>I think that the fact that South Korea is smaller >in size than the US gives it an advantage.
I don't think so. Canada is only one tenth the population of the US, and has a far lower per capita GDP than the US has (Canadian per capita GDP is the sama as Korea actually), yet Canada (and Korea) both still have far wider broadband deployments than the US.
It has just not been important for the US govt that this get done, and to the telcos either, that are always too shortsighted. So now other countries have leaped ahead.
There is no excuse for it really, rather than corporate and govt bungling. The US has by far the highest p/c GDP of any of these countries, and is certainly rich enough to pay for it if they wanted (heck, the money used in Iraq up to now would have paid for it a dozen times over...)
So its not about density, or 'too expensive'.. Just the people in the power to make change don't care to do anything about it...
The younger generation in both countries get alongg just fine with each other (witness the World Cup soccer series, co hosted by both countries together, and the support each country gave to each other (particularly after the Japan team fell out of the elimination series).
The older generation is a different story... but that will fade away over time as the younger generations in both countries take over..
"They want us to stop helping Israel.."..from taking land away from arabs who live there with provided for free US tanks, bulldozers and machine guns to give to Israelis instead..from Israeli soldiers with free US paid for machine guns, shooting dead 12 year rock throwing arab kids, because they are 'a threat', on a pretty much daily basis..from rocketing residential neighborhoods full of innocent arab people with provided for free US rockets, and helecopters because yesterday somebody shot into some adjacent Israeli land that Israel took from them last week....That with US help, we have let Israel kill more palastinians/arabs just to take more land from them than were killed in 9/11 in NYC.
Yep, I can see why arabs might be mad that we help Israel...
At the moment, Israel is a racist aparthied state, like South Africa was in those dark days.. We shouldn't be helping them really.
And we wouldn't be if it wasn't for the all the special interest lobbying on Capital hill. Only different is that instead of something like the DMCA (another travesty brought on by capital hill lobbying), this time, people (ie. arabs) die, because are government is acting the way the lobbyists want, and not doing the right thing. Americans die too, when we get things like 9/11 as a result..
Nothing for Americans to really be proud of (most aren't event aware what our government does there anyways, but go there and have a look some day, like I did.. you'll be in for a shock..), and it goes very far in explaining things like why arabs hate us, 9/11, and other things that otherwise make no sense to most Americans..
It will depend. If you are coming from California, or a high cost city in a high tax state, then moving to Canada probably makes sense, as standard of living, and taxation (about 50% or more in Canada) will be about the same.
If you are coming from anywhere else in the continental US, where housing costs are more reasonable, and taxes are reasonable (most places except CA and NY), your standard of living is likely to go down moving to Canada, where (relative to income) housing is much more expensive, and costs of many imported goods, cars, fuel..etc, are much higher than in the US relative to the new lower salary you will be making.
On the upside, your kids can go to university cheaply, and the free health care is good (though if you get 'expensive treatment' diseases, you are better off in the US as the treatment is not likely to be (as) available in Canada).
Its very cold in Winter, but there is hockey, and the women are beautiful in Montreal and Quebec!
A lot of the problems that apply to proprietary software (and which open source solves), also apply to modern democracies. Ie. paradigms like 'the one with the most money wins'..etc.
Would it be possible to build an open source (possibly web, or possibly not) system to enable people to run for office, and let people 'moderate' the candidates somehow (like slashdot moderation), so that the crackpots, spams and flames get weeded out, leaving a few reasonable choice or choices that people could vote for, that would end up on the traditional ballot along with the candidates of the regular parties.
This could work well in pretty much any modern democracy where money/politics have gotten too intertwined with each other (which is then what causes pretty much all the other problems that the said country then has).
The great thing about this of course, is that it (because of open source IT), would cost almost no money, and so by definition, be more fair, open and democratic (ie. the corporations with fat open checkbooks wouldn't be running everything (ie. like in the US right now, and some Western European countries as well).. Rather the voters would run things again).
Anyone working on such a project to 'open source democracy?'. I guess it would be more a project like Gorklaw rather than a specifically IT only type project..
Only in the US (and maybe some other places where lobbyists rule rather than good sense?) does "right of first sale" (ie. you can resell it) not apply to software.
