In a recent interview, Netcraft quoted C as saying, "I feel happy" and "I think I'll go for a walk now". However Miguel was quick to point out that "C is not fooling anyone" and "is just being a big baby." Unfortunatly, the interview was cut short, and Netcraft will have to wait until next Thursday to confirm the C's death.
They can't both be at fault here! I mean, its not physically possible.
Why not? Suppose the government really did give HP more money than HP provided product. Neither of them did anything about it for years anything for years. Therefore parties at both could be at fault for sloppy book keeping, intentional fraud or both.
It is possible that someone in the middle could have been embezeling the money, and HP knew nothing about it, but that is not the only possibility.
Because Windows Media wins the quality shootout, they say "check the site". You have to know that if DivX won the quality tests, it would be in all caps in the headline! Ha!
Moderators, wake up! If you do check the site you will see that Windows Media didn't win - it was a toss up.
Not when it is done without the concent of the webmaster, the original site has no problem with excessive traffic, and the new site mirrors everything but the ads which are convieniently replaced with some of it's own.
Do NOT try to kill manned Mars exploration just because you hate Bush. That's pretty fuckin' petty.
They aren't trying to kill the "Mars Program" because they hate Bush. The Mars program doesn't exist - it is nothing more than empty words to make Bush look good. That is what they are trying to kill - a lie that makes Bush look good.
Whether we should have one, I think the answer is not yet - or atleast not the program Bush has in mind. In my opinion, there are only two valid reasons for a public space program - science and colonization. Sending a man to Mars won't help science in anyway, and could even hurt it by diverting money away from good programs, and contaminating Mars before we are done studying it.
As far a colonizing goes, we obviously will have to work toward that in small steps. But from what I understand, getting there isn't the main obstacle to colonization - The only real problem to solve would be landing. Everything else involved in traveling to Mars just needs time and money.
The real problem that we need to be looking at if we are serious about colonizing is how to create a sustainable living environment on mars. The two biodome projects were failures (from a working standpoint, not a learning one), the ISS is really just a hotel. Not to mention how little we know about the long term effects on the human body in Martian gravity. Until we figure out how to become self supporting on Mars we will not be colonists, but tourists.
Suppose we did follow Bush's Mars program, flew someone to the Mars and back, and every one is happy. At this point we will A) get bored, and kill the program just like we did with the moon, or B) decide to put up a colony. If we put one up as soon as possible (to keep the momentem we have) it will not be anywhere near sustainable, will be massive expensive to maintain (think ISS far, far away), and it will be useless scientifically. If we instead work towards a sustainable station, then by the time we are ready, we will need to entirely redo our transportation system anyway, again like reviving Apollo.
So at this point a manned Mars mission would be pointless. We should keep building probes and telescopes, and begin research on growing food on mars, and wait off on a manned craft until it is actually usefull.
After the last incident he was given safty guidelines, and he is going to stick to them to the letter. If congress wants to bend them, then fine, but they will be making the call and it will be their asses on the line if something goes wrong not O'Keefes'.
Responding to you and your parent. First, colonizing Mars would increase the sustainability of our species - it is far more likely that the earth will be hit by a big astroid before the sun runs out. Furthermore, we are fairly certian that we have tons of time before the sun runs out, but cant' predict when the next big astroid will come - could be 5 years from now, or it could be 10,000. So getting all our eggs out of this basket that is Earth is more important in the short-run than getting out of the solar system.
We could take care of over-population-related problems on earth if people would just stop reproducing so much. I mean, really guys... you don't need that many kids (or any?)
Actually that is a short-sighted solution to the problem. The european birth rate has been dropping for some time now, while universal health care has been increasing life expectancy. They are now realizing that they will be in a real jam in a couple decades when the average age of the population is 64.
He would start his own touring band, and let anyone bootleg it. When the lawyers and businesmen cornered him and asked if people should pay for copywritten music, he would answer "Give unto the laywers what is the lawyers, but live your life for others, for it is not your own but God's". After that the RIAA left outraged because he had not fallen into their trap.
