Gotta love it. Students doing poorly in your class? Getting complaints about how "hard" a prof you are? President complaining that your high requirements are bringing down grades and making the school look bad in the college choice publications?
Solution: Asign a grade spread between A- and C+. Maybe if you are paying attention, give that REALLY good one an A+. But since you are really just worried about keeping your job, apply a statistical curve and randomize the grade/name combinations. Works great! Hey man, remember "D"s and "F"s are mean, and reduce your satisfaction rating on student evaluations.
Personaly I'd rather go to a school with low reported average GPA, it MIGHT mean the place is full of loosers, or it might just mean the profs are still in charge of education, instead of the administration (gotta keep the paying party customers, I mean students happy)
Standards are low, and with College becoming the "new high-school" they'll only get lower. Hell, Gerorge W. Bush got (bought?) a degree from Yale.
Keep educating? Sure, until spyware, trojans and adware start emulating Winblows dialogs. Recently ran into one of these, puts an icon in the sys-tray that looks exactly like the windows secuity center, then spouts warnings about how your computer in infected with spyware and no anti-spyware software is installed. If you click on it's warning it sends you to a blank webpage that downloads MORE spyware. Lovely. Geek-speek is the only way to correctly identify and qualify threats like this. I've gotten so SICK and FUCKING TIRED of dealing with shit like this on winblows machines I've begun telling customers that there are "two ways to deal with this, pay me x-hundred dollars (depending on severity of infection) to fix this or get a Mac and never call me again." Seriously, it's not even fun any more. I used to get a thrill from cleaning windows systems, but they are just so loaded down with CRAP these days... Frankly it bennefits the customer too when they dispose of all the garbage-ware asociated with Winblows. Since I work primarily with home and small office/home office users who typicaly don't already have a lot of money/time invested in platform speciffic applications, I'm finding this is starting to work. The Mac-Mini dodn't hurt either.
these things came out arround 1995, they used to cost $$$, but are now afordable. Unless this one requires no training it's nothing to jump up and down about.
yeah, I mean jeesh, should have tried for atleast 60K, then you could maybe buy a nice second-hand sonic screwdriver! Or a used Ferrari with low miles.
Mac Mini (w/ airport) + iSight + Darwin Streaming Server = Kicks any self-hosted web-cam's ass. As matter of fact we just did one of these for a local bar. It was a little more expensive than a self hosted cam, but it does synched audio, supports simultanious streams at different bandwidths, and can handle more than twice the user load. It sits headless on a shelf high on a wall, the iSight right next to it, it connects to the network wirelessly and we VNC into it... it's a perfect comodity device!
As an artist struggling to actualy be able to DO any art, I wish to hell I'd thought of this. This is one of those things, that even IF everoyne forgets about it in to years, your name is IN the art history books! An idea this intersting is somehting I might even participate in, just because the "idea" is so good, wether or not it gets co-opted and destroyed.
seen it before, but this stiff is always fun. There's just something cool about melting stuff with the power of the sun. Although you can get better focus and higher heat from a bug fresnel lense, this definately has style.
Remind me to submit my UV (hydrogen) pumped cyanine dye laser if I ever finish it. Just need some more 6KV capacitors, a good vacuum pump and and a lot of Tide(TM).
You're all a bunch of looser script kiddies who couldn't build a system from a Mac Mini! For fucking christ! Why am I wasting my time on slashdot? I'll tell you why, I'm so fucking good it takes me 2 minutes to install and configure XP! I'm reaming my boss out the ass and billing 12 hours a day for time spent jerking off in the bathroom, if the rest of you weren't so goddamned stupid it makes me sick, you'd all be doing the same thing! I'm bored with all this shit, It's too bad Einstein is dead, maybe I could have an inteligent conversation with him, but no! I have deal with all you fat lazy fucks who can't figure out the differnce between AGP and PCI-X! Breeders! Breeders! They're everywhere, pissing all over everything I do. If it were up to me I'd fucking kill every last mother fucking one of you and take over the world. Hell pretty soon I'll have enough refined plutonium for my first 200 kiloton nuke, then I'll lay waste to all the goddamn losers and show you how to really build a system! I'll hand solder a point-to-point transistor network that'll run at 1 MHz and turn in 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 MFLOPS! Then I'll use it to take over every remaining electronics system in the world and kill all the rest of the stupid ass holes out there with thier own web-enabled toasters! Then I'll personnaly FUCKSTART EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOUR HEADS! I OWN YOU ALL, BITCHES!
