The cost of living is 8 times lower here in India than in the U.S. What would be an underpaid job in the U.S is a princely salary in India. Programmers are among the highest paid professions in India.
What rubbish. The cost of subsisting is lower. The cost of any item taken for granted by a US/UK/Australia IT worker but considered a luxury is similar.
I'm thinking about buying a digital SLR in the next year or two. Tell me how many of your programmers paid a "princely salary" could even contemplate that.
But please try to get it into your head that there are no IT sweatshops in India. IT has in fact made millions of workers filthy rich.
Sure there are no IT sweatshops in India. And there's no torture in IRAQ and when I get home tonight I'll be fed bread and honey by fairies and nymphs. How niave.
And you say my "theory" is mostly "nonesense". Answer this: Would you consider immigrating to India?
You want everyone to live in the 3rd world and I'm the idiot? That's rich.
If you're going to resort to an attitude of "I'm right and you're just plain wrong because I say and you're an idiot because you don't agree" I'm not even going to bother arguing with you.
Learn the difference between arguing a point and making a personal attack before you reply to something. In the meantime don't bother replying because your "replies" have degenerated into insults. Grow up.
...but only because the only way things can go for the poor of India is up. When you're poor and live in a 3rd world country it basically doesn't take much to make your life a little better. (note: this does not mean good). Free software means reduced administration costs for any organisation/government trying to help these people.
All other things being equal:
Poor + something good for free = still poor but a little better off.
The Indian "IT boom" is at least partly the result of outsourcing and paying coders a hell of a lot less money than they should be earning given the effort they're putting in. Thing is if you're scratching in the dirt trying to find a feed, you just aren't in a position to turn work down no matter how bad. So yeah their life is improved from poverty to slavery. They won't starve but they sure as hell aren't free to prosper.
Just so I'm clear I'm in favour of the use of free (as in beer) software in a poor country, just not in favour of outsourcing (which is what I attribute India's IT boom to).
It's not that your opinion isn't popular with me. It's that your opinion is wrong.
Read what you just read. If my opinion is "wrong", show me the logical/mathematical proof. If you can its called a fact. If you can't, then its called an opinion or a point of view. Hint: "I suggest you read book so and so" is not a mathematical proof. To try to state otherwise is both inaccurate and extremely arrogant.
You act as if there is a fixed amount of work, so that if a job appears in one country, a job must disappear from another country. If that were the case, how is it that new jobs are created?
You've misunderstood the argument altogether haven't you. I am not arguing that there is a fixed amount of work. I am arguing that if you pay someone very little (taking into account the cost of living where they are), that you've devalued the job. People will do the work if its offered at that rate only because they have no alternative. You devalue that job in both the country from which the work is outsourced and the one to which it is outsourced. Suddenly busting your gut trying to make a living in any job you can outsource is worth nothing more to the business than what it costs to feed a single person in a 3rd world country.
To put it in terms of "a different tactic" outsourcing does not increase wealth distribution - it devalues the work itself. For anyone that wants to work for a living in that job this is bad news.
The person doing it for less is still earning more that before. And she needs it more than you. She has less opportunities for learning, for relocation, less assistance.
Why can't you seem to understand that all you are doing is making the job worth a hell of a lot less. As the amount of work increases and the amount of reward decreases all you are moving towards is a working slave class.
"She" _deserves_ a similar standard of living if "she" is doing similar work to the person who's job has been outsourced.
The person who can eat. And ultimately everyone, as this person will help moviment the economy, the service she does will be less expensive, more capital will be freed for new investments.
So that's what everyone should work hard for? Just so they can barely survive while others get rich off their efforts?
No one deserves anything. It is not a concept in Economics.
Unlike you I'm not interested in economics as a thing of and for itself. Economics is a vehicle for allowing people to live more prosperously, not a thing to be worshipped.
Absolutely not. Without migration and trade we'd be poorer, and you too.
I did not say we needed no migration or trade. I said it should be controlled. I think every country's immigration services and trade departments would agree with me here. You can't have zero control.
Have you forgotten you are a descendant of immigrants yourself? Most people who migrate do that to be able to get a better living.
I find this statement rather arrogant since its me that pointed out to you that I'm the descendant of immigrants. They came here for a better life - here they could work hard and afford to own houses. They did not come here and leave family and friends to work very very hard just to barely make enough to eat.
First, it won't be repeated again and again. The pool of qualified workers isn't that big, and its growth is diminishing due to diminishing fertility rates and growing killing of the unborn. In fact, usually you lack people. Current unemployment in rich countries is anormal.
The pool of people who have nothing and are willing to do anything for the bare minimum is a lot bigger than you think. How many of those have access to get qualified is a different issue. Regardless this world certainly does not lack people.