I have been pretty lukewarm about boycotting the RIAA, mainly because prior to the internet, there really wasn't a viable alternative, and there are a lot of good non-mainstream bands that managed to get contracts. Most of the music I listen to falls into this catagory, and I never felt like I should boycott a musician because he took the best opportunity he could get. That, and I don't want to stop listening to all my favorite bands:) So instead, I have just become more proactive in discovering what indepentant music is out there, and supporting them in addition to the musicians I already know.
On the other hand, it has always boggled my mind how eager consumers are to adopt these online music services formats which are more restrictive, lower quality, and have a smaller selection than the existing standard. No thanks, I will stick to CD. I had no idea copy restriction on CD's was getting so bad in some places, but if the day ever comes that I cannot buy music from an artist in a non-drm'd format, then that will be the day I stop listening to them. That's my limit - if they don't want me to listen to their music then I won't.
What would be best is if we "taught" multiple languages to our kids as toddlers. This way they would pick up a language naturally, rather than spending years working hard to learn it latter, and never becomming quite fluent. Also like you said, being bilingual somehow conditions your brain to make it easier to learn more languages latter on.
So now MS and 3rd party programmers will think to themselves "aw well, if my pointer arithmetic is poor the CPU will catch any over runs".
Give me a break. You might as well say that we should get rid of memory protection and preemptive multitasking, because having them makes the programmers lazy, thinking the OS will catch their errors.
The NX feature is very good for security and stability. All people including programmers make mistakes, and if you design your security policy on the basis that no one will ever make a mistake you are bound for trouble. The only sensible approach is to have multiple layers where mistakes in one will be caught in the next and prevented from becoming a bigger problem than it should.
If the OS+hardware completely disallow you from writing to code memory, or executing application memory, then any attempts to do so will be killed on the spot and the blame will be placed squarely on your application. The user will know that your program screwed up (or was being malicious) instead of blaming it on windows. So not only will this close off an entire class of exploits, it will provide incentive for programmers to do a better job!
I know that one! Zero - the iPod Mini doesn't play ogg vorbis:)
Re:Slashdotters==Curmudgeons?
on
iPod Mini Sells Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Yeah, but it is the rest of the readers that moderate them up. The active posters are actually less like to get moderation points than casual readers - says so in the moderation rules. For example I have excellent karma, meta moderate daily, and it has been over two years since I have gotten moderation points.
That is what surprises me most when I see completely wrong posts moderated up to +5. I can understand someone saying a stupid thing, and I can even understand some people being fooled by it, but when all the moderators are fooled all the time it makes me worry about humanity:)
True, but the difference is that java and.NET, didn't implement high level constructs in their bytecode, like parrot will. They are basically just a portable assembly sets (i am of course simplifying things a bit here), so in terms of linking different languages they really didn't have anything more to offer than the C ABI did - except that theoretically you didn't have to recompile. Thats a very minor advantage, since recompiling isn't that hard. All the advantages that these languages have comes from the fact that they have managed code - garbage collection, bounds checking, and what not - and the execution machine just happened to be the most efficent way to implement that.
The only ones that survived (so far) are the ones that target a single language. No you know of any that were designed from the begining to target more than one existing language? (.NET doesn't count it created languages aound it's bytecode) I don't. Perhaps this is a reason that they haven't been as popular, not the reason they are successful.
At the same time it would be really exciting to see the birth of the first SUCCESSFUL cross-platform execution machine... One application that works identically on all platforms will never be all that usefull because an application is not an island. If it doesn't work well with the system then users will not like it. And execution machines really don't solve any problem when it comes to cross-platfrom development. Distributing 3 binaries as opposed to one bytecode is not that big a deal. What is a big deal are all the look and feel changes that have to be done, and execution machines don't help that. IMHO, this is why execution machines have not been successful - because they are attempting to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Parrot is attempting to solve a real problem - how to create effecient highlevel system interfaces (like windows.NET, or Next Obj-C), without locking yourself into one language. Of course whether they succeed is entirely up in the air, but it is certainly much higher on my radar than java was.