In HK, and even Japan, that has reasonably well enforced intellectual property laws, software is completely transferrable, if you have the original disk, no matter what the company may have printed on the CD/license pack saying you can/cannot do with it. Most shops in Akihabara Tokyo sell all sorts of older versions of MS Software (original CDs), and there isn't a damn thing that MS can do about it, in spite of what they print on their CDs.
Which is sensible really, why shouldn't you be able to sell something you legitimately paid for and no longer want to someone else?
Ah..the rights you used to have in the USA long long ago before the lawyers and corporate lobbyists took over everything...
I am wondering something about all these supposed 'productivity gains' in the US, like because of outsourcing their math used in calculating productivity is wrong (which is why it looks like it keeps going up so much).
I mean if you have a company in the US with 100 people, and 50 IT staff working on stuff. You fire 45 of the IT/software staff and outsource their work to India (5 staff have to stay with the company for network maintenance work..etc).
Now you have a company with 55 staff (rather than 100), far lower IT costs, and a line item that says 'IT oursourcing services'. So now 'productivity' has shot up, hasn't it!?!
Well not really.. Probably you now have in India 150 people doing the same work as the 45 you fired, but since they work almost for free, it doesn't matter.
So productivity hasn't gone up at all (in fact it has gone down!). What has just happened is you replaced americans doing the work, with people elsewhere who work just for food..
This is just a numbers fudge..productivity in the US hasn't gone up at all...
Consciousness is most likely related to some laws of physics that we haven't discovered/fully understood yet,. possibly related to quantum mechanics.
Most likely, As we get better at observing interactions at the very small level between atoms and particles, we are going to find some very unexpected behaviors, some of which will explain the interface between consciousness, and the physical world we know around us. Then things will get very interesting indeed as it will then be possible to manfacture beings/things that exhibit those properties..etc.
This helps the workers in the US (we get jobs again at pay rates that we can live on), but hurts some rich people who already have lots of assets in $ they want to use overseas).
Yes import prices will go up, but guess what..that means more production will move here...so yes... more jobs! more money for US workers..! It is win win for the regular american..
The Chinese currency is cheap to the US Dollar (I was just there BTW), because the Chinese govt. forces it that way, so they can be able to dump lots of stuff on our shores for us to buy at cheap prices, while giving jobs to their people. This is the game we need to play..
Basically, we need to do to these countries (China, India) what they do to us..fight with a low valued currency. Then Indian programmers..etc., are no longer 'cheap', and the offshoring will stop.
Nothing, beside currency value re adjustments, is going to fix this... nothing..
Imagine I want to make a popup box that draws a circle and says 'hello world' with a 'press me' button to close the window.
How to do it in linux for a php/perl type programmer? Almost impossible!
Yes, I know about php-gimp rpm... impossible to get working in Redhat though (why isn't it default?), the config script crashes on install... when you ask on the net... no one knows the answer, as almost no one else can get it to work either...
This I think is part of the problem..
In VB, this stuff is a piece of cake (opening windows, displaying text/pictures, getting input from buttons). In linux, we are still nowhere on this...
Lots of companies want to (or feel forced to) outsource to take advantage of prices/conditions in the third world.
But when you take the advantages of operating business on the 3rd world model, you get the unexpected baggage too, like >99% of users copying and not buying your games (which is the sit. in Russia, China..etc now).
It will be the same too in America after no one can afford to buy them since everyone's gotten their jobs outsourced. And no one will feel guilty about it since its not American's jobs anyways anymore...
We'll, since Indian programmers are so cheap, and there are zillions of them, why doesn't IBM just hire a whole bunch of them there and re-write MS office from scratch.
Probably wouldn't cost that much, especially since they are moving all their software development there from the states anyhow so all the infrastructure to do this is already...
Have confidence won't you! Ie. look at all the weapons of mass destruction these very same intelligence agencies found in Iraq, using these very same advanced image analysis techniques!
..addressed in the article: 20th century, gaps shrank, then widened again in 21st..
That is simply because of globalization, not nanotech or other things. We have now integrated first world economies with third world ones, so the result, is an economy somewhere in the middle. Skilled people get paid (comparatively) far more than those without skills, so we get something between the US of the 1960s and the China of today, disparity wise, which is what has happened now.