that aperently people didn't already know most of this or it wouldn't have been worth writing an article about. Imagine! placing hot PCI cards where they are easy to cool? Or perhaps moving the big RFI producers away from the sound card? jeez people. And who'da ever thunk of partitioning a drive? I've been using scratch partitions and/or redundant OS partitions for, literaly, 17 years. Since I got my first Mac with an HD. (SE with a 20 meg External!)... I mean really most of this is about how to setup XP, not how to BUILD a system.
My Karma's getting too good, So I thought I'd bitch a little.
1) No. 2) I assume you mean straight-up cesium? which is 55, but there are 31 isotopes from 114 to 145. 3) I would be a Jade plant, and would most apreciate bright, direct sunlight. However if I have been in the shade for a while, moving me immediately to bright sun may cause sunburn, and I should be slowly re-introduced.
The "average" iPod buying computer user knows little to nothing about what they NEED to do what they do. I can't count the number of times I've seen a Dual p4 machine with 160gb SATA raid and gig of ram doing NOTHING but web sufing, word and e-mail. So lets consider this: The average computer buyer (being uninformed) has a budget of about a $1000. What do they end up buying? A Dell Dimension 8400 with all kinds of power they'll never use. So they buy an iPod, and get into "what if I switch?" mode... The $1299 for a G5 iMac doesn't seem like a rip-off, and man is it slick looking! They still have all kinds of power they'll never use. Or maybe they see the mac mini and think: gee thats cute! And they end up buying a machine that meets thier needs. I don't have an iPod 'cuz i can't justify the cost...well alright i spent all the money on my home theater... but still, people who buy iPods on a whim have the money. they won't feel the sticker-shock so many have argued as the reason the switches won't happen. I think the Forbes report is on target in it's prediciton.
Who's next to offer "pay as you compute" access to supercomputer level systems? Apple? HP? Toshiba? Hitatchi? Is this going to be a new market segment or just a flash in the pan? Are companies going to begin outsourcing computer time? Are there going to be giant compute centers in India housing huge systems crunching numbers for companies that would have planed to invest in a lower level super computer for inside use? Will this kill supercomputer/supercluster sales or drive them up?
An interesting development for sure.
Re:My Concern Either Way is:
on
Apple Backs Blu-ray
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Same problem with these as with those "disc stabilizer ring" snake-oil they used to sell...
Despite standards, not all discs are EXACTLY the same size, fit is variable. Ever used a disc stabilizer ring? I did once. Put a stabilized audio disc in my 40x read CD drive, the ring blew apart under centrifugal stress and jammed the drive. Had to dissasemble it to get the disc out. Luckily no damage to the drive, but what a PAIN IN THE ASS. These things use the same sort of plasti-rubber rings to hold them on. I don't trust 'em. Good idea, but execution leaves much to be desired.
There are some "industrial" solutions out there that I have seen marketed to video rental stores. Same basic idea, thin plastic sheet; but these things use adhesive to stick them to the disk at the edges and center. Again, centrifugal force from high-speed drives will stretch the plastic and cause them to blow apart eventualy. If the plastic should actualy be scratched badly enough to tear it, they then disintegrate all over the inside of your drive. I've seen it happen. It's messy. Not to mention the residual adhesive gunk on your disc and the difficulty of putting them on perfectly straight. Even with one of those centering jigs they never quite hit the right place. Then there's always the catch of a label-side scratch, Good-bye media.