Yeah, as other people mentioned, the main reason is that these languages aren't statically typed, and so they have to to much of their typechecking at runtime. If you were to implement this in a VM like Java or.NET, you would have to generate byte code to do all that checking - in essence you would basically have to have half an interpreter implemented in byte code. As you can imagine, this would be quite slow. Parrot is designed to support all the features that exist in late binding languages, and they looked a ton of them (perl, python, ruby, lisps, smalltalk, basic, etc) before they started to make sure that the bytcode was an efficent superset of all the general features of those language.
The main reason being it's potential use as a generic high level "ABI" of sorts. Look at GTK/GNOME for example. The developers choose to use C as the base language, largely because it was the easiest language to create bindings for - everything can link to C. But the problem is that C only implements procedural concepts. Anything else must be crafted from hand, like gObject. So you end up reimplementing all the features of a high-level object oriented language, in C, and often this implementation isn't even as efficent as the high level language's implementation. On top of that, when create bindings for a high level language, you wrap all of these gObjects inside of a native language object, and end up with double the overhead. So what it comes down to is that you worked four times as hard, and came up with something twice as slow, just to be able to have an object oriented library that many languages can link to.
Parrot has the oportunity to be for object oriented languages, what the C ABI has become for procudural languages - a common interface for programs of different languages to communicate. Imagine having high level libraries, that can be efficiently used by python, perl, ruby, befunge. Or having scriptable applications that are not just scriptable by one language, but by anything that targets parrot.
When you add to that they fact that it will be cross-platform, and more efficent then most of these high level languages were to begin with, it's hard not to get excited.
Not if he bought a kilo from some dude behind the Circle K. Which is exactly where these will have to be sold of NEC gets their way:)
Just remember kids, if you outlaw unlicenced nantubes, then only outlaws will have unlicenced nanotubes. Then how will Batman be able to maintain his gadgetorial supremecy against the evil minds of the world?
There is some herd mentality aspect to what becomes popular and what doesn't, partially due to hype and parially do to snowball effect - the more programmers there are for language X the more it make since to use language X for a large project.
But from my experiance, the number one influence of the success of a language are the quality and breadth of the support libraries. You can have the cleanest, most powerfull language in the world, but if someone has already done 75% the work for you in klingon, then you can bet programmers are going to want to use klingon.
In a major catastrophe, isn't it fairly likely that power lines will be down anyway (thereby eliminating HAM interference)?
This has already been discussed ad-infinitem, but apparently all the moderators haven't been listening, so here it goes again.
There are several major problems with that. 1) It may be likely that transmitter does not have power, but it is equally likely that he will need to contact people who do. 2) The major reason that ham radio is usefull in emergencies is because there is an active community of people that find ham radio a enjoyable recreation. Get rid of that and you will have less ham operators. 3) There are all sorts of emergencies where people still have power, but HAM is needed. Doesn't anyone remember 9/11? The powerlines were fine, but the phone, cell, and internet were all completly saturated.
Nevermind, thats a lawsuit they might actually win. Given their current record of idiocy and bad public relations, my guess is that it will be the the Pope
Well first off this article sucks. The guy didn't present a single argument as to why tree trade is good, just said "we sell stuff there too", and went into some irrelivent story about Indian animation. So if I had to base my opinion on crap like that I would think that free trade is bullshit as well.
The Economist also had a story on the issue, which was better than this one, although, IMHO it wouldn't have dismissed all my doubts. Unfortuneatly, back issue articles are only available online to subscribers.
So I will try to explain (in 15 minutes - I really shouldn't be posting at all this morning) why free trade is good. The central point is that the only possible thing that increases the standard of living, is increasing efficiency. This can be done several ways, such as better procedures, business methods, technology advances, and trade.
Why trade? If someone can do something cheaper than you (either because they have a lower standard of living, or because they have a resource which you don't), then having them do it will save you money (yes, you being a large multinational corporation). Now contrary to popular belief, this saved money does not all go into some blackhole called Profits or Upper Management. If it did then they wouldn't be competitive with other companies. While CEO's do make alot of money (arguable more than they deserve), it is still miniscule compared to the about of revinue flowing through the company. The savings will go to 1) the customers, 2) expanding the company via profit, or 3) The employees salaries. If the savings go to the customers, they will have more money to spend elsewhere thus causing growth in other industries, creating more jobs. If it goes to expanding the company that will directly create more jobs. If it goes to the employees, even the CEO, they will either spend it or invest it, both of which cause growth and create more jobs. So increases in efficiency always creates more and/or higher paying jobs - regardless of how the effeciency is obtained.
