my exit, then turn around and drive back another 20 so I could exit without ever changing lanes without leaving less than a 33 meter gap in front of me. All the while odds are I'd have someone 5 meters behind on both legs.
Also, yes, inserting a 5 meter car in a 33 meter gap makes 2 approx ~15 meter gaps, which means no car has to brake hard unless the lead car happens to brake hard at that instant; not impossible but unlikely.
I rarely find I have to brake at all if I'm leaving a reasonable gap, just back off the accelerator in anticipation for a few seconds.
People that need to do lots of braking when cars overtake are those that are already tailgating.
Agreed, excepting that N meters is rarely "minimum safe distance" in practice. At 60Kph on the 2 second rule, that would be 33 meters which would hardly make most people feel "cut up" if you slot a 5 meter car into it. And I never see "safe" drivers leaving that kinda gap; that might encourage someone to fill it!
Once you do make the pass then yes, you and the car(s) behind you need to slow a little for a short time to re-establish the MSD but the risk there is far smaller than the usual method of maintaining 1s gaps all the time so that no one can overtake 1 car; they need to charge the queue and round up 4-5 cars generally forgetting that it takes quite a while and the whole time they have their foot on the accelerator getting up to dangerous speeds.
This is usually the domain of impatient youths, but I tell you what, the assholes that are riding my ass in traffic while I keep an actual 2s gap in front of me are just as often middle aged. The youths ( 25 ) at least have an excuse, the science says their brains aren't good at calculating risk, it's the 30+ crowd that tailgate and act like the laws of physics don't apply to them that irritate me.
Safe driving also doesn't mean enforcing your own theories on every other driver on the road through passive aggressive driving.
Australian banks will lend what you can afford to pay, if nothing in your life gets worse. I would contend that foreclosure rates aren't up because people were overcommitted on their reported income, they are up because people lost that income.
In any case, I agree the land prices are a bit high (if it was actually $25K and 20 years, then it should be closer to $116K at 8% a year which isn't uncommon in Australia's messed up housing market), but that's because if the government sells that land at $25K it devalues the value of YOUR house retrospectively and you would lynch them. The government controls the price of land by limiting supply, which means you get "growth" in assets which keeps the baby boomers happy which keeps the government in power.
4-5 car road trains are the scariest thing I experienced when I drove from Adelaide to Alice Springs.
At the time there was no speed limit in the NT and the road trains were all doing ~140Kph.
I think the difference between those and this idea is; if a road train passed a car, when it pulled back onto it's side of the road the last trailer in the train would oscillate about a meter for quite a while, where as a series of trucks have steering on each.
On the other hand the people that have to "let passing cars in" are tailgating, or if the lead vehicle is going so slowly that they're not tailgating then it should be pulling over to let them all pass.
Your position that you're only allowed to overtake lone vehicles is not supported by law in any juristiction in the world that I'm aware of.
And any of that relates to digital on-line sales, how?
There are some costs in shipping shit to Australia, but if you're too stupid as Harvey Norman to arrange purchase direct from the supplier and ship it yourself I'm not sure how that's my problem; when I can purchase direct from a retailer and ship a single unit for less even though I can't take advantage of the price benefits of shipping in bulk.
The real issue in your mythical supply chain is two-fold:
- Australian retail wages are higher than in the US, by around 50% (This is your biggest cost) - Australian real estate is at unsustainable levels which forces the rents high on the retail space you hold the rapidly diminishing levels of JIT stock, and increases the wage pressure above so people can afford to live within a commute of their horrible wage slave job.
Nothing is going to make hardware cost the same in Australia, and the government isn't sugesting that, but the electronic on-line sales price discrepancy is just pure market gouging.
That said, if you want Americans to lower prices in Australia, stop buying their shit in Australia.
I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
Dish alone isn't a huge problem, but between PVRs and this how do you convince advertisers (that pay for the content) to keep advertising?
I know/. tends to think of any media industry legislation as overreaching, and mostly it is, but this trend really does have the potential to kill all "free to air" television. I include ad supported cable channels in that description, since basic cable prices pay for the cable service and not the content.
