Actually, there's still only one way to LAY the bricks. You put down the mortar, you put the brick on top. It is fairly obvious you don't put the brick end to end on top of the others, because it looks wrong. A vector used in place of a list doesn't necessarily look wrong, and you won't know if the thread safety is going to be an asset or a liability until the whole thing is in production and in wide use.
What you're talking about here is aesthetics. This is different from my argument. There have to be, well, an infinite number of ways to make software LOOK. What I'm saying is that there are an equally infinite number of ways to make it WORK. Whereas all bricklaying is essentially gravity, bricks and mortar. I've built brick walls before and whereas I don't prefer it to programming or anything, I liked that I didn't have to ponder the placement of every brick as I went along the wall. I could sit back and listen to music while I troweled on the goop without worrying whether that one brick might cause instability as the wall got taller. Because as it did get taller, the weight became more evenly distributed and the effect of a single brick was offset.
Software is more like building an upside down pyramid. Any brick can cause every brick above it to topple.
Actually, I was in the top of my computer classes in school, and I know dozens of "methodologies" by heart. I've read as many "best practices" documents as I've had senior developers. This is not the issue. The issue is, that there are too many ways to perform a single, simple task. None of them is absolutely right or wrong. They each have their strong points. Problem is, a lot of times you are forced, through simplicity or generality's sake, to implement things in a way that is not best practice.
Take, for example, a list of names. Now, the easiest way to store them is in an array. Easiest, because every coder knows arrays back and front and if you know the exact position of an item, it's easily retreivable.
Now, what happens when you want to store them sorted? Suddenly, the array becomes less perfect, because if an item is out of order, the whole list needs to be reordered. No, a much better structure would be a linked list.
And what if you need the list to be resizable, for on demand insertions and deletions? A linked list is a good idea, but you have to traverse the full length of the list to find the position, which takes time. So ideally, you create a tree to perform searches.
You learn all this in your data structures class. Then, in your algorithms class, you learn the most efficient way to use each of them.
Then, you go to your first job, and the requirement is for ALL THREE. So you're faced with a dilemma: is it best to make an array that acts like a tree and perform sorting by a traversal, or is it best to make a tree with an index?
Multiply that by a hundred (or a thousand) and you have one function of a program. Compound it by having eight to ten guys who each have their own "knowledge holes" and their own preferences. I happen to love searching via hashtables. This other guy prefers in order traversals (start at 0, go until you find something). When there are less than, say, 32 items in the structure, his way is usually best. When there are more than that, mine should be best, which meant it was more scalable and for big applications that's what counts anyway...unless the hash is improperly generated, which it was for all his objects, because he was generating it for his method. My method benefited from extremely "random" keys and was getting explicitly ordered ones, and the result was a massive speed hit.
Both of us were using best practices. Put them together, it was a clusterfuck. The end result was refactoring, during which I had to redo everything and finally settled on a third option (sorting it all for speedy access during the database read we were doing anyway).
As a programmer, I am fucking appalled that you think bugs are "screw ups." I don't know if you realized this, but writing software is *HARD*. Harder than anything else in the physical world, mostly because there's no one right way to do things. I have, in a binder at work, 30 some odd distinct solutions for the relatively simple problem of how to make the database transparent both to customers and to programmers. Can you imagine if there were thirty different ways to lay bricks?
Because it is so hard, software bugs are nobody's "fault." They are not a "mistake" in the same way that recalled car parts are mistakes. The greatest coders in the world still have bugs in their code and the greatest tester will always miss a few of them. It is assumed, at least everywhere I've worked, that software is never "done," but that it is ready for release as soon as the rate of bug discovery reaches a certain cut off level, where finding and fixing the bugs costs more than the possibility of emergency fixes. To cover this cost, in addition to the up front fee for software, we also charge a yearly "support fee" which is something like a car warranty. If we write great code that doesn't break, wow free money for us. If the customer has a problem ever three days, we have to fix it even if we start to lose a little money. But the fact is that there is always a cut off. Nobody gets unlimited free updates forever. Because I am not willing to work for free.
(Neither, for that matter, are a lot of supporting developers of OSS. I've seen that a lot of the time, if your problem does not intersect with the problem of a developer's direct line of work or itnerest, it will not get solved. You'll have to pay to get it fixed -- and that's always more expensive than our cute little $500 per year "warranty.")