Everytime efficency increases, some people do loose jobs. Whether they are laid-off because switching to an assembly line requires less workers, or because the new factory is all automated, or because workers in china are doing it instead. However, the economy as a whole ends up with more new jobs than it destroyed. In economics this is called churning, and is why we always have a certain about of unempolyment - because people are in-between jobs.
Now onto the next point - the types of new jobs created. When people talk about tech replacing workers, they always point out that there will need to be people to design, build, and maintain theses machines. Which is true, but if that was the whole story we would have problems because those type of jobs require smarter/more highly trained people than the jobs they are replacing. What are the displaced workers supposed to do, if they can't perform these new jobs? Luckily, this is not the whole story. As I mentioned, the customers also save money as prices go down, and thus spend this money on all sorts of things, not all of which require rocket scientists as employees. Hence the big increase in service jobs lately which, btw were almost always better than the manufactring jobs that were replaced.
You brought up a good point, that just because jobs are created, does not mean that they are necisarily in the US. But you have to remember that the customers of these outsourcing companies are in the US, and spend money here, and the majority of personal expenses cannot be outsourced. Furthermore, as we become more wealthy we tend to spend more money on better, houses, and recreation than we do on gadgets, so the percentage of non-relocatable jobs increases as our standard of living increases.
Lastly, loosing jobs to India really isn't the problem. The problem is that everyone and their brother went into IT during the dot-com bubble, and after the bubble went burst (because all the companies and jobs did things that no-one actually want
Slashdot Mirror
In a recent interview, Netcraft quoted C as saying, "I feel happy" and "I think I'll go for a walk now". However Miguel was quick to point out that "C is not fooling anyone" and "is just being a big baby." Unfortunatly, the interview was cut short, and Netcraft will have to wait until next Thursday to confirm the C's death.
They can't both be at fault here! I mean, its not physically possible.
Why not? Suppose the government really did give HP more money than HP provided product. Neither of them did anything about it for years anything for years. Therefore parties at both could be at fault for sloppy book keeping, intentional fraud or both.
It is possible that someone in the middle could have been embezeling the money, and HP knew nothing about it, but that is not the only possibility.
Because Windows Media wins the quality shootout, they say "check the site". You have to know that if DivX won the quality tests, it would be in all caps in the headline! Ha!
Moderators, wake up!
If you do check the site you will see that Windows Media didn't win - it was a toss up.
Yep, so slashdot something that doesn't have an advertizement in it. try:
/dev/null http://www.carorcar.com/gifs/race/gp-start-1.jpg; done
while yes; do wget -O
Not when it is done without the concent of the webmaster, the original site has no problem with excessive traffic, and the new site mirrors everything but the ads which are convieniently replaced with some of it's own.
Do NOT try to kill manned Mars exploration just because you hate Bush. That's pretty fuckin' petty.
They aren't trying to kill the "Mars Program" because they hate Bush. The Mars program doesn't exist - it is nothing more than empty words to make Bush look good. That is what they are trying to kill - a lie that makes Bush look good.
Whether we should have one, I think the answer is not yet - or atleast not the program Bush has in mind. In my opinion, there are only two valid reasons for a public space program - science and colonization. Sending a man to Mars won't help science in anyway, and could even hurt it by diverting money away from good programs, and contaminating Mars before we are done studying it.
As far a colonizing goes, we obviously will have to work toward that in small steps. But from what I understand, getting there isn't the main obstacle to colonization - The only real problem to solve would be landing. Everything else involved in traveling to Mars just needs time and money.
The real problem that we need to be looking at if we are serious about colonizing is how to create a sustainable living environment on mars. The two biodome projects were failures (from a working standpoint, not a learning one), the ISS is really just a hotel. Not to mention how little we know about the long term effects on the human body in Martian gravity. Until we figure out how to become self supporting on Mars we will not be colonists, but tourists.
