"Companies don't give a crap about americans, even though the companies started in the USA, the CEO and board of directors are American, and they sell their product to Americans. They will move their factories and tech support and anything they can to Mexico or India or anywhere they can find cheap labor. The CEO's are pretty much trators and they are crapping on the USA."
I hate to burst your bubble, but the real "traitors" are Americans themselves not the people running America's companies. Why? Generally when given the option Americans would rather buy a cheaper product than pay more for American-made goods. Would you willingly pay a few thousand dollars more for a car that is in every way equal to a foreign car, for example, based on principle of supporting American workers?
It is estimated about $1,400 of the amount you pay for a GM vehicle goes straight to health-insurance costs for a GM employee. Let's say a Mexican worker's health insurance would contribute only $500 to the cost of every vehicle. Imagine that the Mexican car company is in direct competition with GM and produced an identical vehicle, but the only difference is price. Which one would you buy? Which one would most Americans buy?
Given that GM had a 1.1 billion dollar loss during the first quarter of this year, it would seem they need to find a way to turn around the company quickly. What will become of our auto industry once China starts producing cars en masse with employees that cost around $0.25 / hour? Will you continue to pay thousands more for American cars? Will foreign countries buy American cars even though they are much more expensive?
Try putting yourself in the shoes of these "traitor" CEO's and see what you would do to keep the company in the black. Are there bad CEO's out there? Sure there are. But there are many CEO's that would love nothing more than to continue to give Americans jobs. Bottom line is: if they can't turn a profit then not only do they lose the unskilled workers to foreign countries, the company ceases to exist and all the support, services, sales, tech, legal, finance, and marketing in the USA sink with the ship.
If ABC released Alias on BitTorrent with advertising built in, the file could be delivered to their audience very fast, and would cost them next to nothing in distribution costs.
You make an excellent point, however, even though the network might officially provide the content with commercials built-in, how likely are the users to actually watch those commercials and not just skip through them? I would guess that very few people would actually watch the commercials given the relative ease of skipping them. This threatens their only way to make money on the content. I can understand why they would be fearful of such an approach. Perhaps the only solution would be having product placement directly in the programs. But to me, it would be annoying to have advertising such an integrated part of entertainment.
IANAL, but according to FCC regulations (47CFR73) "noncommercial educational broadcast stations will be licensed only to
nonprofit educational organizations upon a showing that the proposed
stations will be used primarily to serve the educational needs of the
community; for the advancement of educational programs; and to furnish a
nonprofit and noncommercial television broadcast service."
We feel USDTV might be in violation of these regulations and we've been searching for answers as to the nature of the agreement between the two entities. So far our efforts to contact them have not yeilded results. Does anyone have any understanding of how they are able to license this "non-commercial" bandwidth?
Credit for most of the research goes to Luke Jenkins. There's a complete history of the research he's been doing to get to the bottom of this matter here: http://a.zzq.org/kulc/
The key to this article was in the second-to-last paragraph:
"But open-source is not just a political challenge. It strikes a starkly different, and sometimes opposite, pose from that of traditional capitalist systems."
Many companies are afraid of what this might mean to their current business model. What could open source eventually do the global economy as a whole? This "quiet war" against open source is being waged mostly by corporations in the U.S. that feel they probably have the most to lose.
Consider possible long term effects for them: The U.S. economy has seen absolutely stunning growth during the past 100 years. It has doubled in size six times during that period. Economic theory suggests that this happened because of the technological advancements. Now in the Internet age, any person in even third world countries can get online and instantly have all of the knowledge of a highly professional college graduate from the U.S. Open source gives them the opportunity to have access to information, tools, and concepts which normally would have been accessible only by the traditional business model in first world countries at a price. With the open information revolution it is "free". This concept alone could revolutionize economies around the world: suddenly they have access to the same information, but without the price. This over time will lessen the technological dominance the U.S. has held traditionally. Any new developments made within the U.S. can easily be copied and re-produced in other countries, and possibly even countries with a better comparative advantage than the U.S. (meaning they can do the same for less).
Case in point:
it took technology companies many years to reach the point where hard drives, CPU's, memory, etc. in a PC are so fast and big as they are today. Now, anyone in a poor country could get a computer, and instantly have the benefit of all those years of development. Then with that computer, they can start downloading open source software and accessing information that they would never have been able to do otherwise. A relatively poor Ecuadorian could learn skills to rival his U.S. counterparts, start programming and outsource at a much cheaper price!
