If the Dems and Reps don't look out, the next election could be between Greens and Libertarians, with the former major parties groveling for signatures to get on the ballot.
I'd take either the Libs or the Greens (preferably the Libs, though) over the Republicrats/Demoblicans.
Easy enough to make sure newspapers and television that do this kind of investigative reporting don't get ad dollars - under libertarianism there would be nothing to prevent corporations generating a blacklist of media outlets to kill. And if a multibillion dollar corporation says, "hey, my twenty highly paid scientific experts say that pollution didn't come from my drainpipe", how does a $30K/year individual marshall a lawsuit against them?
One could question whether, in a libertarian state, there would even be such powerful corporations in the first place. Badnarik himself addresses this issue in his answers - corporations, he says, are way too powerful, in large part because they operate under the aegis of the state. Corporations, as they exist today in the US, are an aberrant abomination that blur the line between private enterprise and government power.
i guess you are like the guy who laughed at the idea of fedex in '60s, or laughed at the idea of bottled water in the '70s, or laugh at the idea of spending $5.00 on a cup of coffee in the '90s
Um, none of those involve theft, or the elimination of property rights. Oh, and by the way, I do laugh at the idea of spending $5 on a cup of coffee, no matter what decade it is.
There's a fairly large difference between digital data that can be replicated for at most a few dollars a copy, compared to a heavily resource intensive manufactured item like a car.
I fail to see why that makes it OK to steal software, MS's or anyone else's.
Umm, that is the whole *point* of using hydrogen: to provide an efficient storage mechanism for energy, which can then be extracted cleanly using fuel cells, combustion, etc.
Well, that's all fine and good... except that hydrogen is not an efficient energy sotrage mechanism. Certainly not nearly as efficient as diesel fuel, or methane/propane, which could be manufactured almost as easily as hydrogen, and are much easier to store/use.
Use the power to pump water uphill and store it in a reservoir or heat a large amount of water. There are plenty of ways to store large amounts of electricity.
Or, this electricity could simply be used to store water, period. Got a water tower in your neighborhood? Places like Long Island, NY are chock full of 'em, and they've gotta get the water up there somehow - why not use wind power?
I do think, however, they might want to charge an extra "clean up" premium on porn shoots...
This is the porn industry we're talking about here - they could afford to buy their own damn plane. Pad all the walls with foam rubber upholstered in pink velvet, put in '70s colored lighting, and have "bow-chicka-bow-bow" in 3D surround... Hell, I'm surprised the porn industry doesn't have their own space station already.
It is a government for the people and by the people, according to the constitution.
Our founding documents also refer to such things as "inalienable" rights. The US is not an unlimited democracy - and thank the non-existent god for that.
What I'm personally seeing is that the US/EU companies are firing the junior programmers and keeping the senior architects due to outsourcing to India. The effect of this is to essentially cut out the entire next generation of software architects because they do not get enough experience (and often quit IT totally).
I don't know that that's what will happen. Maybe what it will lead to is a realignment of software engineering as a discipline, along the lines of other engineering disciplines. When US companies hire electrical engineers, they're not expected to have experience as electricians. When companies hire mechanical engineers, they're not expected to have experience as pipe-fitters, are they? Maybe what we'll see is a real shift in US universities toward teaching software engineering - rather than teaching programming, and then expecting these poor bastards to learn how to be engineers on the fly, on the job, after being hired as programmers.
3. Free trade of knowledge. Patents and copyrights restrict the sharing of knowlegde. They should be eliminated entirely.
Patents and copyrights were created to promote the exchange of knowledge, not restrict it. Without patents, everything would be a trade secret. Without copyrights, no one would bother to widely publish creative works. (Software is a special case, because the exchange of information in that field is so cheap and easy, and because software as an industry has yet to reach maturity - it's still in the craft phase.) Now, I can see as well as the next critter that things have gone wrong, but that doesn't mean that the solution is to scrap the whole concept.