Tell me, how much did you spend on a support contract for Windows? I'm guessing nothing, unless you have an MSDN subscription or a copy of Advanced Server. They really have no obligation to fix the bugs that you find in it. They probably will, because it's in their best interest if they intend to sell more copies of the software. But when you get stubborn jerks like myself, who are still using windows 2000 4 years after its release, you have to recoup the development of upgrades and fixes somehow. You've already spend the money made from the sale of the software. Charging a few bucks for support off those of us who find our needs unmet by XP is good business.
And as much as you want to cry about monopolies, the fact is that before they could even GET to the level of unfair practices, they first had to be tested in the fires of being a profitable business. Microsoft, with its massive billions in the bank, has the idea of profit DOWN.
I think thist quote is absolute bullshit. TONS of people have lost money underestimating the intelligence of great masses, especially in the last few years...i'm thinking of America Online, but there are others, especially in the tech sector and double especially in the dot com dreams of Silly Con Valley.
"So easy to use, no wonder it's #1!" Yes. Easy is good when something is cheap, it becomes automatic. But when the price goes up, people are willing to do more work to save a few bucks.
I think the adage should be "A fool and his money are soon parted...but fools don't get that much money to begin with." Managers excepted.
I'm a registered republican who doesn't like loudmouths, hypocrites, idiots or liars. Which unfortunately excludes 50% of the who's who in the party today.
"Lower" courts traditionally do a terrible and often biased interpretation of the law. That's how a man in Chicago was kept in prison for some ungodly amount of time for burning a flag despite the Supreme Court's multiple decisions saying this was not illegal.
I mean, the local courts are essential, but when it comes to blazing new ground, it's all about the appeals process. Could have been that had any of these cases -- sampling, unauthorized parody, napster, etc -- gone all the way, they may have been overturned. But in almost all cases, the parties have given up, seeing that it was easier to admit defeat than to keep up the expense in fighting it.
Of course, a guy in prison has little else to do BUT fight. So people jailed for sharing mp3s are going to be the key to finding out, once and for all, what the Supreme Court Delphis have to say on the matter.
They are targetting file sharers that have explicitly infringed on some record companies' copyright.
Hey, you're welcome to your opinion, no matter how wrong it is. But the fact is that the argument supporting your opinion depends on the file trading being an infringing activity, which is a legal statement that has yet to be proven.
I mean, if you want to get REALLY technical (and by trying to make a distinction between "sharing" and "copying" when in the digital world the only difference is a change of state, you ARE trying to get technical), MP3s may fall under a different area of fair use: that protecting the right to establish works in the style of other works. A 128 kbit ogg file is not a "copy" of the copyrighted work on CD -- it's a digital interpretation of it which eliminates at least 90% of the original and bears as much resemblence to it on the data level as a cassette does to a record. The RIAA says it doesn't matter, but they're kind of an interested party, aren't they? Maybe we should let the courts decide, though that will never stop us from freely trading our opinions -- no matter how wrong they are. No, those are protected in the constitution, and are subject to fair use;).
Our current president wouldn't justify anything. He just doesn't care. How else can you explain a president elected by a slim margin under controversial circumstances who received less than 50% of the popular vote doing more to advance the cheap labor conservative agenda than 12 years of reagan/bush sr?
"Who cares if less than half of the nation agree with me? We're doing it anyway! Now back to Texas to unwind by riding my ATV over some protected forests while planning the next second wave nation to fuck with bombs, yippee kai yay!"
Of course. And it should be okay for the media to use terms like "convicted murderer OJ Simpson," it's okay because even though he wasn't convicted of murder, we all know he should have been.
You see, that's what you're saying. That the media is allowed to lie and misuse terms if we "know what they mean." This is untrue. It's a form of the type of subtle spin and bias that big media conglomeration promises us it won't do. "Copyright theft" in this context is as much a misnomer as "Consumer Broadband Protection Act."
Besides, it has yet to be proven that trading mp3s is truly copyright infringment, let alone theft. We're merely assuming it is, because lower courts have said so. The same lower courts that readily ignore supreme court judgments on flag burning and abortion. The supreme court, the only court that really matters in terms of what's constitutional, has yet to speak definitively on the matter. Probably because it hasn't had reason to yet...people's constitutional rights aren't really being infringed upon to the point that they had to include that in their busy schedule.
But they will be. Probably with this case.