Slashdot Mirror
You analogy fails, this is not the case of destroying your shoes to encourage the economy.
Free trade is valuable for those interested in weath concentration. Bill's model is far more about wealth distribution. No one gets rich doing piece work, they get enough to survive, perhaps quite well, but not rich. If you want to get rich you need to corner the market by finding a (by local standards) slave workforce in another market that you can exploit to create product for you which you can sell at a higher profit and yet undercut your local competitors massively. This does not benefit the country, this benefits the individual.
The free trade model taken to it's ultimate end will see a massive concentration of wealth in a tiny fraction of the world population and everyone else will be serfs; it's not like the US has a God given right to be wealthy and the rest of the world will lag behind forever, in fact you can't be wealthy unless there is poor and the Chinese might behind at the moment, but they're catching you at a breathtaking pace (http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:CHN&dl=en&hl=en&q=china+gdp - I'd call that an exponential curve).
In any case, I hope you're one of the 1% Clark, otherwise you're proselytizing for your masters based on the "everyone can be rich in the US" fallacy.
I'll just go ahead and cut/paste my last comment to this same misrepresentation by headlines:
Headline should be: One of the smaller Antarctic shelves stable for 2 years, new field data show.
It's large, by comparison to your backyard at 120x60 miles, but here's an illustration of how large it is compared to the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet:
http://www.npolar.no/npcms/export/sites/np/images/ice/maps/Antarktisk-Fimbulisen.jpg
It's an interesting data point, but it doesn't show "Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all" any more than "OMG it's farking cold this morning" shows that the planet is cooling.
Comprehension; it's hard.
Most of the content I've watched already has CC... to be honest this sounds more like you'll see some content pulled until the content providers supply CC.
This is a wash for the deaf, they get no new content.
The hearing lose.
I'm all for them making some kind of "from now on" decision, but to kill off the back catalogue is nothing short of petty and vindictive.
I'll take number 1.
No sensible employer will keep a number 2 employee beyond year 1 and I don't like to switch jobs that often. In fact if number 2 was a serious option I would expect you were going to axe me after 12 months for a total spend of ~$66k rather than keep me for 24 months at a total spend of $268 million. Meanwhile I'd need to keep myself in ramen noodles for the first 10 months while living in my parent's house.
Yup. I find the strangest part of that is they're still (as I understand it) supporting the existing authentication infrastructure they had before, so they still have all the cost of supporting that, but removed the choice for new customers to use it.
I think they swear up and down they get no FB kickbacks (doesn't make it true I realise), but they certainly don't seem to care that "improving the user experience" is losing them paying customers.
Maybe that's what G+ is doing wrong, they should insist you have a Facebook account and crosspost everything to that account :)
I tried to give Spotify my money recently. They tried to get me to sign up with Facebook and rely on an external service to provide the authentication, a service that would have no financial motivation to solve my problems if there was an issue.
Needless to say, they didn't get my money. Perhaps you can find a better example.
Nice rant, but this would be the antithesis of how Linux has grown.
Yes, you have issues with backward compatibility, but it also means things like not being stuck with a 640Kb memory limit for 10+ years.
I did particularly enjoy how you held out that you run a 4 year old video driver as a strength of Windows and and (nVidia's?) Windows drivers, when in fact it's likely it "interacts better with the software you perfer to use" because it's broken in unique ways that software worked around and now updating the driver would break the fixes. OMG, wait, that's __exactly__ what you're complaining about in Linux.
BTW, referring to the rest of us as folks twice makes you sound like a politician trying to sell us reintroducing prima nocta as a "return to the good old days".
What you want, and who you think can deliver it, are worlds apart.
The thing that's mostly going to affect your kids is becoming 2nd class to China, but keep hold of that dream that business has your best interests as a nation at heart and that they won't ditch your sorry ass the moment they can make more money elsewhere.
Unfettered capitalism is just as retarded as pure socialism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
The heaven side convinces the 99% to accept their fate, the hell side warns them what happens if they don't.
