Sure it would: an entire tld would be unambiguously associated with pornography, which benefits several groups. People who publish pornography want the marketing and public relations benefits and people who want to block pornography can block the entire tld without having any false positives. The existence of a number of guaranteed-to-be-porn sites will make it easier for writers of censorware to train their filters. Even those who think that pornographers should be hunted down have something to gain: a list of pornographers and their contact info.
The only real problems with.xxx are that some people might think that it's technologically feasible to force all porn sites to use it and that some people might foolishly assume that any non-.xxx site is not pornographic.
That's an interesting proposal. If it does turn out that limiting drug patents decreases private drug research, the Federal government can surely afford to make up the difference by increasing funding to university researchers. I have no objection to for-profit research, but using artificial means that hurt society to make it profitable is counterproductive I think.
The risk is that drug companies would continue to do research, and would actually hoard their knowledge via trade secrets. I don't think that would necessarily be worse than the current situation, though.
Patents on software make as much sense as patents on books or music. Get rid of them now before they give patents in general a bad name.
It's too late for that. I shared your position, until I realized that some of the arguments against software patents are true for many other kinds of patents as well. Society should reexamine the goals of the patent system and determine if they are being achieved by the current implementation. Are there any patent success stories? How do they compare in number and impact to cases where the patent system has been counterproductive?
However, if you remove the reward, there is no reason for me to take a change.
Nobody has suggested removing the rewards of hard work and innovation.
Nor is it even ethically and morally appropriate for society to "take" my work product and make it free
This sounds like it's implying something that I disagree with, but I don't want to put words in your mouth. Do you mean to say that society owes you intellectual property (copyright, patent, trademark) rights--that such rights exist in a state of nature?
Sometimes, our work products are already free, and sometimes it would be wrong for society to prevent our work products from bringing benefit to more people.
I do need to be rewarded for this type of risk or I'm just not going to put my butt on the line like this and thus goes a couple hundred jobs.
The risk is that you might not be rewarded: your business might fail. It's not society's responsibility to reward risky business ventures; if it did, then they would not be risky.
i386 is the official name in several contexts for what you refer to as the x86 architecture. If something is compiled for the i386 architecture, it does not imply that it runs on an actual 386 processor.
Want to know what is a recent innovation compared to the past 500+ years? The Internet. That changes things. You can put a song in a shared folder and have a thousand people download it in a week.
Exactly. Thanks to the internet, copyright as currently implemented actually hurts society more than it helps. Instead of helping people access content, copyright impedes access.
One of the (many) problems with our government is there are only two ideas to every issue, both of them bad. (i.e. screw the poor/just give the poor money)
The worst thing is, our government mangages to do both of those at the same time!
It's all the same in the end. Nobody knows how to help the poor without also helping the freeloaders. Whatever the government does ends up hurting more people.
Sorry to break it to the folks over at the Inquirer, but Asimov's Laws do not actually exist....any more than his 'positronic brain' does. It's fiction.
Sounds like a funny definition of "exist" to me. What do you think it takes for an idea to exist? An idea is not corporeal.
Oh come off this nonsense. This is not about elimating choice, this is about practical reality.
The only way to have all Linux distributions converge on a common anything is to eliminate choice, because different people have different preferences. The Debian people believe that their favorite way is best, and the Red Hat people believe that their favorite way is best. How do you propose to get them all to agree?
It does not make sense to try to support a product across so many distributions that are fundamentally the same operating system.
That's why sensible people say "Don't bother trying to support every distribution: pick one and support that."
a) ayup, but biotech is going overseas as we speak
Doesn't matter, that wasn't part of question (a).
b) How does the offshoring industry and services for offshore US workers produce any jobs here?
Doesn't matter, that wasn't aprt of question (b).
c) Just in time coding/hardware design. Why can't an offshore company provide that?
They could if they wanted to, but any company big enough to offshore part of its employees is too big to care about measly little jobs like that. It seems like foreign small businesses could do it, but they aren't. We could speculate all day about why.
Who's going to make UAV hardware/software? Americans? Now maybe, but in the near future? Hardly.
Americans will constitute the US military-industrial complex for as long as the US government requires it, and I don't see them changing their mind any time soon.
Your last point, going into business for yourself, is going to be the most viable option left.
Historically enterpreneurship has driven the economy. You don't necessarily have to go into business for yourself, though; it's often enough to work for somebody who's gone into business themselves.
It's sometimes hard to recognize at the time which new industries will persist and which will not. Here are some that have appeared in the last 10-20 years:
a) Name one new industry that's being created.
I'll stick with your answer: biotech (though arguably this is a conglomeration of multiple industries, some of which will work and some of which won't)
b) Now name one new industry that's being created because of offshoring.
The offshoring industry.
Service industries for now-rich (or now-middle-class) foreigners working for US companies.