I still advocate caddies (or diamond coating *grin*) as the only real solution for people who don't want to bother handling discs with extreme care.
I love my Skip Dr. and wouldn't trade it for a case of disc protectors, but it sure would be nice to just not have to worry.
Error correction/scratch protection. There may be some (or even many) of you out there who loathed CD-Caddy drives in the early days, but I MISS THEM. One thing the caddy did was protect the disc and prevent scratches. You could stick a caddied disk in your pocket and walk arround with it all day, pull it out, pop it in, and away you go. If you do that with a bare CD, by the end of the day you'll be lucky if it'll still read. Insertion and removal from a case is a pain, and I never met a jewel case as strong as even flimsy caddies. Sure, the prevelence and price reduction of media means if you ruin a disk you just burn another and don't care...
The problem is (and was/still is with DVD) that high data density makes the media far more succeptable to surface imperfections, be they scratches or dirt. Who hasn't sighed in irritation at rental DVD's that skip or blurt? And if you think DVD's are bad, just think for a minute about an optical media with 10 times the data density! Until synthetic diamond becomes cheap enough to coat consumer level optical discs with, I look forward to the return of our Caddy-Carrying Overloards.
Either that or there needs to be some SERIOUS error correction implemented. The average consumer just isn't going to want to handle a movie like it was a precious peice of china. Without some solution to this problem neither media will catch on with me. Maybe "they" are just planing on selling you a new copy of the disc every six months, but archivers and folks who use the media for data storage are not gonna like that.
First off let me say I'm not trying to say that I think any of these practices are "good" or "nice" or even "smart business" however, Every one of these claims against apple are SOP for quite a few sucessfull consumer electronics manufacturers. I work in retail electronics, and on a slow day I read through the fine print of all the waranty terms and stipulations for several of our major electronics suppliers and manufacturers.
Mind you these are names you know: Magnavox, Philips, Sony, RCA, Zenith , SpeakerCraft, LG, Panasonic etc...
With the exception of Panasonic (which has some other irritating fine print related to what is and isn't covered...) nearly everyone features some fine print about repair parts possibly being re-manufactured and that they would NOT inform you if the parts used were new or not. That warantys on certain items began from "the day of customer purchase, or 90 days from arrival at the retialer, whicherver comes first" This is a nearly direct quote from a Philips waranty. I can't tell you how many times we've had to pay for parts under waranty (though labor/shipping is covered) And how many times we've lost a Sony sale because somone called tech support and was told the item or replacement equipment they needed was "on sale" at the sonystyle.com web site.
Sure, it's not good to hear this about "kinder gentler" Apple Computer, but there are, atleast in my mind, concerns as to wether any of this is even illegal. Not nice maybe, underhanded maybe, but if this case is ruled in favor of the customers and retailers it opens up the whole consumer electronics industry to this type of litigation, and there are damn few who aren't guilty.
That other "nerd news" organizations use slashdot as a source, somone sees the new somewhere else after missing the original slashdot post and then re-submits it to slashdot a couple weeks later?
Still, dupes are far too common here and somone needs a good switch kick in the memory.
I agree with your annalysis on a general and historical basis, however, the sustainability of capitolism is what worries me. I'm no economist, so if anyone can tell me why this line of thinking is wrong, please do...
Once all the mergers have taken place, and all the costs have been cut there are two very different sides to the results.
1) Stock holders are happy, customers are happy. Costs go down, profits go up, services improve.
2) Employees loose jobs. Greater efficiency of a larger single organization dictates a reduction in staff to serve the previous customer base.
Result number two is NOT indefinately sustaianable as far as I can see. Historicaly large mergers send about 10-30% of the total merged workforce to the unemployment lines. With the added pressue of increasing population growth and longer lived workers the only long term result that i can see is massive unemployment and further rifts between the rich and the poor.