You see, the RIAA would like us to believe that copyright means only they have the right to "copy." That's not what the word means -- "Copy" refers to lyrics, similar to the words "ad copy." Copyright gives a person the rights to performance and production of a song. I copyright my songs so others won't turn them into hits and not give me a cut. I copyright them so they can't be used in movies without my permission (and a cut).
It doesn't necessarily give me a right to control home users who are putting my songs on a mix CD. And I shouldn't (and don't) care, because that doesn't infringe on my rights as a musician. And since I'm a self promoting independent artist, who needs all the exposure he can get, I appreciate this kind of publicity. Mix makers are a musician's best friend. Which is why so many labels give out their singles on mp3s for free...sub pop and coup de tat are two off the top of my head.
The main reason the RIAA wants to abolish file trading is that it gives users a medium to learn about new artists that their members (who include the same labels involved in payola scams, price fixing and very few independent labels) can not control. Which means people will be spending their money not on RIAA albums, but on independents. Activity we've alreadt seen. And as radio becomes EVEN LESS diverse, and members scale back their releases EVEN FURTHER to please shareholders who don't like the libertine Rolling Stone idea of funding albums that might lost money, file sharing will (and has) become a primary way for people to discover new music. New music which doesn't have a big SONY label glued to the back. And that's apparently a Bad Thing. Because if artists jump to the indies, they'll be making 3, 5, even 7 dollars per album sold instead of 1 dollar kept to offset production costs and held in case of returns. They'll be impossible to control by corralling them into a culture of drugs and debt to ensure their willingness to sign shockingly one sided contracts. And then there will be no money to pay the worthless A&R men to manufacture singles!
Maybe...i buy about three CDs a month, or $50. Why, i'd have to live another 20 years to exceed that, assuming they don't raise their prices. No way will I live that long!
Au contraire. The only way a sensible, representative government could get around this kind of thing is by crippling patent law. But we don't have one of those handy at the moment. It would be simple and predictable for the current government to say that Microsoft, whose biggest client is the US Government, is an essential part of its operation. And that MS' crummy DRM is essential to national security.
Well, it's all good to grumble about it, but a return to 19th century ethics isn't likely. Take a look at the statistics on crime during the great depression and watch how they drop as FDR introduces social welfare and security programs. The fact remains that countries with assured subsistance welfare violent crime is universely reduced. I'm thinking of Canada, Britain, Germany, Sweden...
And what's the alternative? It's been displayed that big business isn't willing to pay Americans to work. It's either work, steal or welfare...and of course, welfare costs about half what prison costs.
It's not a threat. It's a statistical fact, as trackable and identifiable throughout history as the cycle of increased economic disparity during the term of ever republican president. You know facts, right? Absolute statements of truth backed by first hand evidence? And you can distinguish them from "nonsensical pipe dreams" like the trickle down economic theory that cheap labor conservatives have been touting for the past years?
Well, people get pretty attached to their things, man. Taxes help pay for welfare and unemployment systems, which keep out of work people from taking those things out of desperation. I think if you have a lot of things, you'd want to keep them, even if you could just get more of them. So you pay the government to keep people honest.
Or are you one of these paranoid fucks who thinks all taxation is theft, and that government is unnecessary and everybody is kind and we can all be prosperous because nobody would screw over anyone else?
Actually, I don't deal in foreign sundries unless it's absolutely necessary. Which is why I don't shop at Walmart. If I have to spend ten times as much for an American made product, I'll do it.
I think most people wouldn't mind spending $5 on a toothbrush instead of $.69, especially if it were built to last forever.
The problem here is that there are statistics for both sides of the line.
The top ten percent richest people pay 80% of taxes in this country.
They also pay only about 27% of their income.
This is just a tribute to how enormously rich some of these people are, largely based on decisions like this one. IBM will not lower its prices at all, despite the 40-25% savings on labor. That extra money will be diverted directly into executive salaries, which have been rising at three times the cost of living.
They even went up last year. You know, in a tanked economy. They got rich off uncertainty, unemployment and cheap labor. And in the case of the Enrons of the world, flat out lies.
So no, I don't feel sorry for them when we ask for taxes on their dividends. I don't feel sorry asking them to pay MORE than a paltry 27%, because 27% of very fucking rich is still quite rich. And until there's better laws ensuring fair competition and an american labor force, I don't feel bad about expecting these "pioneers of industry" to give a little something back to the country they are dry humping.
I mean, it's the same work right? No cultural differences? No possibility of communication mishaps, no language barrier.