Second, if it was, then that service was superfluous. Better that everyone eat than that superfluous services exist.
Again you seem very happy to live in a world where everyone works very hard for the privillege of being able to eat and nothing more! Everything else in your eyes is excessive. Forgive me for wanting more out of life!!!
Third, for each person loosing their job there are still dozens of others able to pay for the services. And the reduction in income in the rich countries isn't that important. You are thinking with your fears and perhaps anedoctes, not with hard numbers.
Again you contradict yourself. First there's a shortage of people. Now there's an abundance of people. I sincerely don't think you're thinking with "hard numbers" at all. You're thinking "I want a job and I'll do anything for it and there are billions in the same position as me so stuff it I don't care if everyone gets brought down to the same level of just scratching for food".
Eventually you run out of people who can afford the services. You're basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. Outsourcing then selling back to the economy you outsourced from is non-sustainable.
Legislation out of touch with reality engenders black markets.
Lets fix the legislative system and make it more in touch then. Or rather lets find experts who can. Or are you saying a no-law unrestricted free market is the way to go? In that extreme your best option is to become a war lord and enslave as many people as you can.
The thing with diamonds is due to wars, not free trade. It has noth
Look its really this simple. If you devalue a job by paying someone less to do it elsewhere, do not expect to be better off if you're doing that job.
Take a high stress computer consultancy/programming/support role. Lets say someone in the US gets paid US70k to do the job and that means that they're on call for 24/7 support and dealing with new project requirements all the time. That is a high stress job. If a person is doing that job reasonably well they deserve to be able to afford more than just the bare essentials. Otherwise what they are is a slave not a worker.
So now you offshore the work and pay someone a LOT less to do it to cut costs. Not only could they not afford luxuries in the US, they can't afford them in their own country. They on the other hand are grateful to be a slave because now they can eat.
Now who does this benefit? The unscrupulous employer willing to employ someone at slave wages and the consumer supposedly. But what you forget to take into account is that if this story is repeated again and again, the conumer can no longer afford the services provided. (Say this person worked for a bank and writes internet banking software - what use is this if neither he nor anyone else in his social class could afford internet access?)
In the long term, the distribution of wealth makes it grow faster, so that everyone gets richer.
I don't understand how you think this will work.
> A person doing the same job in another country should be able to expect similar HIGH standards of living
That's wishful thinking. There is no way of doing that happen other than with globalisation, and that in the very, very long term.
and then:
If you had it your way, you'd effectively live worse.
You're contradicting yourself. One minute you tell me I can't have high standards of living everywhere and the next you're saying I'm a very bad man because if I had my way everyone would be worse off.
Granted you can stop trading and migration, but that would impoverish everyone, including you, and create a totalitarian state. BTW Europe and US already feel quite totalitarian to someone from Brazil.
Funny I've lived in Australia all my life and despite misgivings due to being a descendant of Egyptian immigrants, I'd rather Europe or even the US to Brazil any day. Brazil would be a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
What you need is some control over migration and trade to prevent employers from exploiting their staff. Within a country's own sovereignty this can be done through legislation. However unless you have an effective international mechanism fr preventing abuse of a "free market" and effective policiing to ensure abuse does not occur you ultimately end up with situations like you have with conflict diamonds where people have only two choices: literally be a slave or die violently. That is the extreme and eventual consequence of making people work harder and harder for less and less.
Quite frankly if you want a better job for yourself, get an education and work hard towards getting the skills you need for that job. Don't argue for a situation in which everyone gets paid less.
You don't improve someone else's standard of living by bringing your own down. You improve the standard of living of the owners of your company a little. They basically scuttle your earnings so they can be that little bit richer. Don't fool yourself - Wealth gets MORE concentrated, not less.
A person doing the same job in another country should be able to expect similar HIGH standards of living. Yes you do need to take into account differences in cost of living etc. but that does not mean it should be significantly cheaper to move that business to another country.
I make no apology for wanting to live well, and I don't just want that for myself.
Tell me Russ Is your definition of ignorance anyone else's opinion that isn't popular with you?
Do you honestly think that an Indian worker earning just enough to feed his family is going to buy American goods? I didn't know that America mass produced Ruti. For that matter do you think that $1 coming back into the country makes up for the lost labour or the decline in the standard of living resulting from the outsourcing?
Before you claim someone else is ignorant, you might want to cast the log from your own eye.
In the words of Homer Simpson "You're living in a dream world...".
Innovation costs money. Bleeding money off shore through outsourcing until the common guy on the street can't get a job is not going to help scientists and engineers innovate. The more you lower the standard of living in a country, the less people will be concerned with innovation and the more effort they'll need to spend just to stay afloat. Eventually you will simply bring the standard of your own country down closer to the level of the countries you outsource to.