This is scary for U.S. companies because it means the competition would suddenly increase, and given the relatively high cost of labor in the U.S., it could mean harder economic times for us. I imagine there would be sort of an "evening out" effect economically between the U.S. and other countries.
On top of this, when consumers are faced between the choice of two products, one that is free and one that is $100 (for example), the closer they are to being just as good, the less the consumers will buy the commercial product. To have to compete with open source would mean large profit losses for companies especially like Microsoft, who has for a long time enjoyed near monopoly status.
The only thing protecting this from changing are so called "Intellectual Property" laws that would prevent this from happening. When you see it this way, you see that Microsoft and others are simply trying to protect their interests and investment. Personally, I like the open source revolution. It definately benefits customers. We all benefit from competition, but companies have an increasingly hard time surviving in such conditions. I also recognize the importance of companies though: they are the ones that make the economic wheel spin. We rely on companies for our jobs. We have some interesting decades ahead of us. I honestly believe open source, and open information as a whole will be the main factors in revolutionizing the global economy yet again.
Is it any wonder that these companies, and even our own U.S. government fear somewhat the effect open source could have on their respective growth and income? How about we as individuals of the U.S.?
"Lawmakers are wrapping up their business for the year within weeks, and neither measure has any chance of making it through Congress by then. Rather, the bills are aimed at staking out the technology industry's position in a festering dispute that could result in congressional action next year."
The music industry is surely aware of these proposals as we are, meaning they are going to be spending the time between now next year's session working on ways to thwart proposals like these. I'm sure they have been contemplating ways to control the issue and ally senators to their cause. There is frequent mention on Slashdot about writing to our congressmen to get them to support or reject bills for the consumer good. How many of us really do that? I admit that I haven't taken the time to write out any letters (on paper) anyway. There are so many issues that are brought up every day that aim to threaten our rights as computer users (copyright, patents, etc). Many of the issues are technical and aren't understood by the general public.
I propose that we as a community start our own campaign to educate the public on issues like these. The more people we can help to understand what's at stake with misguided proposals in congress, the more influence we can have overall. If people really understand what the DMCA is and how it limits their freedom and goes against the things meant to protect the consumer (ie: Fair use, archiving, etc.) They will help us maintain our rights as consumers. If we were to take a poll of people who really understand what the DMCA is and the implications of it, how many people would be in favor of it? I would guess that it is not a majority. How then do bills like these pass? I believe many weren't educated enough to understand the issue to make a reasonable choice about it. This is the point we as a community need to unite on. Letters to congressman may be very helpful as well. Think of all the people we come in contact with everyday, at work, school, etc. We can help them understand these issues. We can write articles and make web pages. We can talk to local media and write letters to the editors. We can make our presence known. Any of these people that we could educate could become allies in our cause. If our voice is heard, congress will respond accordingly.
"Since the chance of finding a balloon once it falls back to earth is remote, the company isn't counting on getting any equipment back once it is launched."
This is just great! I was wondering how I was going to get the equipment for my own wireless network!
Just be careful you don't forget to "check in" if your servers go down for some reason!
Re: That's not entirely true
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"It's a basic right for someone to be able to publish publically available information, such as a universal resource locator."
That's not entirely true. There have actually been court cases where they have ruled that linking to a URL can be infringing. Some of these include Starbucks, Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, and US Intellectual Reserve Inc vs. Utah Lighthouse Ministry Inc. Here's a good article about the topic.
The article says that scientists will not proceed with their work until they have talked with with religious leaders in a debate.
What are their real intentions here?
When in history have we ever discovered a technology, and decided not to use it? Has there ever been a time? We may have limited use, but we have never completely stopped advancement on technology just because it is considered "unethical". There is not a single case that I can think of where we have completely abandoned a technology we have discovered.
If that's the case, what do the scientists hope to gain by asking the community about the issue? They have never needed religious approval before to conduct other experiments and do tests. New technology seems to be shunned sometimes by some anti-groups, but isn't it always embraced in the end? It takes time, but it happens.
Here's a Scenario: The debate ends with people in agreement that it is not right to be tampering with life, and we should not try to "create" life. How long will it be until 'someone' researches it anyway.
We, as humans, cannot simply drop the issue.
History has proven it, and it will prove it again.
The article states that the scientists will not proceed with their work until they have had a public debate with religious leaders' involvement.
What are their real intentions?
When in history have we ever discovered a technology, and decided not to use it? Has there ever been a time? We may have limited use, but we have never completely stopped advancement on technology just because it is considered "unethical". There is not a single case that I can think of where we have completely abandoned a technology we have discovered.