Suppose we did follow Bush's Mars program, flew someone to the Mars and back, and every one is happy. At this point we will A) get bored, and kill the program just like we did with the moon, or B) decide to put up a colony. If we put one up as soon as possible (to keep the momentem we have) it will not be anywhere near sustainable, will be massive expensive to maintain (think ISS far, far away), and it will be useless scientifically. If we instead work towards a sustainable station, then by the time we are ready, we will need to entirely redo our transportation system anyway, again like reviving Apollo.
So at this point a manned Mars mission would be pointless. We should keep building probes and telescopes, and begin research on growing food on mars, and wait off on a manned craft until it is actually usefull.
After the last incident he was given safty guidelines, and he is going to stick to them to the letter. If congress wants to bend them, then fine, but they will be making the call and it will be their asses on the line if something goes wrong not O'Keefes'.
Responding to you and your parent. First, colonizing Mars would increase the sustainability of our species - it is far more likely that the earth will be hit by a big astroid before the sun runs out. Furthermore, we are fairly certian that we have tons of time before the sun runs out, but cant' predict when the next big astroid will come - could be 5 years from now, or it could be 10,000. So getting all our eggs out of this basket that is Earth is more important in the short-run than getting out of the solar system.
... you don't need that many kids (or any?)
We could take care of over-population-related problems on earth if people would just stop reproducing so much. I mean, really guys
Actually that is a short-sighted solution to the problem. The european birth rate has been dropping for some time now, while universal health care has been increasing life expectancy. They are now realizing that they will be in a real jam in a couple decades when the average age of the population is 64.
No, no, no.
:)
He would start his own touring band, and let anyone bootleg it. When the lawyers and businesmen cornered him and asked if people should pay for copywritten music, he would answer "Give unto the laywers what is the lawyers, but live your life for others, for it is not your own but God's". After that the RIAA left outraged because he had not fallen into their trap.
hmm, that started out as a joke
Absolutely.
:) So instead, I have just become more proactive in discovering what indepentant music is out there, and supporting them in addition to the musicians I already know.
I have been pretty lukewarm about boycotting the RIAA, mainly because prior to the internet, there really wasn't a viable alternative, and there are a lot of good non-mainstream bands that managed to get contracts. Most of the music I listen to falls into this catagory, and I never felt like I should boycott a musician because he took the best opportunity he could get. That, and I don't want to stop listening to all my favorite bands
On the other hand, it has always boggled my mind how eager consumers are to adopt these online music services formats which are more restrictive, lower quality, and have a smaller selection than the existing standard. No thanks, I will stick to CD. I had no idea copy restriction on CD's was getting so bad in some places, but if the day ever comes that I cannot buy music from an artist in a non-drm'd format, then that will be the day I stop listening to them. That's my limit - if they don't want me to listen to their music then I won't.
What would be best is if we "taught" multiple languages to our kids as toddlers. This way they would pick up a language naturally, rather than spending years working hard to learn it latter, and never becomming quite fluent. Also like you said, being bilingual somehow conditions your brain to make it easier to learn more languages latter on.
Bah, they sailed acrossed the ocean to their "new and better land" and good riddens I say.
Wow, one look at your life should be enough to make you worry about humanity!
:)
Hehe, no it just makes me worry about me
So now MS and 3rd party programmers will think to themselves "aw well, if my pointer arithmetic is poor the CPU will catch any over runs".
Give me a break. You might as well say that we should get rid of memory protection and preemptive multitasking, because having them makes the programmers lazy, thinking the OS will catch their errors.
The NX feature is very good for security and stability. All people including programmers make mistakes, and if you design your security policy on the basis that no one will ever make a mistake you are bound for trouble. The only sensible approach is to have multiple layers where mistakes in one will be caught in the next and prevented from becoming a bigger problem than it should.
If the OS+hardware completely disallow you from writing to code memory, or executing application memory, then any attempts to do so will be killed on the spot and the blame will be placed squarely on your application. The user will know that your program screwed up (or was being malicious) instead of blaming it on windows. So not only will this close off an entire class of exploits, it will provide incentive for programmers to do a better job!