Unfortunately, Christianity has a get out of jail free card so you get the occasional douchbag that takes "I am the truth, the way, and the light" literally and screws everyone they can. This seems pretty common in those that are super Catholic, and less so in casual Christians. YMMV.
I think if the rationalists take over you would see a steep rise in vigilantism... but if an armed society is a polite society then I think it follows that a society that doesn't believe you will get what's coming to you "eventually" will be a cautious society.
I use HDD as a catch all synonym for "the local mass storage device", but I cede to your pedantry. The soldered in was an error misreading that it was all hardwired like the good old days when Apple used proprietary everything allowing crazy gouging on upgrades/spares (post things like Apple ][ where Woz was actually engineering their own kit)
I bought an iBook G4, I liked it, until I needed to replace the HDD (omg, do I need to say what the form factor and connection type was or can we just let that go?) which was an incredibly tedious operation involving words I'd never seen before, like "spudge".
It seems to be mostly the creatives that are complaining about the form of the new MacBook; the Linux/Android crowd are laughing up their sleeves at it like everything else that comes out of Apple, they could care less about the details. The ad hominem just makes you sound like the fanboi you're accusing "us" of being though.
I think most iPad buyers admit that it's a toy, why would it need to be upgradable beyond it's purchase specs when people that buy them get a new one everytime they're released?
People aren't ready to admit that their Mac laptop is a toy, and a small percentage of them use it for actual work so they're even justified.
From my point of view, soldered in HDD == tears about data loss when the laptop breaks, since there's _no_ repair company on the planet that will warrant your data when you send the machine in for repair and I suspect apple would just be replacing the entire internals rather than soldering anything; so perhaps that will happen for battery replacement as well.
The whole thing seems to be a massive fuck you to the types of people that allowed apple to survive between the ][c and the iPod.
As a small company you simply agree that your company will support the software in perpetuity, then disband that company when the support costs hit a pre-determined point, and start a new one with the same people. The liability for the support dies with the old company.
Hey, don't blame me for corporations law.
will their new CDN work out that I'm not in the US more effectively?
Yeah, as a trial I put "com" into Firefox's awesomebar to see what might happen.
Strangely, I don't get a response from the TLD, I get a gGoogle search with the top results of: Amazon.com, Yahoo.com
I thought it was a big wierd their competition was #2 on the list :)
If I have a company that turns over 5 million a year, pays 4 million to "news" organisations to publish my "facts" and me 1 million a year in salary, it's a not-for-profit.
Check out what the CEOs of most of the big charities make (other than the Salvos).
I'm thinking this guy is a senior manager who would normally ask his IT drones to attempt to solve this problem. Like the one I had in my youth that wanted backup of his laptop to happen automatically for the random 4 hours a day it was connected to the corporate network, without impacting the performance of the laptop by doing anything too heavy like, you know, syncing files across the network.
I'm at a loss as to why people answer these kinda questions, if it was your own family you'd tell them to stop being such a lazy ass and remember to hit dropbox or whatever whenever they have a link.
You assume OSX is perfect then? For example, their choice to make the maximise window button not maximise the window, that's ideal?
The aluminium and liquid look is still fresh?
FTA, this one made me LOL: "Many PC owners were still using Windows 98, unwilling to become early adopters of Windows XP after the Windows Millennium Edition debacle, and resorted to using various skinning programs to make their computers look more like Macs."
Someone alert Oxford, "many" has now been redefined as "the infintessimal overlap of the sets, 'have technical skills' and 'value aesthetics over function'."
I'd like to volunteer for a month of bed rest a year.
I guess what I mean is people don't feel aggrieved if you go into a 33 meter (100 foot) gap.
If I read what you're saying correctly there's never a gap big enough to enter unless the road in question only has 2 cars on it, which is not realistic. i.e. you're maintaining that there needs to be at least a 70+ meter gap. If that was the case, I'd have to enter the dual carriageway when I leave work from the right hand side, and drive about 20 miles past my exit, then turn around and drive back another 20 so I could exit without ever changing lanes without leaving less than a 33 meter gap in front of me. All the while odds are I'd have someone 5 meters behind on both legs.