If that's the case, what do the scientists hope to gain by asking the community about the issue? They have never needed religious approval before to conduct other experiments and do tests. New technology seems to be shunned many times by some groups, but is always embraced in the end. It takes time, but it happens.
Here's a Scenario: The debate ends with people in agreement that it is not right to be tampering with life, and we should not try to "create" life. How long will it be until 'someone' researches it anyway.
We, as humans, cannot simply drop the issue.
History has proven it, and it will prove it again.
I bet there are some people out there right now that can't wait until they release the DVD Audio, so they can start hacking away at it. There is always going to be a way to hack it no matter what. I can see the hackers now... "Let's go get one of those DVD Audio players and start finding a way to crack it!" It is inevitable. They are just wasting time and money. -Mike Taylor- miketay@removethis.xmission.com
You said "dead as Salt Lake City on a Friday night"
Have you ever visited Salt Lake City? It doesn't seem "dead" to me on a Friday night...unless you are talking about after 10:00 PM??
Re:I just put $17,000 in COREL (CORL)'s Stock.
on
Corel Clears the Air
·
· Score: 1
What about Corel Word Perfect? It's a pretty widely used product.
People in some countries get free domain names!!
on
InterNIC Redesign
·
· Score: 1
I've noticed that with some TLD's such as.CX (www.nic.cx), if you are a citizen of the respective country, you get free domain names. So why don't citizens of the US get free.US names? Why can't we start a non-profit organization to handle domain names? All they are are names in a database. I don't understand the $70/year that Internic requires. Reading through all the comments on here, almost everone agrees that the Internic pretty much sucks, and wPÀould like to see things done a different way. I support the anti-internic campaign (http://www.anti-internic.org). -Nohup
People in some countries get free domain names!!
on
InterNIC Redesign
·
· Score: 1
I've noticed that with some TLD's such as.CX (www.nic.cx), if you are a citizen of the respective country, you get free domain names. So why don't citizens of the US get free.US names? Why can't we start a non-profit organization to handle domain names? All they are are names in a database. I don't understand the $70/year that Internic requires. Reading through all the comments on here, almost everone agrees that the Internic pretty much sucks, and would like to see things done a different way. I support the anti-internic campaign (http://www.anti-internic.org). -Nohup
Slashdot Mirror
"Companies don't give a crap about americans, even though the companies started in the USA, the CEO and board of directors are American, and they sell their product to Americans. They will move their factories and tech support and anything they can to Mexico or India or anywhere they can find cheap labor. The CEO's are pretty much trators and they are crapping on the USA."
I hate to burst your bubble, but the real "traitors" are Americans themselves not the people running America's companies. Why? Generally when given the option Americans would rather buy a cheaper product than pay more for American-made goods. Would you willingly pay a few thousand dollars more for a car that is in every way equal to a foreign car, for example, based on principle of supporting American workers?
It is estimated about $1,400 of the amount you pay for a GM vehicle goes straight to health-insurance costs for a GM employee. Let's say a Mexican worker's health insurance would contribute only $500 to the cost of every vehicle. Imagine that the Mexican car company is in direct competition with GM and produced an identical vehicle, but the only difference is price. Which one would you buy? Which one would most Americans buy?
Given that GM had a 1.1 billion dollar loss during the first quarter of this year, it would seem they need to find a way to turn around the company quickly. What will become of our auto industry once China starts producing cars en masse with employees that cost around $0.25 / hour? Will you continue to pay thousands more for American cars? Will foreign countries buy American cars even though they are much more expensive?
Try putting yourself in the shoes of these "traitor" CEO's and see what you would do to keep the company in the black. Are there bad CEO's out there? Sure there are. But there are many CEO's that would love nothing more than to continue to give Americans jobs. Bottom line is: if they can't turn a profit then not only do they lose the unskilled workers to foreign countries, the company ceases to exist and all the support, services, sales, tech, legal, finance, and marketing in the USA sink with the ship.
If ABC released Alias on BitTorrent with advertising built in, the file could be delivered to their audience very fast, and would cost them next to nothing in distribution costs.
You make an excellent point, however, even though the network might officially provide the content with commercials built-in, how likely are the users to actually watch those commercials and not just skip through them? I would guess that very few people would actually watch the commercials given the relative ease of skipping them. This threatens their only way to make money on the content. I can understand why they would be fearful of such an approach. Perhaps the only solution would be having product placement directly in the programs. But to me, it would be annoying to have advertising such an integrated part of entertainment.