When you are part of the five member team operating the world's largest telecom (efficiency and cost cutting to the max to get here) you pull down a pretty good salery...or do you? Who do you sell your service too? The other 400,000,000 people who used to do your (and your four co-workers) Job(s) are unemployed, on Government support and can barly afford food, let alone the latest cellular tele-palm-vibrator-microwave-oven-tv-car-tent-bicy cle you give away with a five year service contract. They don't even pass the credit check for your home phone service. they can dial 911 and toll free numbers because the law says you have to let them, but thats it.
Sure you still have the Government buying your service, but now they've followed your lead and are down to a staff of 17 humans and an artificial intelegence budget calculator.
these are silly extremes, but there will be problems (social and political to mention just two) long before this sort theoretical insanity ensues. I feel that we are teetering awfully close to this edge already and if the governments of the world allow capitolism un-checked reign for much longer we are looking at a class War. Not a polite little small "w" war, but a big nasty guns and death and hatred big "W" War.
I work in a town where 70% (thats a REAL FIGURE) of residential property is owned by out-of state investors and the only jobs left for locals born in the area are service related. This works for now. People don't starve, and they don't live on the street, but the underlying resentment is DANGEROUSLY close to comming above the water line. and like I said, no one starves here.
Just wait untill the merger of MCI-WORLD-AT&T-VerizoPhone with EuroTel-Virgin-FranceTel puts 40% of the western world's telcom workers out of a job.
Governments are supposed to regulate things so that they don't get out of hand. there's a fine line between de-regulation and anarchy (I'm looking at all the Libertarians here...) And i think we need less of both.
Slashdot Mirror
Gotta love it. Students doing poorly in your class? Getting complaints about how "hard" a prof you are? President complaining that your high requirements are bringing down grades and making the school look bad in the college choice publications?
Solution: Asign a grade spread between A- and C+. Maybe if you are paying attention, give that REALLY good one an A+. But since you are really just worried about keeping your job, apply a statistical curve and randomize the grade/name combinations. Works great! Hey man, remember "D"s and "F"s are mean, and reduce your satisfaction rating on student evaluations.
Personaly I'd rather go to a school with low reported average GPA, it MIGHT mean the place is full of loosers, or it might just mean the profs are still in charge of education, instead of the administration (gotta keep the paying party customers, I mean students happy)
Standards are low, and with College becoming the "new high-school" they'll only get lower. Hell, Gerorge W. Bush got (bought?) a degree from Yale.
Keep educating? Sure, until spyware, trojans and adware start emulating Winblows dialogs. Recently ran into one of these, puts an icon in the sys-tray that looks exactly like the windows secuity center, then spouts warnings about how your computer in infected with spyware and no anti-spyware software is installed. If you click on it's warning it sends you to a blank webpage that downloads MORE spyware. Lovely. Geek-speek is the only way to correctly identify and qualify threats like this. I've gotten so SICK and FUCKING TIRED of dealing with shit like this on winblows machines I've begun telling customers that there are "two ways to deal with this, pay me x-hundred dollars (depending on severity of infection) to fix this or get a Mac and never call me again." Seriously, it's not even fun any more. I used to get a thrill from cleaning windows systems, but they are just so loaded down with CRAP these days... Frankly it bennefits the customer too when they dispose of all the garbage-ware asociated with Winblows. Since I work primarily with home and small office/home office users who typicaly don't already have a lot of money/time invested in platform speciffic applications, I'm finding this is starting to work. The Mac-Mini dodn't hurt either.
http://www.smarthome.com/8169.html
these things came out arround 1995, they used to cost $$$, but are now afordable. Unless this one requires no training it's nothing to jump up and down about.
yeah, I mean jeesh, should have tried for atleast 60K, then you could maybe buy a nice second-hand sonic screwdriver! Or a used Ferrari with low miles.