I mean, shit, why not move all our work over there? It's so cheap! Move everything! Indian HR departments, Indian marketting teams, Indian accountants. Indian CEOs! They're just as good as our American CEOs, only slightly more brown and they'll work for pennies on the dollar!
And since all the work is being sent to India, why not move distribution and sales over there too? Uproot all of our walmarts and jc pennys and move them to downtown Calcutta! That's where all the money's gonna be, so we'll save so much by not converting currencies.
Feh. I bust my ass every day for American small business, and IBM has to go and pull some bullshit like this. Sometimes I think corporations are the only evil force left in the world. I mean, at least terrorists are fighting for what they think is a noble cause. IBM is destroying people's livelihood for a tiny percentage increase in investor ROI.
Remember this shit before you vote republican in 04.
Well, I go to a gym with people, so I may not be any help here. But I've done the following in the past:
1) Bike to work (used to do 8 miles and it was a gas, very effective dropped about 10 lbs one summer without trying, now work 15 miles away up the interstate so it's no chance).
2) Lunchtime workout (at gym, worked well when I only did 1/2 hour, now my workout is ~ 1.5 hours so it's no good)
3) Lunchtime basketball game. Tons of fun. Soon outlawed by CEO as employees who didn't get "open lunch" were taking one anyway.
4) I used to work in an office, long time ago, that had a treadmill in the supply closet and people would take 15 minute goes on it throughout the day as a way to help them quit smoking (which made more sense at the time).
I've often thought that some sort of pedal driven UPS system would be a good idea. Power from the resistance recharges the UPS, offsets electricity costs, gets fat asses in shape. If you want to steal this idea, go ahead, just give me a free one -- during rush times at work i have to miss my workout window (gym closes at 10 pm) so I can please my wife. *Sigh* damn chores...
Slashdot Mirror
It's posts like this that make me love slashdot.
"Hello. I have read your post and would like to insult you. Did I mention that I know what an API is?"
Actually, there's still only one way to LAY the bricks. You put down the mortar, you put the brick on top. It is fairly obvious you don't put the brick end to end on top of the others, because it looks wrong. A vector used in place of a list doesn't necessarily look wrong, and you won't know if the thread safety is going to be an asset or a liability until the whole thing is in production and in wide use.
What you're talking about here is aesthetics. This is different from my argument. There have to be, well, an infinite number of ways to make software LOOK. What I'm saying is that there are an equally infinite number of ways to make it WORK. Whereas all bricklaying is essentially gravity, bricks and mortar. I've built brick walls before and whereas I don't prefer it to programming or anything, I liked that I didn't have to ponder the placement of every brick as I went along the wall. I could sit back and listen to music while I troweled on the goop without worrying whether that one brick might cause instability as the wall got taller. Because as it did get taller, the weight became more evenly distributed and the effect of a single brick was offset.
Software is more like building an upside down pyramid. Any brick can cause every brick above it to topple.
Actually, I was in the top of my computer classes in school, and I know dozens of "methodologies" by heart. I've read as many "best practices" documents as I've had senior developers. This is not the issue. The issue is, that there are too many ways to perform a single, simple task. None of them is absolutely right or wrong. They each have their strong points. Problem is, a lot of times you are forced, through simplicity or generality's sake, to implement things in a way that is not best practice.
Take, for example, a list of names. Now, the easiest way to store them is in an array. Easiest, because every coder knows arrays back and front and if you know the exact position of an item, it's easily retreivable.
Now, what happens when you want to store them sorted? Suddenly, the array becomes less perfect, because if an item is out of order, the whole list needs to be reordered. No, a much better structure would be a linked list.
And what if you need the list to be resizable, for on demand insertions and deletions? A linked list is a good idea, but you have to traverse the full length of the list to find the position, which takes time. So ideally, you create a tree to perform searches.
You learn all this in your data structures class. Then, in your algorithms class, you learn the most efficient way to use each of them.
Then, you go to your first job, and the requirement is for ALL THREE. So you're faced with a dilemma: is it best to make an array that acts like a tree and perform sorting by a traversal, or is it best to make a tree with an index?
Multiply that by a hundred (or a thousand) and you have one function of a program. Compound it by having eight to ten guys who each have their own "knowledge holes" and their own preferences. I happen to love searching via hashtables. This other guy prefers in order traversals (start at 0, go until you find something). When there are less than, say, 32 items in the structure, his way is usually best. When there are more than that, mine should be best, which meant it was more scalable and for big applications that's what counts anyway...unless the hash is improperly generated, which it was for all his objects, because he was generating it for his method. My method benefited from extremely "random" keys and was getting explicitly ordered ones, and the result was a massive speed hit.