4GB is how many hours of ogg audio??
:)
I know that one! Zero - the iPod Mini doesn't play ogg vorbis
Yeah, but it is the rest of the readers that moderate them up. The active posters are actually less like to get moderation points than casual readers - says so in the moderation rules. For example I have excellent karma, meta moderate daily, and it has been over two years since I have gotten moderation points.
:)
That is what surprises me most when I see completely wrong posts moderated up to +5. I can understand someone saying a stupid thing, and I can even understand some people being fooled by it, but when all the moderators are fooled all the time it makes me worry about humanity
True, but the difference is that java and .NET, didn't implement high level constructs in their bytecode, like parrot will. They are basically just a portable assembly sets (i am of course simplifying things a bit here), so in terms of linking different languages they really didn't have anything more to offer than the C ABI did - except that theoretically you didn't have to recompile. Thats a very minor advantage, since recompiling isn't that hard. All the advantages that these languages have comes from the fact that they have managed code - garbage collection, bounds checking, and what not - and the execution machine just happened to be the most efficent way to implement that.
.NET, or Next Obj-C), without locking yourself into one language. Of course whether they succeed is entirely up in the air, but it is certainly much higher on my radar than java was.
The only ones that survived (so far) are the ones that target a single language.
No you know of any that were designed from the begining to target more than one existing language? (.NET doesn't count it created languages aound it's bytecode) I don't. Perhaps this is a reason that they haven't been as popular, not the reason they are successful.
At the same time it would be really exciting to see the birth of the first SUCCESSFUL cross-platform execution machine...
One application that works identically on all platforms will never be all that usefull because an application is not an island. If it doesn't work well with the system then users will not like it. And execution machines really don't solve any problem when it comes to cross-platfrom development. Distributing 3 binaries as opposed to one bytecode is not that big a deal. What is a big deal are all the look and feel changes that have to be done, and execution machines don't help that. IMHO, this is why execution machines have not been successful - because they are attempting to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Parrot is attempting to solve a real problem - how to create effecient highlevel system interfaces (like windows
Yeah, as other people mentioned, the main reason is that these languages aren't statically typed, and so they have to to much of their typechecking at runtime. If you were to implement this in a VM like Java or .NET, you would have to generate byte code to do all that checking - in essence you would basically have to have half an interpreter implemented in byte code. As you can imagine, this would be quite slow. Parrot is designed to support all the features that exist in late binding languages, and they looked a ton of them (perl, python, ruby, lisps, smalltalk, basic, etc) before they started to make sure that the bytcode was an efficent superset of all the general features of those language.
but Parrot is really starting to excite me.
The main reason being it's potential use as a generic high level "ABI" of sorts. Look at GTK/GNOME for example. The developers choose to use C as the base language, largely because it was the easiest language to create bindings for - everything can link to C. But the problem is that C only implements procedural concepts. Anything else must be crafted from hand, like gObject. So you end up reimplementing all the features of a high-level object oriented language, in C, and often this implementation isn't even as efficent as the high level language's implementation. On top of that, when create bindings for a high level language, you wrap all of these gObjects inside of a native language object, and end up with double the overhead. So what it comes down to is that you worked four times as hard, and came up with something twice as slow, just to be able to have an object oriented library that many languages can link to.
Parrot has the oportunity to be for object oriented languages, what the C ABI has become for procudural languages - a common interface for programs of different languages to communicate. Imagine having high level libraries, that can be efficiently used by python, perl, ruby, befunge. Or having scriptable applications that are not just scriptable by one language, but by anything that targets parrot.
When you add to that they fact that it will be cross-platform, and more efficent then most of these high level languages were to begin with, it's hard not to get excited.
Nanotubes have nothing to do with ladders to heaven do they?
No, just elevators to space.
Not if he bought a kilo from some dude behind the Circle K. Which is exactly where these will have to be sold of NEC gets their way :)
Just remember kids, if you outlaw unlicenced nantubes, then only outlaws will have unlicenced nanotubes. Then how will Batman be able to maintain his gadgetorial supremecy against the evil minds of the world?