Outsourcing to another place where people work like slaves for peanuts just to keep themselves from starving is evil. Period. You reap what you sew. This BS WILL come back to haunt us all.
Everyone who genuinely wants to work should be able to make a living. If they're willing to make a gigantic effort they should be able to expect proportional rewards.
Just one question. Have you even used Mozilla or Firefox lately? It certainly use to be a buggy piece of garbage that I avoided for years (after Netscape 4.7) but I'd argue its now better and more stable than IE (which isn't hard).
Mark my words, within five years DIRAC will be bigger than MP3 is now.
You're all too willing to predict the future. I wish I had your prescience. You may be right but like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison have been to the tune of many millions and they're the successful ones.
End users are going to make up the majority of users for a successful product. The end user of the codec is not going to encode the video, they're going to watch it. If the video doesn't simply play in their web browser forget it, the majority won't bother - they've got busy lives and other things to do with their time.
The fact is the majority of users don't watch DivX's. If you could click on a link and play one without installing additional software, and if they all had cheap bandwidth they might.
First of all, this is stupid. Imagine if we did away with all that pointless branching into different car manufacturers (who needs all of Toyota, Nissan, Ford, GM etc. each with their quirks and styles) and just had a single make and model of car? Much easier right? Huh?
You're comparing hardware with software and then calling my arguement stupid? A better analogy would be to imagine that each car used a different type of petrol. The machinery is analogous to the car. The petrol is analogous to the software. Each petrol station has to carry each type of petrol and every time a petrol manufacturer wants to change the mix a new type emerges.
For that matter even the hardware has standards. There are standard sizes of tyres, the vehicles have to comply with the saftey standards where they are sold etc.
Secondly, this is stupid. You are comparing apples with rubber ducks.
In some cases the comparison is valid. 5kg of rubber duck = 5kg of red delicious in a highschool physics problem.
It is you that's comparing software to hardware and blurring that line. Hardware standards must be more stringent since hardware requires physical replacement if it is not interoperable. You can have many different manufacturers of CD/DVD readers/writers, but they all need to work to the same spec. if you want interoperability.
If you want the latest client operating system from SuSE there is only 1, just like Microsoft.
You've made my point for me. In the case of MS and Apple 1 manufacturer makes each operating system. There are not 70 versions of the same OS. With Linux, that's not the way that it works. SUSE is different to Redhat. Packages may compile/run on one but not the other. The end user ends up doing version control management on their libraries. Not only do you have issues with incompatibility upgrading but you have cross-compatibility issues. What a total and utter mess! And then we expect people who are interested in the computer only as a tool to switch over from Windows? At most with windows I have to worry about which one of about 6 versions a program is written for. For a lot of software a single build works for all.
Please try to make sense in future.
How about you try and refrain from attacking a point of view you don't understand just because it differs from yours? Oh and please learn the difference between attacking a point of view and attacking a person.
Some variety is good and necessary, however infinite variety and a lack of standards is not in anyone's interests.
Regardless of patents etc. it doesn't matter that there is something as good as a Microsoft codec. Unless there is a perceived advantage, unfortunately it isn't going to become widely adopted because the huge mass marketing machine that is Microsoft is pushing its technology and making it the easy to use default.
You only have to look at Mozilla/Firebird which have finally matured into reasonably solid stable products. Netscape innovated, then lost market share and IE got a foothold. Now it doesn't matter to most companies that there is once again a good alternative in Mozilla because it only has a small marketshare. In the case of MP3, it took more of a foothold earlier on but we're already seeing movement towards proprietary formats.
The only way that the open source community is going to do well here is to provide a single coherent product without branches that is trivial to install and use for the average non-technical computer user. Unfortunately the very nature of open source and free software makes this difficult, because you have to reach a consensus amongst a diverse range of very intelligent people with very different politcal agendas. Choosing a single united front is a huge challenge.
Forget the codec for a moment. If I want to install the latest client operating system from Microsoft there is only 1. (This is the ideal - I know we've had Me/98/XP running concurrently but that's still only 3). How many Linux distributions exist - each version with its quirks and styles. It may be fantastic from the point of view of evolution of the software. Its not going to get users switching over.
I think I made my point very well. I really couldn't give a hoot about the exact wording of the motto. What's the bet this post also gets modded "Flamebait" or "Troll" or "Offtopic" even though I'd argue criticising a slight misquote of slashdot's motto a hell of a lot less on the topic.
Translation of modderation: How dare you criticise slashdot!
Hello! flamebait and trolling relates to unfounded criticism for the sole purpose of upsetting people/stirring the pot. Since I'm criticising the relevance of the article I find it ironic that it get modded "off topic". Come on in all seriousness that article wasn't relevant, wasn't funny and wasn't worth the energy of the mouse click let alone the attention to reading the first few lines of that junk.