A revolution is coming...
Some research has been about USDTV's operation in Utah and they appear to be using channels that have been allocated to the "Utah State Board of Regents", which is the state board responsible for overseeing education in Utah.
IANAL, but according to FCC regulations (47CFR73) "noncommercial educational broadcast stations will be licensed only to nonprofit educational organizations upon a showing that the proposed stations will be used primarily to serve the educational needs of the community; for the advancement of educational programs; and to furnish a nonprofit and noncommercial television broadcast service."
We feel USDTV might be in violation of these regulations and we've been searching for answers as to the nature of the agreement between the two entities. So far our efforts to contact them have not yeilded results. Does anyone have any understanding of how they are able to license this "non-commercial" bandwidth?
Credit for most of the research goes to Luke Jenkins. There's a complete history of the research he's been doing to get to the bottom of this matter here: http://a.zzq.org/kulc/
The key to this article was in the second-to-last paragraph:
"But open-source is not just a political challenge. It strikes a starkly different, and sometimes opposite, pose from that of traditional capitalist systems."
Many companies are afraid of what this might mean to their current business model. What could open source eventually do the global economy as a whole? This "quiet war" against open source is being waged mostly by corporations in the U.S. that feel they probably have the most to lose.
Consider possible long term effects for them: The U.S. economy has seen absolutely stunning growth during the past 100 years. It has doubled in size six times during that period. Economic theory suggests that this happened because of the technological advancements. Now in the Internet age, any person in even third world countries can get online and instantly have all of the knowledge of a highly professional college graduate from the U.S. Open source gives them the opportunity to have access to information, tools, and concepts which normally would have been accessible only by the traditional business model in first world countries at a price. With the open information revolution it is "free". This concept alone could revolutionize economies around the world: suddenly they have access to the same information, but without the price. This over time will lessen the technological dominance the U.S. has held traditionally. Any new developments made within the U.S. can easily be copied and re-produced in other countries, and possibly even countries with a better comparative advantage than the U.S. (meaning they can do the same for less).
- Case in point:
it took technology companies many years to reach the point where hard drives, CPU's, memory, etc. in a PC are so fast and big as they are today. Now, anyone in a poor country could get a computer, and instantly have the benefit of all those years of development. Then with that computer, they can start downloading open source software and accessing information that they would never have been able to do otherwise. A relatively poor Ecuadorian could learn skills to rival his U.S. counterparts, start programming and outsource at a much cheaper price!This is scary for U.S. companies because it means the competition would suddenly increase, and given the relatively high cost of labor in the U.S., it could mean harder economic times for us. I imagine there would be sort of an "evening out" effect economically between the U.S. and other countries.
On top of this, when consumers are faced between the choice of two products, one that is free and one that is $100 (for example), the closer they are to being just as good, the less the consumers will buy the commercial product. To have to compete with open source would mean large profit losses for companies especially like Microsoft, who has for a long time enjoyed near monopoly status.
The only thing protecting this from changing are so called "Intellectual Property" laws that would prevent this from happening. When you see it this way, you see that Microsoft and others are simply trying to protect their interests and investment. Personally, I like the open source revolution. It definately benefits customers. We all benefit from competition, but companies have an increasingly hard time surviving in such conditions. I also recognize the importance of companies though: they are the ones that make the economic wheel spin. We rely on companies for our jobs. We have some interesting decades ahead of us. I honestly believe open source, and open information as a whole will be the main factors in revolutionizing the global economy yet again.
Is it any wonder that these companies, and even our own U.S. government fear somewhat the effect open source could have on their respective growth and income? How about we as individuals of the U.S.?
Seems fishy that three of the major hard drive companies reduce their warranties at the same time...
"Lawmakers are wrapping up their business for the year within weeks, and neither measure has any chance of making it through Congress by then. Rather, the bills are aimed at staking out the technology industry's position in a festering dispute that could result in congressional action next year."
The music industry is surely aware of these proposals as we are, meaning they are going to be spending the time between now next year's session working on ways to thwart proposals like these. I'm sure they have been contemplating ways to control the issue and ally senators to their cause. There is frequent mention on Slashdot about writing to our congressmen to get them to support or reject bills for the consumer good. How many of us really do that? I admit that I haven't taken the time to write out any letters (on paper) anyway. There are so many issues that are brought up every day that aim to threaten our rights as computer users (copyright, patents, etc). Many of the issues are technical and aren't understood by the general public.