Both of us were using best practices. Put them together, it was a clusterfuck. The end result was refactoring, during which I had to redo everything and finally settled on a third option (sorting it all for speedy access during the database read we were doing anyway).
As a programmer, I am fucking appalled that you think bugs are "screw ups." I don't know if you realized this, but writing software is *HARD*. Harder than anything else in the physical world, mostly because there's no one right way to do things. I have, in a binder at work, 30 some odd distinct solutions for the relatively simple problem of how to make the database transparent both to customers and to programmers. Can you imagine if there were thirty different ways to lay bricks?
Because it is so hard, software bugs are nobody's "fault." They are not a "mistake" in the same way that recalled car parts are mistakes. The greatest coders in the world still have bugs in their code and the greatest tester will always miss a few of them. It is assumed, at least everywhere I've worked, that software is never "done," but that it is ready for release as soon as the rate of bug discovery reaches a certain cut off level, where finding and fixing the bugs costs more than the possibility of emergency fixes. To cover this cost, in addition to the up front fee for software, we also charge a yearly "support fee" which is something like a car warranty. If we write great code that doesn't break, wow free money for us. If the customer has a problem ever three days, we have to fix it even if we start to lose a little money. But the fact is that there is always a cut off. Nobody gets unlimited free updates forever. Because I am not willing to work for free.
(Neither, for that matter, are a lot of supporting developers of OSS. I've seen that a lot of the time, if your problem does not intersect with the problem of a developer's direct line of work or itnerest, it will not get solved. You'll have to pay to get it fixed -- and that's always more expensive than our cute little $500 per year "warranty.")
Tell me, how much did you spend on a support contract for Windows? I'm guessing nothing, unless you have an MSDN subscription or a copy of Advanced Server. They really have no obligation to fix the bugs that you find in it. They probably will, because it's in their best interest if they intend to sell more copies of the software. But when you get stubborn jerks like myself, who are still using windows 2000 4 years after its release, you have to recoup the development of upgrades and fixes somehow. You've already spend the money made from the sale of the software. Charging a few bucks for support off those of us who find our needs unmet by XP is good business.
And as much as you want to cry about monopolies, the fact is that before they could even GET to the level of unfair practices, they first had to be tested in the fires of being a profitable business. Microsoft, with its massive billions in the bank, has the idea of profit DOWN.
JESUS TAPDANCING CHRIST!
This is twice what I make and I'm living the life of fucking riley!
MOVE!
I think thist quote is absolute bullshit. TONS of people have lost money underestimating the intelligence of great masses, especially in the last few years...i'm thinking of America Online, but there are others, especially in the tech sector and double especially in the dot com dreams of Silly Con Valley.
"So easy to use, no wonder it's #1!" Yes. Easy is good when something is cheap, it becomes automatic. But when the price goes up, people are willing to do more work to save a few bucks.
I think the adage should be "A fool and his money are soon parted...but fools don't get that much money to begin with." Managers excepted.
I'm a registered republican who doesn't like loudmouths, hypocrites, idiots or liars. Which unfortunately excludes 50% of the who's who in the party today.
Of course, we called it "whispering" back then.
how else can [insert current party in power] rig the next election
Well, rigging it in a state in which your brother is governor with a supreme court your daddy appointed should be pretty easy...
"Lower" courts traditionally do a terrible and often biased interpretation of the law. That's how a man in Chicago was kept in prison for some ungodly amount of time for burning a flag despite the Supreme Court's multiple decisions saying this was not illegal.
I mean, the local courts are essential, but when it comes to blazing new ground, it's all about the appeals process. Could have been that had any of these cases -- sampling, unauthorized parody, napster, etc -- gone all the way, they may have been overturned. But in almost all cases, the parties have given up, seeing that it was easier to admit defeat than to keep up the expense in fighting it.
Of course, a guy in prison has little else to do BUT fight. So people jailed for sharing mp3s are going to be the key to finding out, once and for all, what the Supreme Court Delphis have to say on the matter.
They are targetting file sharers that have explicitly infringed on some record companies' copyright.
;).
Hey, you're welcome to your opinion, no matter how wrong it is. But the fact is that the argument supporting your opinion depends on the file trading being an infringing activity, which is a legal statement that has yet to be proven.