Amen brother. My boss comprehends maybe 25% of what I do and therefor beleives that I am expendable...that is until something goes wrong.
Mac Mini (w/ airport) + iSight + Darwin Streaming Server = Kicks any self-hosted web-cam's ass. As matter of fact we just did one of these for a local bar. It was a little more expensive than a self hosted cam, but it does synched audio, supports simultanious streams at different bandwidths, and can handle more than twice the user load. It sits headless on a shelf high on a wall, the iSight right next to it, it connects to the network wirelessly and we VNC into it... it's a perfect comodity device!
My High school fencing team beat Harvard and Yale.
Albeit at astronomical prices.
As an artist struggling to actualy be able to DO any art, I wish to hell I'd thought of this. This is one of those things, that even IF everoyne forgets about it in to years, your name is IN the art history books! An idea this intersting is somehting I might even participate in, just because the "idea" is so good, wether or not it gets co-opted and destroyed.
seen it before, but this stiff is always fun. There's just something cool about melting stuff with the power of the sun. Although you can get better focus and higher heat from a bug fresnel lense, this definately has style.
Remind me to submit my UV (hydrogen) pumped cyanine dye laser if I ever finish it. Just need some more 6KV capacitors, a good vacuum pump and and a lot of Tide(TM).
OK *grin*
You're all a bunch of looser script kiddies who couldn't build a system from a Mac Mini! For fucking christ! Why am I wasting my time on slashdot? I'll tell you why, I'm so fucking good it takes me 2 minutes to install and configure XP! I'm reaming my boss out the ass and billing 12 hours a day for time spent jerking off in the bathroom, if the rest of you weren't so goddamned stupid it makes me sick, you'd all be doing the same thing! I'm bored with all this shit, It's too bad Einstein is dead, maybe I could have an inteligent conversation with him, but no! I have deal with all you fat lazy fucks who can't figure out the differnce between AGP and PCI-X! Breeders! Breeders! They're everywhere, pissing all over everything I do. If it were up to me I'd fucking kill every last mother fucking one of you and take over the world. Hell pretty soon I'll have enough refined plutonium for my first 200 kiloton nuke, then I'll lay waste to all the goddamn losers and show you how to really build a system! I'll hand solder a point-to-point transistor network that'll run at 1 MHz and turn in 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 MFLOPS! Then I'll use it to take over every remaining electronics system in the world and kill all the rest of the stupid ass holes out there with thier own web-enabled toasters! Then I'll personnaly FUCKSTART EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOUR HEADS! I OWN YOU ALL, BITCHES!
Peace.
that aperently people didn't already know most of this or it wouldn't have been worth writing an article about. Imagine! placing hot PCI cards where they are easy to cool? Or perhaps moving the big RFI producers away from the sound card? jeez people. And who'da ever thunk of partitioning a drive? I've been using scratch partitions and/or redundant OS partitions for, literaly, 17 years. Since I got my first Mac with an HD. (SE with a 20 meg External!)... I mean really most of this is about how to setup XP, not how to BUILD a system.
My Karma's getting too good, So I thought I'd bitch a little.
1) No.
2) I assume you mean straight-up cesium? which is 55, but there are 31 isotopes from 114 to 145.
3) I would be a Jade plant, and would most apreciate bright, direct sunlight. However if I have been in the shade for a while, moving me immediately to bright sun may cause sunburn, and I should be slowly re-introduced.
You'er welcome.
Could kick MC PeePant's ass!
I'm not sure why, but it's fun.