I'm not trying to "bait" anyone or "troll". I just would prefer that my time isn't wasted.
You're not suppose to moderate something under as flamebait or troll or off topic because you don't like the opinion expressed. How's that for off topic!
Oh boo hoo. I've hurt my little Karma and I can't get up.
For goodness sake if you want to mod me down go ahead but "Troll"?
The motto is "News for nerds. Things that matter". Not pre-adolescent drug induced ramblings for the technically inclined. About 3 stories in 10 are remotely interesting and about 1 in 10 is news. For examples the fact that CD media deteriorates is not news and hasn't been for a few years now. 3 stories about it in as many months here is unimpressive.
One thing to point out is that the agents called and said they wanted to speak with the student, but it doesn't appear they ever arrested him. That means he could have told them that he wasn't interested in meeting with them, or he could have walked out of the room at any time. He also could have at any time brought in a lawyer.
Oh yeah. Excellent idea. "No I won't talk to you unless I'm under arrest" is the best way to get yourself arrested. As for due process, and not being locked up like an animal and/or torchered because the US is such a civilized country, tell that to those locked up without a trial in Guantanamo Bay and the Iraqis that made the news in those abhorent torcher pictures that have been all over the news.
The real moral of the story is that war is nasty. If you declare war be prepared for attrocities on both sides. It seems that the accepted way to fight the "war on terrorism" is to sink to the standards of your enemies these days. I mean honestly where does the US get off calling itself the land of the free anymore? I fear for how far this madness will go.
Come on. This is a pile of Orwellian BS. What's next. GoodNet (tm) instead of Goodspeak?
As the amount of information and its accessibility increases the whole idea that you can selectively censor the right things 100% accurately all the time becomes comical. You simply can't have a proliferation of easily accessible information and censor the "bad information" since what is bad is subjective anyway.
If you must place controls, its more practical to do so on the tools and materials required to perpetrate the "evil" you wish to combat.
I for once like the access to information that the internet gives me. Its empowering and I've used this information practically not just for entertainment or frivolous uses.
When doctors have given me and the ones I love incomplete or inaccurate information as they have on a couple of occassions I've been able to get better information and present it back to them to act on it. Its sped up a couple of key diagnoses for my girlfriend and I. In both cases not working out what the problem was as soon as we did would have resulted in each of us spending significant amounts of time out of work (not to mention feeling miserable). We'd each for different medical reasons have been permanently excluded from driving, and would almost certainly have had our lives shortened. Had the information been buried in some public library without any access to anecdotal evidence (usenet) life today for me would be very much worse.
'GNU/Linuxy'? That's so like uh huh yesterday like. *girly giggle* I mean like she's so not with it like *hair flick* She should get with the times and like stop it *bounce*
HTTPS is HTTP _over_ SSL. Typically its a single port that handles web requests on 443. You can block all other ports for SSL, and still allow port 443.
I stand corrected. What I said was incorrect. What I meant was HTTP on port 80, HTTPS on 443. (ie no non-standard ports). Even servers serving HTTP on 8080 were inaccessible.
"What's wrong with just plain FTP over SSL? No one's going to be blocking FTP anytime soon..."
I work as an IT consultant in Australia and work on site most of the time. Our clients - banks and insurance companies - certainly do do block FTP and SSL. They usually block anything that isn't HTTP or HTTPS on port 80. This is a genuine frustration for me as I often want to send log files and software to the HQ of the software firm I work for.
To make matters worse one client I worked for had a policy of restricting access to external email and other content (games, porn etc.). They used web filter software which I won't name here for now. Lots of legitmate sites I'd want to get to for genuinely work related purposes were also blocked.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is the method adopted by large educational institutions in the end. They won't be able to fight large corporates for very long with the limited funding they do have. It will only take a handful of large law suits to sway them towards censorship.
Its an interesting world we live in now. It seems to have become standard practice somewhere in the late 90s to make product and then intimidate or sue your customers.
2^10 = 1024. So we have 10 doublings of the speed of data left to go right? How often do data speeds double? (Using these methods of course).
I wonder sort of progress will be impacted in practical terms. There are limits to everything of course. Just one more limit. I hope I'm alive to run into some of these scientific limits so I can see what innovative workarounds people come up with.
...but I don't like the idea of any company having gigabytes of my email, which it has conveniently filled with advertising
A person's email archive belongs on their own hard disk. I wouldn't trust all my personal mail to a 3rd party (even if it was a highly accessibly safe box).
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of living is 8 times lower here in India than in the U.S. What would be an underpaid job in the U.S is a princely salary in India. Programmers are among the highest paid professions in India.