I mean, if you want to get REALLY technical (and by trying to make a distinction between "sharing" and "copying" when in the digital world the only difference is a change of state, you ARE trying to get technical), MP3s may fall under a different area of fair use: that protecting the right to establish works in the style of other works. A 128 kbit ogg file is not a "copy" of the copyrighted work on CD -- it's a digital interpretation of it which eliminates at least 90% of the original and bears as much resemblence to it on the data level as a cassette does to a record. The RIAA says it doesn't matter, but they're kind of an interested party, aren't they? Maybe we should let the courts decide, though that will never stop us from freely trading our opinions -- no matter how wrong they are. No, those are protected in the constitution, and are subject to fair use
Our current president wouldn't justify anything. He just doesn't care. How else can you explain a president elected by a slim margin under controversial circumstances who received less than 50% of the popular vote doing more to advance the cheap labor conservative agenda than 12 years of reagan/bush sr?
"Who cares if less than half of the nation agree with me? We're doing it anyway! Now back to Texas to unwind by riding my ATV over some protected forests while planning the next second wave nation to fuck with bombs, yippee kai yay!"
Of course. And it should be okay for the media to use terms like "convicted murderer OJ Simpson," it's okay because even though he wasn't convicted of murder, we all know he should have been.
You see, that's what you're saying. That the media is allowed to lie and misuse terms if we "know what they mean." This is untrue. It's a form of the type of subtle spin and bias that big media conglomeration promises us it won't do. "Copyright theft" in this context is as much a misnomer as "Consumer Broadband Protection Act."
Besides, it has yet to be proven that trading mp3s is truly copyright infringment, let alone theft. We're merely assuming it is, because lower courts have said so. The same lower courts that readily ignore supreme court judgments on flag burning and abortion. The supreme court, the only court that really matters in terms of what's constitutional, has yet to speak definitively on the matter. Probably because it hasn't had reason to yet...people's constitutional rights aren't really being infringed upon to the point that they had to include that in their busy schedule.
But they will be. Probably with this case.
You see, the RIAA would like us to believe that copyright means only they have the right to "copy." That's not what the word means -- "Copy" refers to lyrics, similar to the words "ad copy." Copyright gives a person the rights to performance and production of a song. I copyright my songs so others won't turn them into hits and not give me a cut. I copyright them so they can't be used in movies without my permission (and a cut).
It doesn't necessarily give me a right to control home users who are putting my songs on a mix CD. And I shouldn't (and don't) care, because that doesn't infringe on my rights as a musician. And since I'm a self promoting independent artist, who needs all the exposure he can get, I appreciate this kind of publicity. Mix makers are a musician's best friend. Which is why so many labels give out their singles on mp3s for free...sub pop and coup de tat are two off the top of my head.
The main reason the RIAA wants to abolish file trading is that it gives users a medium to learn about new artists that their members (who include the same labels involved in payola scams, price fixing and very few independent labels) can not control. Which means people will be spending their money not on RIAA albums, but on independents. Activity we've alreadt seen. And as radio becomes EVEN LESS diverse, and members scale back their releases EVEN FURTHER to please shareholders who don't like the libertine Rolling Stone idea of funding albums that might lost money, file sharing will (and has) become a primary way for people to discover new music. New music which doesn't have a big SONY label glued to the back. And that's apparently a Bad Thing. Because if artists jump to the indies, they'll be making 3, 5, even 7 dollars per album sold instead of 1 dollar kept to offset production costs and held in case of returns. They'll be impossible to control by corralling them into a culture of drugs and debt to ensure their willingness to sign shockingly one sided contracts. And then there will be no money to pay the worthless A&R men to manufacture singles!
Maybe...i buy about three CDs a month, or $50. Why, i'd have to live another 20 years to exceed that, assuming they don't raise their prices. No way will I live that long!
The last three digits of yours are 8:05...do you perchance work for TBS?
I stand corrected, but only because I'm too lazy to check facts.
Intertrust is a privately held firm, numbnuts. "Investors" haven't made anything -- just its parent companies.
Privately held firms are where it's at. All the flexibility and simplicity of small business combined with the clout of big business.
Au contraire. The only way a sensible, representative government could get around this kind of thing is by crippling patent law. But we don't have one of those handy at the moment. It would be simple and predictable for the current government to say that Microsoft, whose biggest client is the US Government, is an essential part of its operation. And that MS' crummy DRM is essential to national security.