OK, that's two.
c) Now name one new industry that's being created and is not being offshored as we speak.
specialized hardware/software design. Want a custom PCI card, and willing to pay $30,000 for it? There are US companies that want your business. Really, there are many different kinds of customized development, both hardware and software. Companies big enough to see value in offshoring aren't interested in measly $300,000 projects.
new products with military-industrial applications, like UAV hardware or software
in-home computer tech support (or really any in-home service; even our vet makes house calls nowadays, though that was theoretically possible 20 years ago)
network engineering for domestic customers (when a school system needs a new network installed, they're not going to fly somebody in from India)
Was your point to show that there are no new industries in categories (b) or (c)?
Here's my point: economic growth exists. Wealth is created through enterpreneurship (a better word than "new industry" for the purposes of this discussion.)
A global "comparable wage" for jobs that go overseas. In short, if a job you are sending overseas would pay $6.00 / hr here then you MUST pay $6.00 / hr there. If it pays $20 here then you MUST pay $20 there. That is the only way to ensure it is fair for all around. Companies are willing to embrace global intrests lets see them embrace global wages. That will increase the standard of living both over there and over here.
What stops ownership of overseas factories from simply shifting to overseas companies that aren't bound by the "comparable wage" rule? Those goods could be subject to an import tariff, but it seems like getting the WTO to agree would be nontrivial.
The problem is that there are few industries left to create, and that those that remain are nothing like what has come before.
No. People are capable of inventing new industries and making them profitable. We have some guesses about some industries that seem to be on the verge of being profitable, but there are future industries that we don't know about yet. The number of future industries that we don't know about yet depends on how long humanity will exist.
You keep talking about how things will be as before, we'll come up with something new, and it will all be shiny and happy again.
You're half right. I do believe that life will continue on as before: nasty, brutish and short, not shiny and happy.
I agree; life is definitely not peachy for many people, which we would do well to remember. I posted specifically to correct the "If you get rich, it's because somebody else got poor" idea.
An economy is not a zero-sum game, which is often not understood by people with left-wing economic views. New industries are constantly being created. The trick is to be among those who are doing the creating, and that is a problem unrelated to outsourcing.
Re:Head to head against Winders and *nix
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
The term "luser" is already in widespread use, and not in relation to Linux.
Replace 6% with a variable then; I'm interested to see if anybody can answer that particular question. I'll rephrase it here:
How come the US unemployment rate is at X%? Do you think that X% can produce all the stuff China and India produce for us? You think if you blocked off all trade the X% would be working better jobs? Fact is more things need to be produced. What would happen to all the jobs people CURRENTLY have? -Anonymous Coward
I'd like to see serious suggestions about what to do about outsourcing, if it is in fact something that needs action to correct. My inclination is to try to bring other countries up to our standard of living as quickly as possible in order to (among other things) make it less desirable to outsource to them, but I'm open to new ideas.
Re:Head to head against Winders and *nix
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
It doesn't bother me if you stick with Windows because you want to spend extra time getting X going. I do that myself on my work machine. But don't look down on those of us who prefer MacOS X's user-friendly X integration. Far be it from me to criticize somebody's OS choice, but you might want to keep your anti-MacOS X thoughts to yourself on a site populated by computer geeks, some of whom will gleefully rip your anti-MacOS X opinions to shreds.
The "architectures" in the article are still not the same. 1 GHz Pentium M != 1 GHz Pentium 4.
Re:Head to head against Winders and *nix
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
X is pretty great, yes. I hear MacOS X is great too though, and you can reportedly run X on MacOS X even easier than on Windows. MacOS 1 : Windows 0
Re:if we could get them to compare similar hardwar
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
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· Score: 1
This test obviously doesn't. It looks to me like they just picked up a laptop they had laying around to try.
Yes, and what was disappointing for me was that the random laptop they had laying around did pretty well in the benchmark comparison, even though the hardware was clearly older and less capable (slower ram, older graphics, much slower hard drive).
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it would: an entire tld would be unambiguously associated with pornography, which benefits several groups. People who publish pornography want the marketing and public relations benefits and people who want to block pornography can block the entire tld without having any false positives. The existence of a number of guaranteed-to-be-porn sites will make it easier for writers of censorware to train their filters. Even those who think that pornographers should be hunted down have something to gain: a list of pornographers and their contact info.
The only real problems with .xxx are that some people might think that it's technologically feasible to force all porn sites to use it and that some people might foolishly assume that any non-.xxx site is not pornographic.
The risk is that drug companies would continue to do research, and would actually hoard their knowledge via trade secrets. I don't think that would necessarily be worse than the current situation, though.
It's too late for that. I shared your position, until I realized that some of the arguments against software patents are true for many other kinds of patents as well. Society should reexamine the goals of the patent system and determine if they are being achieved by the current implementation. Are there any patent success stories? How do they compare in number and impact to cases where the patent system has been counterproductive?
Nobody has suggested removing the rewards of hard work and innovation.