What rubbish. The cost of subsisting is lower. The cost of any item taken for granted by a US/UK/Australia IT worker but considered a luxury is similar.
I'm thinking about buying a digital SLR in the next year or two. Tell me how many of your programmers paid a "princely salary" could even contemplate that.
But please try to get it into your head that there are no IT sweatshops in India. IT has in fact made millions of workers filthy rich.
Sure there are no IT sweatshops in India. And there's no torture in IRAQ and when I get home tonight I'll be fed bread and honey by fairies and nymphs. How niave.
And you say my "theory" is mostly "nonesense". Answer this: Would you consider immigrating to India?
You want everyone to live in the 3rd world and I'm the idiot? That's rich.
If you're going to resort to an attitude of "I'm right and you're just plain wrong because I say and you're an idiot because you don't agree" I'm not even going to bother arguing with you.
Learn the difference between arguing a point and making a personal attack before you reply to something. In the meantime don't bother replying because your "replies" have degenerated into insults. Grow up.
...but only because the only way things can go for the poor of India is up. When you're poor and live in a 3rd world country it basically doesn't take much to make your life a little better. (note: this does not mean good). Free software means reduced administration costs for any organisation/government trying to help these people.
All other things being equal:
Poor + something good for free = still poor but a little better off.
The Indian "IT boom" is at least partly the result of outsourcing and paying coders a hell of a lot less money than they should be earning given the effort they're putting in. Thing is if you're scratching in the dirt trying to find a feed, you just aren't in a position to turn work down no matter how bad. So yeah their life is improved from poverty to slavery. They won't starve but they sure as hell aren't free to prosper.
Just so I'm clear I'm in favour of the use of free (as in beer) software in a poor country, just not in favour of outsourcing (which is what I attribute India's IT boom to).
It's not that your opinion isn't popular with me. It's that your opinion is wrong.
Read what you just read. If my opinion is "wrong", show me the logical/mathematical proof. If you can its called a fact. If you can't, then its called an opinion or a point of view. Hint: "I suggest you read book so and so" is not a mathematical proof. To try to state otherwise is both inaccurate and extremely arrogant.
You act as if there is a fixed amount of work, so that if a job appears in one country, a job must disappear from another country. If that were the case, how is it that new jobs are created?
You've misunderstood the argument altogether haven't you. I am not arguing that there is a fixed amount of work. I am arguing that if you pay someone very little (taking into account the cost of living where they are), that you've devalued the job. People will do the work if its offered at that rate only because they have no alternative. You devalue that job in both the country from which the work is outsourced and the one to which it is outsourced. Suddenly busting your gut trying to make a living in any job you can outsource is worth nothing more to the business than what it costs to feed a single person in a 3rd world country.
To put it in terms of "a different tactic" outsourcing does not increase wealth distribution - it devalues the work itself. For anyone that wants to work for a living in that job this is bad news.
The person doing it for less is still earning more that before. And she needs it more than you. She has less opportunities for learning, for relocation, less assistance.
Why can't you seem to understand that all you are doing is making the job worth a hell of a lot less. As the amount of work increases and the amount of reward decreases all you are moving towards is a working slave class.
"She" _deserves_ a similar standard of living if "she" is doing similar work to the person who's job has been outsourced.
The person who can eat. And ultimately everyone, as this person will help moviment the economy, the service she does will be less expensive, more capital will be freed for new investments.
So that's what everyone should work hard for? Just so they can barely survive while others get rich off their efforts?
No one deserves anything. It is not a concept in Economics.
Unlike you I'm not interested in economics as a thing of and for itself. Economics is a vehicle for allowing people to live more prosperously, not a thing to be worshipped.
Absolutely not. Without migration and trade we'd be poorer, and you too.
I did not say we needed no migration or trade. I said it should be controlled. I think every country's immigration services and trade departments would agree with me here. You can't have zero control.
Have you forgotten you are a descendant of immigrants yourself? Most people who migrate do that to be able to get a better living.
I find this statement rather arrogant since its me that pointed out to you that I'm the descendant of immigrants. They came here for a better life - here they could work hard and afford to own houses. They did not come here and leave family and friends to work very very hard just to barely make enough to eat.
First, it won't be repeated again and again. The pool of qualified workers isn't that big, and its growth is diminishing due to diminishing fertility rates and growing killing of the unborn. In fact, usually you lack people. Current unemployment in rich countries is anormal.
The pool of people who have nothing and are willing to do anything for the bare minimum is a lot bigger than you think. How many of those have access to get qualified is a different issue. Regardless this world certainly does not lack people.
Second, if it was, then that service was superfluous. Better that everyone eat than that superfluous services exist.