Nope. France should have been on there. So should have pretty much all of europe, but I decided the list was getting too long.
Well, it's all good to grumble about it, but a return to 19th century ethics isn't likely. Take a look at the statistics on crime during the great depression and watch how they drop as FDR introduces social welfare and security programs. The fact remains that countries with assured subsistance welfare violent crime is universely reduced. I'm thinking of Canada, Britain, Germany, Sweden...
And what's the alternative? It's been displayed that big business isn't willing to pay Americans to work. It's either work, steal or welfare...and of course, welfare costs about half what prison costs.
It's not a threat. It's a statistical fact, as trackable and identifiable throughout history as the cycle of increased economic disparity during the term of ever republican president. You know facts, right? Absolute statements of truth backed by first hand evidence? And you can distinguish them from "nonsensical pipe dreams" like the trickle down economic theory that cheap labor conservatives have been touting for the past years?
Well, people get pretty attached to their things, man. Taxes help pay for welfare and unemployment systems, which keep out of work people from taking those things out of desperation. I think if you have a lot of things, you'd want to keep them, even if you could just get more of them. So you pay the government to keep people honest.
Or are you one of these paranoid fucks who thinks all taxation is theft, and that government is unnecessary and everybody is kind and we can all be prosperous because nobody would screw over anyone else?
Actually, I don't deal in foreign sundries unless it's absolutely necessary. Which is why I don't shop at Walmart. If I have to spend ten times as much for an American made product, I'll do it.
I think most people wouldn't mind spending $5 on a toothbrush instead of $.69, especially if it were built to last forever.
But they don't have the option.
The problem here is that there are statistics for both sides of the line.
The top ten percent richest people pay 80% of taxes in this country.
They also pay only about 27% of their income.
This is just a tribute to how enormously rich some of these people are, largely based on decisions like this one. IBM will not lower its prices at all, despite the 40-25% savings on labor. That extra money will be diverted directly into executive salaries, which have been rising at three times the cost of living.
They even went up last year. You know, in a tanked economy. They got rich off uncertainty, unemployment and cheap labor. And in the case of the Enrons of the world, flat out lies.
So no, I don't feel sorry for them when we ask for taxes on their dividends. I don't feel sorry asking them to pay MORE than a paltry 27%, because 27% of very fucking rich is still quite rich. And until there's better laws ensuring fair competition and an american labor force, I don't feel bad about expecting these "pioneers of industry" to give a little something back to the country they are dry humping.
I mean, it's the same work right? No cultural differences? No possibility of communication mishaps, no language barrier.
I mean, shit, why not move all our work over there? It's so cheap! Move everything! Indian HR departments, Indian marketting teams, Indian accountants. Indian CEOs! They're just as good as our American CEOs, only slightly more brown and they'll work for pennies on the dollar!
And since all the work is being sent to India, why not move distribution and sales over there too? Uproot all of our walmarts and jc pennys and move them to downtown Calcutta! That's where all the money's gonna be, so we'll save so much by not converting currencies.
Feh. I bust my ass every day for American small business, and IBM has to go and pull some bullshit like this. Sometimes I think corporations are the only evil force left in the world. I mean, at least terrorists are fighting for what they think is a noble cause. IBM is destroying people's livelihood for a tiny percentage increase in investor ROI.
Remember this shit before you vote republican in 04.
Well, I go to a gym with people, so I may not be any help here. But I've done the following in the past:
1) Bike to work (used to do 8 miles and it was a gas, very effective dropped about 10 lbs one summer without trying, now work 15 miles away up the interstate so it's no chance).
2) Lunchtime workout (at gym, worked well when I only did 1/2 hour, now my workout is ~ 1.5 hours so it's no good)
3) Lunchtime basketball game. Tons of fun. Soon outlawed by CEO as employees who didn't get "open lunch" were taking one anyway.
4) I used to work in an office, long time ago, that had a treadmill in the supply closet and people would take 15 minute goes on it throughout the day as a way to help them quit smoking (which made more sense at the time).
I've often thought that some sort of pedal driven UPS system would be a good idea. Power from the resistance recharges the UPS, offsets electricity costs, gets fat asses in shape. If you want to steal this idea, go ahead, just give me a free one -- during rush times at work i have to miss my workout window (gym closes at 10 pm) so I can please my wife. *Sigh* damn chores...