I propose that we as a community start our own campaign to educate the public on issues like these. The more people we can help to understand what's at stake with misguided proposals in congress, the more influence we can have overall. If people really understand what the DMCA is and how it limits their freedom and goes against the things meant to protect the consumer (ie: Fair use, archiving, etc.) They will help us maintain our rights as consumers. If we were to take a poll of people who really understand what the DMCA is and the implications of it, how many people would be in favor of it? I would guess that it is not a majority. How then do bills like these pass? I believe many weren't educated enough to understand the issue to make a reasonable choice about it. This is the point we as a community need to unite on. Letters to congressman may be very helpful as well. Think of all the people we come in contact with everyday, at work, school, etc. We can help them understand these issues. We can write articles and make web pages. We can talk to local media and write letters to the editors. We can make our presence known. Any of these people that we could educate could become allies in our cause. If our voice is heard, congress will respond accordingly.
Good idea, except now that they posted it on Slashdot, demand will exceed supply and I'll never be able to check out the games I want!!
This is just great! I was wondering how I was going to get the equipment for my own wireless network!
Just be careful you don't forget to "check in" if your servers go down for some reason!
"It's a basic right for someone to be able to publish publically available information, such as a universal resource locator."
That's not entirely true. There have actually been court cases where they have ruled that linking to a URL can be infringing. Some of these include Starbucks, Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, and US Intellectual Reserve Inc vs. Utah Lighthouse Ministry Inc. Here's a good article about the topic.
The article says that scientists will not proceed with their work until they have talked with with religious leaders in a debate.
What are their real intentions here?
When in history have we ever discovered a technology, and decided not to use it? Has there ever been a time? We may have limited use, but we have never completely stopped advancement on technology just because it is considered "unethical". There is not a single case that I can think of where we have completely abandoned a technology we have discovered.
If that's the case, what do the scientists hope to gain by asking the community about the issue? They have never needed religious approval before to conduct other experiments and do tests. New technology seems to be shunned sometimes by some anti-groups, but isn't it always embraced in the end? It takes time, but it happens.
Here's a Scenario: The debate ends with people in agreement that it is not right to be tampering with life, and we should not try to "create" life. How long will it be until 'someone' researches it anyway.
- We, as humans, cannot simply drop the issue.
History has proven it, and it will prove it again.The article states that the scientists will not proceed with their work until they have had a public debate with religious leaders' involvement.
What are their real intentions?
When in history have we ever discovered a technology, and decided not to use it? Has there ever been a time? We may have limited use, but we have never completely stopped advancement on technology just because it is considered "unethical". There is not a single case that I can think of where we have completely abandoned a technology we have discovered.
If that's the case, what do the scientists hope to gain by asking the community about the issue? They have never needed religious approval before to conduct other experiments and do tests. New technology seems to be shunned many times by some groups, but is always embraced in the end. It takes time, but it happens.
Here's a Scenario: The debate ends with people in agreement that it is not right to be tampering with life, and we should not try to "create" life. How long will it be until 'someone' researches it anyway.
- We, as humans, cannot simply drop the issue.
History has proven it, and it will prove it again.I bet there are some people out there right now that can't wait until they release the DVD Audio, so they can start hacking away at it. There is always going to be a way to hack it no matter what. I can see the hackers now... "Let's go get one of those DVD Audio players and start finding a way to crack it!" It is inevitable. They are just wasting time and money. -Mike Taylor- miketay@removethis.xmission.com
You said "dead as Salt Lake City on a Friday night"
Have you ever visited Salt Lake City? It doesn't seem "dead" to me on a Friday night...unless you are talking about after 10:00 PM??
What about Corel Word Perfect? It's a pretty widely used product.
I've noticed that with some TLD's such as .CX (www.nic.cx), if you are a citizen of the respective country, you get free domain names. So why don't citizens of the US get free .US names? Why can't we start a non-profit organization to handle domain names? All they are are names in a database. I don't understand the $70/year that Internic requires. Reading through all the comments on here, almost everone agrees that the Internic pretty much sucks, and wPÀould like to see things done a different way. I support the anti-internic campaign (http://www.anti-internic.org). -Nohup
I've noticed that with some TLD's such as .CX (www.nic.cx), if you are a citizen of the respective country, you get free domain names. So why don't citizens of the US get free .US names? Why can't we start a non-profit organization to handle domain names? All they are are names in a database. I don't understand the $70/year that Internic requires. Reading through all the comments on here, almost everone agrees that the Internic pretty much sucks, and would like to see things done a different way. I support the anti-internic campaign (http://www.anti-internic.org). -Nohup