Again you seem very happy to live in a world where everyone works very hard for the privillege of being able to eat and nothing more! Everything else in your eyes is excessive. Forgive me for wanting more out of life!!!
Third, for each person loosing their job there are still dozens of others able to pay for the services. And the reduction in income in the rich countries isn't that important. You are thinking with your fears and perhaps anedoctes, not with hard numbers.
Again you contradict yourself. First there's a shortage of people. Now there's an abundance of people. I sincerely don't think you're thinking with "hard numbers" at all. You're thinking "I want a job and I'll do anything for it and there are billions in the same position as me so stuff it I don't care if everyone gets brought down to the same level of just scratching for food".
Eventually you run out of people who can afford the services. You're basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. Outsourcing then selling back to the economy you outsourced from is non-sustainable.
Legislation out of touch with reality engenders black markets.
Lets fix the legislative system and make it more in touch then. Or rather lets find experts who can. Or are you saying a no-law unrestricted free market is the way to go? In that extreme your best option is to become a war lord and enslave as many people as you can.
The thing with diamonds is due to wars, not free trade. It has noth
Look its really this simple. If you devalue a job by paying someone less to do it elsewhere, do not expect to be better off if you're doing that job.
Take a high stress computer consultancy/programming/support role. Lets say someone in the US gets paid US70k to do the job and that means that they're on call for 24/7 support and dealing with new project requirements all the time. That is a high stress job. If a person is doing that job reasonably well they deserve to be able to afford more than just the bare essentials. Otherwise what they are is a slave not a worker.
So now you offshore the work and pay someone a LOT less to do it to cut costs. Not only could they not afford luxuries in the US, they can't afford them in their own country. They on the other hand are grateful to be a slave because now they can eat.
Now who does this benefit? The unscrupulous employer willing to employ someone at slave wages and the consumer supposedly. But what you forget to take into account is that if this story is repeated again and again, the conumer can no longer afford the services provided. (Say this person worked for a bank and writes internet banking software - what use is this if neither he nor anyone else in his social class could afford internet access?)
In the long term, the distribution of wealth makes it grow faster, so that everyone gets richer.
I don't understand how you think this will work.
> A person doing the same job in another country should be able to expect similar HIGH standards of living
That's wishful thinking. There is no way of doing that happen other than with globalisation, and that in the very, very long term.
and then:
If you had it your way, you'd effectively live worse.
You're contradicting yourself. One minute you tell me I can't have high standards of living everywhere and the next you're saying I'm a very bad man because if I had my way everyone would be worse off.
Granted you can stop trading and migration, but that would impoverish everyone, including you, and create a totalitarian state. BTW Europe and US already feel quite totalitarian to someone from Brazil.
Funny I've lived in Australia all my life and despite misgivings due to being a descendant of Egyptian immigrants, I'd rather Europe or even the US to Brazil any day. Brazil would be a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
What you need is some control over migration and trade to prevent employers from exploiting their staff. Within a country's own sovereignty this can be done through legislation. However unless you have an effective international mechanism fr preventing abuse of a "free market" and effective policiing to ensure abuse does not occur you ultimately end up with situations like you have with conflict diamonds where people have only two choices: literally be a slave or die violently. That is the extreme and eventual consequence of making people work harder and harder for less and less.
Quite frankly if you want a better job for yourself, get an education and work hard towards getting the skills you need for that job. Don't argue for a situation in which everyone gets paid less.
What a complete load of rubbish.
You don't improve someone else's standard of living by bringing your own down. You improve the standard of living of the owners of your company a little. They basically scuttle your earnings so they can be that little bit richer. Don't fool yourself - Wealth gets MORE concentrated, not less.
A person doing the same job in another country should be able to expect similar HIGH standards of living. Yes you do need to take into account differences in cost of living etc. but that does not mean it should be significantly cheaper to move that business to another country.
I make no apology for wanting to live well, and I don't just want that for myself.
Tell me Russ
Is your definition of ignorance anyone else's opinion that isn't popular with you?
Do you honestly think that an Indian worker earning just enough to feed his family is going to buy American goods? I didn't know that America mass produced Ruti. For that matter do you think that $1 coming back into the country makes up for the lost labour or the decline in the standard of living resulting from the outsourcing?
Before you claim someone else is ignorant, you might want to cast the log from your own eye.
In the words of Homer Simpson "You're living in a dream world...".
Innovation costs money. Bleeding money off shore through outsourcing until the common guy on the street can't get a job is not going to help scientists and engineers innovate. The more you lower the standard of living in a country, the less people will be concerned with innovation and the more effort they'll need to spend just to stay afloat. Eventually you will simply bring the standard of your own country down closer to the level of the countries you outsource to.