There is some herd mentality aspect to what becomes popular and what doesn't, partially due to hype and parially do to snowball effect - the more programmers there are for language X the more it make since to use language X for a large project.
But from my experiance, the number one influence of the success of a language are the quality and breadth of the support libraries. You can have the cleanest, most powerfull language in the world, but if someone has already done 75% the work for you in klingon, then you can bet programmers are going to want to use klingon.
In a major catastrophe, isn't it fairly likely that power lines will be down anyway (thereby eliminating HAM interference)?
This has already been discussed ad-infinitem, but apparently all the moderators haven't been listening, so here it goes again.
There are several major problems with that.
1) It may be likely that transmitter does not have power, but it is equally likely that he will need to contact people who do.
2) The major reason that ham radio is usefull in emergencies is because there is an active community of people that find ham radio a enjoyable recreation. Get rid of that and you will have less ham operators.
3) There are all sorts of emergencies where people still have power, but HAM is needed. Doesn't anyone remember 9/11? The powerlines were fine, but the phone, cell, and internet were all completly saturated.
... Themselves.
Nevermind, thats a lawsuit they might actually win. Given their current record of idiocy and bad public relations, my guess is that it will be the the Pope
Well first off this article sucks. The guy didn't present a single argument as to why tree trade is good, just said "we sell stuff there too", and went into some irrelivent story about Indian animation. So if I had to base my opinion on crap like that I would think that free trade is bullshit as well.
The Economist also had a story on the issue, which was better than this one, although, IMHO it wouldn't have dismissed all my doubts. Unfortuneatly, back issue articles are only available online to subscribers.
So I will try to explain (in 15 minutes - I really shouldn't be posting at all this morning) why free trade is good. The central point is that the only possible thing that increases the standard of living, is increasing efficiency. This can be done several ways, such as better procedures, business methods, technology advances, and trade.
Why trade? If someone can do something cheaper than you (either because they have a lower standard of living, or because they have a resource which you don't), then having them do it will save you money (yes, you being a large multinational corporation). Now contrary to popular belief, this saved money does not all go into some blackhole called Profits or Upper Management. If it did then they wouldn't be competitive with other companies. While CEO's do make alot of money (arguable more than they deserve), it is still miniscule compared to the about of revinue flowing through the company. The savings will go to 1) the customers, 2) expanding the company via profit, or 3) The employees salaries. If the savings go to the customers, they will have more money to spend elsewhere thus causing growth in other industries, creating more jobs. If it goes to expanding the company that will directly create more jobs. If it goes to the employees, even the CEO, they will either spend it or invest it, both of which cause growth and create more jobs. So increases in efficiency always creates more and/or higher paying jobs - regardless of how the effeciency is obtained.
Everytime efficency increases, some people do loose jobs. Whether they are laid-off because switching to an assembly line requires less workers, or because the new factory is all automated, or because workers in china are doing it instead. However, the economy as a whole ends up with more new jobs than it destroyed. In economics this is called churning, and is why we always have a certain about of unempolyment - because people are in-between jobs.
Now onto the next point - the types of new jobs created. When people talk about tech replacing workers, they always point out that there will need to be people to design, build, and maintain theses machines. Which is true, but if that was the whole story we would have problems because those type of jobs require smarter/more highly trained people than the jobs they are replacing. What are the displaced workers supposed to do, if they can't perform these new jobs? Luckily, this is not the whole story. As I mentioned, the customers also save money as prices go down, and thus spend this money on all sorts of things, not all of which require rocket scientists as employees. Hence the big increase in service jobs lately which, btw were almost always better than the manufactring jobs that were replaced.
You brought up a good point, that just because jobs are created, does not mean that they are necisarily in the US. But you have to remember that the customers of these outsourcing companies are in the US, and spend money here, and the majority of personal expenses cannot be outsourced. Furthermore, as we become more wealthy we tend to spend more money on better, houses, and recreation than we do on gadgets, so the percentage of non-relocatable jobs increases as our standard of living increases.
Lastly, loosing jobs to India really isn't the problem. The problem is that everyone and their brother went into IT during the dot-com bubble, and after the bubble went burst (because all the companies and jobs did things that no-one actually want