Also, yes, inserting a 5 meter car in a 33 meter gap makes 2 approx ~15 meter gaps, which means no car has to brake hard unless the lead car happens to brake hard at that instant; not impossible but unlikely.
I rarely find I have to brake at all if I'm leaving a reasonable gap, just back off the accelerator in anticipation for a few seconds.
People that need to do lots of braking when cars overtake are those that are already tailgating.
Agreed, excepting that N meters is rarely "minimum safe distance" in practice. At 60Kph on the 2 second rule, that would be 33 meters which would hardly make most people feel "cut up" if you slot a 5 meter car into it. And I never see "safe" drivers leaving that kinda gap; that might encourage someone to fill it!
Once you do make the pass then yes, you and the car(s) behind you need to slow a little for a short time to re-establish the MSD but the risk there is far smaller than the usual method of maintaining 1s gaps all the time so that no one can overtake 1 car; they need to charge the queue and round up 4-5 cars generally forgetting that it takes quite a while and the whole time they have their foot on the accelerator getting up to dangerous speeds.
This is usually the domain of impatient youths, but I tell you what, the assholes that are riding my ass in traffic while I keep an actual 2s gap in front of me are just as often middle aged. The youths ( 25 ) at least have an excuse, the science says their brains aren't good at calculating risk, it's the 30+ crowd that tailgate and act like the laws of physics don't apply to them that irritate me.
Safe driving also doesn't mean enforcing your own theories on every other driver on the road through passive aggressive driving.
Australian banks will lend what you can afford to pay, if nothing in your life gets worse. I would contend that foreclosure rates aren't up because people were overcommitted on their reported income, they are up because people lost that income.
In any case, I agree the land prices are a bit high (if it was actually $25K and 20 years, then it should be closer to $116K at 8% a year which isn't uncommon in Australia's messed up housing market), but that's because if the government sells that land at $25K it devalues the value of YOUR house retrospectively and you would lynch them. The government controls the price of land by limiting supply, which means you get "growth" in assets which keeps the baby boomers happy which keeps the government in power.
4-5 car road trains are the scariest thing I experienced when I drove from Adelaide to Alice Springs.
At the time there was no speed limit in the NT and the road trains were all doing ~140Kph.
I think the difference between those and this idea is; if a road train passed a car, when it pulled back onto it's side of the road the last trailer in the train would oscillate about a meter for quite a while, where as a series of trucks have steering on each.
On the other hand the people that have to "let passing cars in" are tailgating, or if the lead vehicle is going so slowly that they're not tailgating then it should be pulling over to let them all pass.
Your position that you're only allowed to overtake lone vehicles is not supported by law in any juristiction in the world that I'm aware of.
And any of that relates to digital on-line sales, how?
There are some costs in shipping shit to Australia, but if you're too stupid as Harvey Norman to arrange purchase direct from the supplier and ship it yourself I'm not sure how that's my problem; when I can purchase direct from a retailer and ship a single unit for less even though I can't take advantage of the price benefits of shipping in bulk.
The real issue in your mythical supply chain is two-fold:
- Australian retail wages are higher than in the US, by around 50% (This is your biggest cost)
- Australian real estate is at unsustainable levels which forces the rents high on the retail space you hold the rapidly diminishing levels of JIT stock, and increases the wage pressure above so people can afford to live within a commute of their horrible wage slave job.
Nothing is going to make hardware cost the same in Australia, and the government isn't sugesting that, but the electronic on-line sales price discrepancy is just pure market gouging.
That said, if you want Americans to lower prices in Australia, stop buying their shit in Australia.
I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
Dish alone isn't a huge problem, but between PVRs and this how do you convince advertisers (that pay for the content) to keep advertising?
I know /. tends to think of any media industry legislation as overreaching, and mostly it is, but this trend really does have the potential to kill all "free to air" television. I include ad supported cable channels in that description, since basic cable prices pay for the cable service and not the content.