Outsourcing to another place where people work like slaves for peanuts just to keep themselves from starving is evil. Period. You reap what you sew. This BS WILL come back to haunt us all.
Everyone who genuinely wants to work should be able to make a living. If they're willing to make a gigantic effort they should be able to expect proportional rewards.
Sammy
Just one question. Have you even used Mozilla or Firefox lately? It certainly use to be a buggy piece of garbage that I avoided for years (after Netscape 4.7) but I'd argue its now better and more stable than IE (which isn't hard).
Mark my words, within five years DIRAC will be bigger than MP3 is now.
You're all too willing to predict the future. I wish I had your prescience. You may be right but like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison have been to the tune of many millions and they're the successful ones.
End users are going to make up the majority of users for a successful product. The end user of the codec is not going to encode the video, they're going to watch it. If the video doesn't simply play in their web browser forget it, the majority won't bother - they've got busy lives and other things to do with their time.
The fact is the majority of users don't watch DivX's. If you could click on a link and play one without installing additional software, and if they all had cheap bandwidth they might.
First of all, this is stupid. Imagine if we did away with all that pointless branching into different car manufacturers (who needs all of Toyota, Nissan, Ford, GM etc. each with their quirks and styles) and just had a single make and model of car? Much easier right? Huh?
You're comparing hardware with software and then calling my arguement stupid? A better analogy would be to imagine that each car used a different type of petrol. The machinery is analogous to the car. The petrol is analogous to the software. Each petrol station has to carry each type of petrol and every time a petrol manufacturer wants to change the mix a new type emerges.
For that matter even the hardware has standards. There are standard sizes of tyres, the vehicles have to comply with the saftey standards where they are sold etc.
Secondly, this is stupid. You are comparing apples with rubber ducks.
In some cases the comparison is valid. 5kg of rubber duck = 5kg of red delicious in a highschool physics problem.
It is you that's comparing software to hardware and blurring that line. Hardware standards must be more stringent since hardware requires physical replacement if it is not interoperable. You can have many different manufacturers of CD/DVD readers/writers, but they all need to work to the same spec. if you want interoperability.
If you want the latest client operating system from SuSE there is only 1, just like Microsoft.
You've made my point for me. In the case of MS and Apple 1 manufacturer makes each operating system. There are not 70 versions of the same OS. With Linux, that's not the way that it works. SUSE is different to Redhat. Packages may compile/run on one but not the other. The end user ends up doing version control management on their libraries. Not only do you have issues with incompatibility upgrading but you have cross-compatibility issues. What a total and utter mess! And then we expect people who are interested in the computer only as a tool to switch over from Windows? At most with windows I have to worry about which one of about 6 versions a program is written for. For a lot of software a single build works for all.
Please try to make sense in future.
How about you try and refrain from attacking a point of view you don't understand just because it differs from yours? Oh and please learn the difference between attacking a point of view and attacking a person.
Some variety is good and necessary, however infinite variety and a lack of standards is not in anyone's interests.
Regardless of patents etc. it doesn't matter that there is something as good as a Microsoft codec. Unless there is a perceived advantage, unfortunately it isn't going to become widely adopted because the huge mass marketing machine that is Microsoft is pushing its technology and making it the easy to use default.
You only have to look at Mozilla/Firebird which have finally matured into reasonably solid stable products. Netscape innovated, then lost market share and IE got a foothold. Now it doesn't matter to most companies that there is once again a good alternative in Mozilla because it only has a small marketshare. In the case of MP3, it took more of a foothold earlier on but we're already seeing movement towards proprietary formats.
The only way that the open source community is going to do well here is to provide a single coherent product without branches that is trivial to install and use for the average non-technical computer user. Unfortunately the very nature of open source and free software makes this difficult, because you have to reach a consensus amongst a diverse range of very intelligent people with very different politcal agendas. Choosing a single united front is a huge challenge.
Forget the codec for a moment. If I want to install the latest client operating system from Microsoft there is only 1. (This is the ideal - I know we've had Me/98/XP running concurrently but that's still only 3). How many Linux distributions exist - each version with its quirks and styles. It may be fantastic from the point of view of evolution of the software. Its not going to get users switching over.
What a busload of BS.
/stirring the pot. Since I'm criticising the relevance of the article I find it ironic that it get modded "off topic". Come on in all seriousness that article wasn't relevant, wasn't funny and wasn't worth the energy of the mouse click let alone the attention to reading the first few lines of that junk.
I think I made my point very well. I really couldn't give a hoot about the exact wording of the motto. What's the bet this post also gets modded "Flamebait" or "Troll" or "Offtopic" even though I'd argue criticising a slight misquote of slashdot's motto a hell of a lot less on the topic.
Translation of modderation: How dare you criticise slashdot!