Hardly. The reason the labour is cheaper over there is because they start of at a lower standard of living (as you noted) AND THEY DO NOT GAIN OUR PROTECTIONS.
How do you think such protections come about? They come about when the standard of living of a country rises to the point that people have time to think about such things, rather than mere survival. Not until then. In EuroAmerica, they came about *after* the Industrial Revolution, not before.
Maybe not directly. But what about all those 401Ks? They're largely stock-based, aren't they?
Check that. Look at the environmental protections and the employee protections of those countries. In most cases, the reason it is cheaper to send the work over seas is because they have fewer protections.
The more money flows into those countries, and the better off their people become, the more concern they'll have about things like labor standards and environmental quality, rather than mere hand-to-mouth survival.
Right..... and the last time we went to war with a country we were outsourcing to was......?
Uhhhh... *exactly*. We don't go to war with countries with which we have stable, peaceful economic ties. Now extrapolate this to the entire world.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Dems and Reps don't look out, the next election could be between Greens and Libertarians, with the former major parties groveling for signatures to get on the ballot.
I'd take either the Libs or the Greens (preferably the Libs, though) over the Republicrats/Demoblicans.
Easy enough to make sure newspapers and television that do this kind of investigative reporting don't get ad dollars - under libertarianism there would be nothing to prevent corporations generating a blacklist of media outlets to kill. And if a multibillion dollar corporation says, "hey, my twenty highly paid scientific experts say that pollution didn't come from my drainpipe", how does a $30K/year individual marshall a lawsuit against them?
One could question whether, in a libertarian state, there would even be such powerful corporations in the first place. Badnarik himself addresses this issue in his answers - corporations, he says, are way too powerful, in large part because they operate under the aegis of the state. Corporations, as they exist today in the US, are an aberrant abomination that blur the line between private enterprise and government power.
I NEVER SAID that I steal software
I never said that you did, either.
nor do I recommend people take it.
No, but you are condoning it by manufacturing a justification for it.
i guess you are like the guy who laughed at the idea of fedex in '60s, or laughed at the idea of bottled water in the '70s, or laugh at the idea of spending $5.00 on a cup of coffee in the '90s
Um, none of those involve theft, or the elimination of property rights. Oh, and by the way, I do laugh at the idea of spending $5 on a cup of coffee, no matter what decade it is.
[the address]...Palmyra Atoll (Uninhabited Sovereign Territory)...Sounds like the 21th century equilivant of 'Florida Swamp land'.
Oh, and the phone number? "+78", etc.? Ain't no such country code.
There's a fairly large difference between digital data that can be replicated for at most a few dollars a copy, compared to a heavily resource intensive manufactured item like a car.
I fail to see why that makes it OK to steal software, MS's or anyone else's.
Umm, that is the whole *point* of using hydrogen: to provide an efficient storage mechanism for energy, which can then be extracted cleanly using fuel cells, combustion, etc.
Well, that's all fine and good... except that hydrogen is not an efficient energy sotrage mechanism. Certainly not nearly as efficient as diesel fuel, or methane/propane, which could be manufactured almost as easily as hydrogen, and are much easier to store/use.
And if cars were cheap enough, no one would steal them, either. What's your point?
Whenever I plonk down the military base in Sim City 3000, crime goes sky-high in the surrounding areas.
Heh. But seriously, an increase in crime around a military does not mean that crime goes up on the military base.
Use the power to pump water uphill and store it in a reservoir or heat a large amount of water. There are plenty of ways to store large amounts of electricity.
Or, this electricity could simply be used to store water, period. Got a water tower in your neighborhood? Places like Long Island, NY are chock full of 'em, and they've gotta get the water up there somehow - why not use wind power?
I do think, however, they might want to charge an extra "clean up" premium on porn shoots...
This is the porn industry we're talking about here - they could afford to buy their own damn plane. Pad all the walls with foam rubber upholstered in pink velvet, put in '70s colored lighting, and have "bow-chicka-bow-bow" in 3D surround... Hell, I'm surprised the porn industry doesn't have their own space station already.