This sounds like it's implying something that I disagree with, but I don't want to put words in your mouth. Do you mean to say that society owes you intellectual property (copyright, patent, trademark) rights--that such rights exist in a state of nature?
Sometimes, our work products are already free, and sometimes it would be wrong for society to prevent our work products from bringing benefit to more people.
The risk is that you might not be rewarded: your business might fail. It's not society's responsibility to reward risky business ventures; if it did, then they would not be risky.
i386 is the official name in several contexts for what you refer to as the x86 architecture. If something is compiled for the i386 architecture, it does not imply that it runs on an actual 386 processor.
Exactly. Thanks to the internet, copyright as currently implemented actually hurts society more than it helps. Instead of helping people access content, copyright impedes access.
Does anything fit into category #2? If "yes", then the wording is vague, but I believe the answer is "no", so the wording is fine.
It's all the same in the end. Nobody knows how to help the poor without also helping the freeloaders. Whatever the government does ends up hurting more people.
Sounds like a funny definition of "exist" to me. What do you think it takes for an idea to exist? An idea is not corporeal.
The only way to have all Linux distributions converge on a common anything is to eliminate choice, because different people have different preferences. The Debian people believe that their favorite way is best, and the Red Hat people believe that their favorite way is best. How do you propose to get them all to agree?
That's why sensible people say "Don't bother trying to support every distribution: pick one and support that."
I agree. Plus, learning C first really gives a good appreciation of the features of Python (or whatever other modern language you choose.)
Doesn't matter, that wasn't part of question (a).
Doesn't matter, that wasn't aprt of question (b).
They could if they wanted to, but any company big enough to offshore part of its employees is too big to care about measly little jobs like that. It seems like foreign small businesses could do it, but they aren't. We could speculate all day about why.
Americans will constitute the US military-industrial complex for as long as the US government requires it, and I don't see them changing their mind any time soon.
Historically enterpreneurship has driven the economy. You don't necessarily have to go into business for yourself, though; it's often enough to work for somebody who's gone into business themselves.
I'll stick with your answer: biotech (though arguably this is a conglomeration of multiple industries, some of which will work and some of which won't)
The offshoring industry.
Service industries for now-rich (or now-middle-class) foreigners working for US companies.
OK, that's two.
specialized hardware/software design. Want a custom PCI card, and willing to pay $30,000 for it? There are US companies that want your business. Really, there are many different kinds of customized development, both hardware and software. Companies big enough to see value in offshoring aren't interested in measly $300,000 projects.
new products with military-industrial applications, like UAV hardware or software
in-home computer tech support (or really any in-home service; even our vet makes house calls nowadays, though that was theoretically possible 20 years ago)
network engineering for domestic customers (when a school system needs a new network installed, they're not going to fly somebody in from India)
Was your point to show that there are no new industries in categories (b) or (c)?
Here's my point: economic growth exists. Wealth is created through enterpreneurship (a better word than "new industry" for the purposes of this discussion.)
What stops ownership of overseas factories from simply shifting to overseas companies that aren't bound by the "comparable wage" rule? Those goods could be subject to an import tariff, but it seems like getting the WTO to agree would be nontrivial.
Still, that's the best suggestion I've heard yet.
No. People are capable of inventing new industries and making them profitable. We have some guesses about some industries that seem to be on the verge of being profitable, but there are future industries that we don't know about yet. The number of future industries that we don't know about yet depends on how long humanity will exist.
You're half right. I do believe that life will continue on as before: nasty, brutish and short, not shiny and happy.
I agree; life is definitely not peachy for many people, which we would do well to remember. I posted specifically to correct the "If you get rich, it's because somebody else got poor" idea.
An economy is not a zero-sum game, which is often not understood by people with left-wing economic views. New industries are constantly being created. The trick is to be among those who are doing the creating, and that is a problem unrelated to outsourcing.
The term "luser" is already in widespread use, and not in relation to Linux.
I'd like to see serious suggestions about what to do about outsourcing, if it is in fact something that needs action to correct. My inclination is to try to bring other countries up to our standard of living as quickly as possible in order to (among other things) make it less desirable to outsource to them, but I'm open to new ideas.
It doesn't bother me if you stick with Windows because you want to spend extra time getting X going. I do that myself on my work machine. But don't look down on those of us who prefer MacOS X's user-friendly X integration. Far be it from me to criticize somebody's OS choice, but you might want to keep your anti-MacOS X thoughts to yourself on a site populated by computer geeks, some of whom will gleefully rip your anti-MacOS X opinions to shreds.
Why not just tell me what's wrong with it?
Why?
The "architectures" in the article are still not the same. 1 GHz Pentium M != 1 GHz Pentium 4.
X is pretty great, yes. I hear MacOS X is great too though, and you can reportedly run X on MacOS X even easier than on Windows. MacOS 1 : Windows 0
Yes, and what was disappointing for me was that the random laptop they had laying around did pretty well in the benchmark comparison, even though the hardware was clearly older and less capable (slower ram, older graphics, much slower hard drive).