Hello! flamebait and trolling relates to unfounded criticism for the sole purpose of upsetting people
I'm not trying to "bait" anyone or "troll". I just would prefer that my time isn't wasted.
You're not suppose to moderate something under as flamebait or troll or off topic because you don't like the opinion expressed. How's that for off topic!
Oh boo hoo. I've hurt my little Karma and I can't get up.
For goodness sake if you want to mod me down go ahead but "Troll"?
The motto is "News for nerds. Things that matter". Not pre-adolescent drug induced ramblings for the technically inclined. About 3 stories in 10 are remotely interesting and about 1 in 10 is news. For examples the fact that CD media deteriorates is not news and hasn't been for a few years now. 3 stories about it in as many months here is unimpressive.
*shakes head*
Watch the standard of slashdot article sink!
One thing to point out is that the agents called and said they wanted to speak with the student, but it doesn't appear they ever arrested him. That means he could have told them that he wasn't interested in meeting with them, or he could have walked out of the room at any time. He also could have at any time brought in a lawyer.
Oh yeah. Excellent idea. "No I won't talk to you unless I'm under arrest" is the best way to get yourself arrested. As for due process, and not being locked up like an animal and/or torchered because the US is such a civilized country, tell that to those locked up without a trial in Guantanamo Bay and the Iraqis that made the news in those abhorent torcher pictures that have been all over the news.
The real moral of the story is that war is nasty. If you declare war be prepared for attrocities on both sides. It seems that the accepted way to fight the "war on terrorism" is to sink to the standards of your enemies these days. I mean honestly where does the US get off calling itself the land of the free anymore? I fear for how far this madness will go.
Come on. This is a pile of Orwellian BS. What's next. GoodNet (tm) instead of Goodspeak?
As the amount of information and its accessibility increases the whole idea that you can selectively censor the right things 100% accurately all the time becomes comical. You simply can't have a proliferation of easily accessible information and censor the "bad information" since what is bad is subjective anyway.
If you must place controls, its more practical to do so on the tools and materials required to perpetrate the "evil" you wish to combat.
I for once like the access to information that the internet gives me. Its empowering and I've used this information practically not just for entertainment or frivolous uses.
When doctors have given me and the ones I love incomplete or inaccurate information as they have on a couple of occassions I've been able to get better information and present it back to them to act on it. Its sped up a couple of key diagnoses for my girlfriend and I. In both cases not working out what the problem was as soon as we did would have resulted in each of us spending significant amounts of time out of work (not to mention feeling miserable). We'd each for different medical reasons have been permanently excluded from driving, and would almost certainly have had our lives shortened. Had the information been buried in some public library without any access to anecdotal evidence (usenet) life today for me would be very much worse.
'GNU/Linuxy'? That's so like uh huh yesterday like. *girly giggle* I mean like she's so not with it like *hair flick* She should get with the times and like stop it *bounce*
"ftp://foo1.foo2.foo3.foo4:80/warez/mp3z"
Well that won't work, since the ftp server makes connections back in to the client.
HTTPS is HTTP _over_ SSL. Typically its a single port that handles web requests on 443. You can block all other ports for SSL, and still allow port 443.
I stand corrected. What I said was incorrect. What I meant was HTTP on port 80, HTTPS on 443. (ie no non-standard ports). Even servers serving HTTP on 8080 were inaccessible.
"What's wrong with just plain FTP over SSL? No one's going to be blocking FTP anytime soon..."
I work as an IT consultant in Australia and work on site most of the time. Our clients - banks and insurance companies - certainly do do block FTP and SSL. They usually block anything that isn't HTTP or HTTPS on port 80. This is a genuine frustration for me as I often want to send log files and software to the HQ of the software firm I work for.
To make matters worse one client I worked for had a policy of restricting access to external email and other content (games, porn etc.). They used web filter software which I won't name here for now. Lots of legitmate sites I'd want to get to for genuinely work related purposes were also blocked.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is the method adopted by large educational institutions in the end. They won't be able to fight large corporates for very long with the limited funding they do have. It will only take a handful of large law suits to sway them towards censorship.
Its an interesting world we live in now. It seems to have become standard practice somewhere in the late 90s to make product and then intimidate or sue your customers.
2^10 = 1024. So we have 10 doublings of the speed of data left to go right? How often do data speeds double? (Using these methods of course).
I wonder sort of progress will be impacted in practical terms. There are limits to everything of course. Just one more limit. I hope I'm alive to run into some of these scientific limits so I can see what innovative workarounds people come up with.
...but I don't like the idea of any company having gigabytes of my email, which it has conveniently filled with advertising
A person's email archive belongs on their own hard disk. I wouldn't trust all my personal mail to a 3rd party (even if it was a highly accessibly safe box).