Now if you compared it to say, an Opteron (a much more fair comparison), well then you'd see AMD still wins or pulls up even.
Well, here you go... AMD's fastest Opteron runs neck and neck against Intel's fastest Xeon, and guess which one is cheaper? (Only slightly though...)
I'm not sure about Austrian toilets, but I'm afraid they may resemble German toilets [spies.com].
I'm afraid they do, too - at least the ones in the Hotel zur Rossmuehle in Tulln-am-der-Donau, outside Vienna. Yuck.
It's environmentally friendly-- generally no new CO2 is made in collecting the CO2 for it.
Well, I'm assuming the collection process requires energy, which likely comes from burning fossil fuels...
If this was true, Raistlin wouldn't be such a popular character.
Only on Slashdot would a statement like this be made. The remaining 99.99% of the world would be scratching their heads asking "Raistlin who?".
Those charts are genious.
They look kinda like Nassi-Schneiderman charts...
The film were Billy-Bob met Ms Jolie is actually entitled Pushing Tin [imdb.com].
And in that film, Cate Blanchett's the one to look at, not Jolie.
Anakin is Darth Vader!
And Hayden Christensen is Mark Hamill's father. Go figure.
Why just PS2 and Xbox? If they can release it for Xbox, they can release it for Windows, can't they?
What, you mean like how companies showed up and steamrolled the existing buggy operating system offering with a far superior one?
That's right, they did - and it's free, to boot! So what's the problem?
It is a government for the people and by the people, according to the constitution.
Our founding documents also refer to such things as "inalienable" rights. The US is not an unlimited democracy - and thank the non-existent god for that.
What I'm personally seeing is that the US/EU companies are firing the junior programmers and keeping the senior architects due to outsourcing to India. The effect of this is to essentially cut out the entire next generation of software architects because they do not get enough experience (and often quit IT totally).
I don't know that that's what will happen. Maybe what it will lead to is a realignment of software engineering as a discipline, along the lines of other engineering disciplines. When US companies hire electrical engineers, they're not expected to have experience as electricians. When companies hire mechanical engineers, they're not expected to have experience as pipe-fitters, are they? Maybe what we'll see is a real shift in US universities toward teaching software engineering - rather than teaching programming, and then expecting these poor bastards to learn how to be engineers on the fly, on the job, after being hired as programmers.
3. Free trade of knowledge. Patents and copyrights restrict the sharing of knowlegde. They should be eliminated entirely.
Patents and copyrights were created to promote the exchange of knowledge, not restrict it. Without patents, everything would be a trade secret. Without copyrights, no one would bother to widely publish creative works. (Software is a special case, because the exchange of information in that field is so cheap and easy, and because software as an industry has yet to reach maturity - it's still in the craft phase.) Now, I can see as well as the next critter that things have gone wrong, but that doesn't mean that the solution is to scrap the whole concept.
Hardly. The reason the labour is cheaper over there is because they start of at a lower standard of living (as you noted) AND THEY DO NOT GAIN OUR PROTECTIONS.
How do you think such protections come about? They come about when the standard of living of a country rises to the point that people have time to think about such things, rather than mere survival. Not until then. In EuroAmerica, they came about *after* the Industrial Revolution, not before.
But 90% of US citizens do NOT own much stock.
Maybe not directly. But what about all those 401Ks? They're largely stock-based, aren't they?
Check that. Look at the environmental protections and the employee protections of those countries. In most cases, the reason it is cheaper to send the work over seas is because they have fewer protections.
The more money flows into those countries, and the better off their people become, the more concern they'll have about things like labor standards and environmental quality, rather than mere hand-to-mouth survival.
Right..... and the last time we went to war with a country we were outsourcing to was......?
Uhhhh... *exactly*. We don't go to war with countries with which we have stable, peaceful economic ties. Now extrapolate this to the entire world.