The "average" iPod buying computer user knows little to nothing about what they NEED to do what they do. I can't count the number of times I've seen a Dual p4 machine with 160gb SATA raid and gig of ram doing NOTHING but web sufing, word and e-mail. So lets consider this: The average computer buyer (being uninformed) has a budget of about a $1000. What do they end up buying? A Dell Dimension 8400 with all kinds of power they'll never use. So they buy an iPod, and get into "what if I switch?" mode... The $1299 for a G5 iMac doesn't seem like a rip-off, and man is it slick looking! They still have all kinds of power they'll never use. Or maybe they see the mac mini and think: gee thats cute! And they end up buying a machine that meets thier needs. I don't have an iPod 'cuz i can't justify the cost...well alright i spent all the money on my home theater... but still, people who buy iPods on a whim have the money. they won't feel the sticker-shock so many have argued as the reason the switches won't happen. I think the Forbes report is on target in it's prediciton.
Who's next to offer "pay as you compute" access to supercomputer level systems? Apple? HP? Toshiba? Hitatchi? Is this going to be a new market segment or just a flash in the pan? Are companies going to begin outsourcing computer time? Are there going to be giant compute centers in India housing huge systems crunching numbers for companies that would have planed to invest in a lower level super computer for inside use? Will this kill supercomputer/supercluster sales or drive them up?
An interesting development for sure.
Same problem with these as with those "disc stabilizer ring" snake-oil they used to sell...
Despite standards, not all discs are EXACTLY the same size, fit is variable. Ever used a disc stabilizer ring? I did once. Put a stabilized audio disc in my 40x read CD drive, the ring blew apart under centrifugal stress and jammed the drive. Had to dissasemble it to get the disc out. Luckily no damage to the drive, but what a PAIN IN THE ASS. These things use the same sort of plasti-rubber rings to hold them on. I don't trust 'em. Good idea, but execution leaves much to be desired.
There are some "industrial" solutions out there that I have seen marketed to video rental stores. Same basic idea, thin plastic sheet; but these things use adhesive to stick them to the disk at the edges and center. Again, centrifugal force from high-speed drives will stretch the plastic and cause them to blow apart eventualy. If the plastic should actualy be scratched badly enough to tear it, they then disintegrate all over the inside of your drive. I've seen it happen. It's messy. Not to mention the residual adhesive gunk on your disc and the difficulty of putting them on perfectly straight. Even with one of those centering jigs they never quite hit the right place. Then there's always the catch of a label-side scratch, Good-bye media.
I still advocate caddies (or diamond coating *grin*) as the only real solution for people who don't want to bother handling discs with extreme care.
I love my Skip Dr. and wouldn't trade it for a case of disc protectors, but it sure would be nice to just not have to worry.
Error correction/scratch protection. There may be some (or even many) of you out there who loathed CD-Caddy drives in the early days, but I MISS THEM. One thing the caddy did was protect the disc and prevent scratches. You could stick a caddied disk in your pocket and walk arround with it all day, pull it out, pop it in, and away you go. If you do that with a bare CD, by the end of the day you'll be lucky if it'll still read. Insertion and removal from a case is a pain, and I never met a jewel case as strong as even flimsy caddies. Sure, the prevelence and price reduction of media means if you ruin a disk you just burn another and don't care...
The problem is (and was/still is with DVD) that high data density makes the media far more succeptable to surface imperfections, be they scratches or dirt. Who hasn't sighed in irritation at rental DVD's that skip or blurt? And if you think DVD's are bad, just think for a minute about an optical media with 10 times the data density! Until synthetic diamond becomes cheap enough to coat consumer level optical discs with, I look forward to the return of our Caddy-Carrying Overloards.
Either that or there needs to be some SERIOUS error correction implemented. The average consumer just isn't going to want to handle a movie like it was a precious peice of china. Without some solution to this problem neither media will catch on with me. Maybe "they" are just planing on selling you a new copy of the disc every six months, but archivers and folks who use the media for data storage are not gonna like that.
I feel exactly the same.
You were expecting maybe SCO would turn into a profitable, stable company with a viable product? Especialy given the recent past...
This is the perfect time to remind people about the upcomming new album from Ill Mitch
If you havn't heard "Hey Ladies Fans", or "Fast and Danger" you havn't lived.
First off let me say I'm not trying to say that I think any of these practices are "good" or "nice" or even "smart business" however, Every one of these claims against apple are SOP for quite a few sucessfull consumer electronics manufacturers. I work in retail electronics, and on a slow day I read through the fine print of all the waranty terms and stipulations for several of our major electronics suppliers and manufacturers.
Mind you these are names you know: Magnavox, Philips, Sony, RCA, Zenith , SpeakerCraft, LG, Panasonic etc...
With the exception of Panasonic (which has some other irritating fine print related to what is and isn't covered...) nearly everyone features some fine print about repair parts possibly being re-manufactured and that they would NOT inform you if the parts used were new or not. That warantys on certain items began from "the day of customer purchase, or 90 days from arrival at the retialer, whicherver comes first" This is a nearly direct quote from a Philips waranty. I can't tell you how many times we've had to pay for parts under waranty (though labor/shipping is covered) And how many times we've lost a Sony sale because somone called tech support and was told the item or replacement equipment they needed was "on sale" at the sonystyle.com web site.
Sure, it's not good to hear this about "kinder gentler" Apple Computer, but there are, atleast in my mind, concerns as to wether any of this is even illegal. Not nice maybe, underhanded maybe, but if this case is ruled in favor of the customers and retailers it opens up the whole consumer electronics industry to this type of litigation, and there are damn few who aren't guilty.
That other "nerd news" organizations use slashdot as a source, somone sees the new somewhere else after missing the original slashdot post and then re-submits it to slashdot a couple weeks later?
Still, dupes are far too common here and somone needs a good switch kick in the memory.
I agree with your annalysis on a general and historical basis, however, the sustainability of capitolism is what worries me. I'm no economist, so if anyone can tell me why this line of thinking is wrong, please do...
y cle you give away with a five year service contract. They don't even pass the credit check for your home phone service. they can dial 911 and toll free numbers because the law says you have to let them, but thats it.
Once all the mergers have taken place, and all the costs have been cut there are two very different sides to the results.
1) Stock holders are happy, customers are happy. Costs go down, profits go up, services improve.
2) Employees loose jobs. Greater efficiency of a larger single organization dictates a reduction in staff to serve the previous customer base.
Result number two is NOT indefinately sustaianable as far as I can see. Historicaly large mergers send about 10-30% of the total merged workforce to the unemployment lines. With the added pressue of increasing population growth and longer lived workers the only long term result that i can see is massive unemployment and further rifts between the rich and the poor.
When you are part of the five member team operating the world's largest telecom (efficiency and cost cutting to the max to get here) you pull down a pretty good salery...or do you? Who do you sell your service too? The other 400,000,000 people who used to do your (and your four co-workers) Job(s) are unemployed, on Government support and can barly afford food, let alone the latest cellular tele-palm-vibrator-microwave-oven-tv-car-tent-bic
Sure you still have the Government buying your service, but now they've followed your lead and are down to a staff of 17 humans and an artificial intelegence budget calculator.
these are silly extremes, but there will be problems (social and political to mention just two) long before this sort theoretical insanity ensues. I feel that we are teetering awfully close to this edge already and if the governments of the world allow capitolism un-checked reign for much longer we are looking at a class War. Not a polite little small "w" war, but a big nasty guns and death and hatred big "W" War.
I work in a town where 70% (thats a REAL FIGURE) of residential property is owned by out-of state investors and the only jobs left for locals born in the area are service related. This works for now. People don't starve, and they don't live on the street, but the underlying resentment is DANGEROUSLY close to comming above the water line. and like I said, no one starves here.
Just wait untill the merger of MCI-WORLD-AT&T-VerizoPhone with EuroTel-Virgin-FranceTel puts 40% of the western world's telcom workers out of a job.
Governments are supposed to regulate things so that they don't get out of hand. there's a fine line between de-regulation and anarchy (I'm looking at all the Libertarians here...) And i think we need less of both.