Eventually (probably after we are all retired), when the 3rd world catches up with the first world, low level laborers wages will then push up, bands will narrow just as they did in the 20th century in the USA before the US economy got integrated with everything else like it has the last few years.
Then the problem will go away. But then that will be in 50..75 years, so for this generation, whether we are factory workers or IT programmers, yes we are fS&cked. Our grandchildren though, should be OK..
they are very very good at putting pressure on suppliers to cut prices, because they are such a big volume seller.
They know now, that without all the distribution costs of physical media, that the 90cents / track that Apple currently pays to the RIAA, can be cut down to 50 cents or less because they know this is all just pure profit for the RIAA right now. This is all fat, Walmart knows it and they have the buyer market power to make this price cut happen.
Then they will sell those tracks to us for 60 cents, undercutting Apple, and Walmart still will make money.
This is how Walmart always does it with whatever they sell. No reason it will be any different this time.
THAT MEANS A 3 YEAR LINUX CONVERSION WINDOW..
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
So windows is in suspended animation till 2006.
That now gives everyone 3 years to get a plan together to get off the windows licensing and upgrade treadmill and onto linux, before MS moves the bar/formats again.
This means there is no better time than now to switch to Linux..
Links to kazaa lite are gone in Japan google too..
Gee, since when did the DMCA apply in Japan? uhh... it doesn't... even now..
So google should show such links in other countries that are not currently in the internet dark ages like the US is, and keep that country's problems out of here..
Well, lets see, RIAA sets up a cartel, overcharges for CDs (and still does), gets convicted for it, and uses bribed politicians to get out of it with 50 cent coupons for purchase of more inflated priced music.
RIAA buys more laws with more bribe money not to charge customers to copy the above music 50 cents per violation (like they got away with above), but rather to hit them with multi thousand dollar lawsuits.
RIAA then buys more laws making copyrights to be infinate in length (effectively).
Then some wonder why people have no respect for copyright laws as they are now. Uh... why should we? The current laws were all bought and paid for, and represent the interests of 'we the people' in no way whatsoever. So screw them..
If CD's sold for $5 per disk (which is what they should sell for without all the cartel and payola action), the problem would pretty much go away, as most people wouldn't have a problem buying CDs for that price rather than hassle with looking for downloading them.
>Seriously, I've been through a couple of IT recessions, and it's never pretty.
No, this time it is different. IT in the US is going to go the way of shoe manufacturing went... offshore.
If all this en mass outsourcing wasn't happening now, the recession in IT would be over by now, and there would be job shortages in the US.
The fact is, with the Internet, programmers/project managers can be in India, or Romania, and it is the same as if they were in Miami, except that they can be paid $2/hr.
That is the future I am afraid. If you work in IT in the USA, I would seriously starting looking at other options in the long term, because IT isn't one of them (unless you want to go live in Bangalore or Mumbai).
Slashdot Mirror
>I think that the fact that South Korea is smaller
>in size than the US gives it an advantage.
I don't think so. Canada is only one tenth the population of the US, and has a far lower per capita GDP than the US has (Canadian per capita GDP is the sama as Korea actually), yet Canada (and Korea) both still have far wider broadband deployments than the US.
It has just not been important for the US govt that this get done, and to the telcos either, that are always too shortsighted. So now other countries have leaped ahead.
There is no excuse for it really, rather than corporate and govt bungling. The US has by far the highest p/c GDP of any of these countries, and is certainly rich enough to pay for it if they wanted (heck, the money used in Iraq up to now would have paid for it a dozen times over...)
So its not about density, or 'too expensive'.. Just the people in the power to make change don't care to do anything about it...
The younger generation in both countries get alongg just fine with each other (witness the World Cup soccer series, co hosted by both countries together, and the support each country gave to each other (particularly after the Japan team fell out of the elimination series).
The older generation is a different story... but that will fade away over time as the younger generations in both countries take over..
everything will be fine...
"They want us to stop helping Israel.." ..from taking land away from arabs who live there with provided for free US tanks, bulldozers and machine guns to give to Israelis instead ..from Israeli soldiers with free US paid for machine guns, shooting dead 12 year rock throwing arab kids, because they are 'a threat', on a pretty much daily basis ..from rocketing residential neighborhoods full of innocent arab people with provided for free US rockets, and helecopters because yesterday somebody shot into some adjacent Israeli land that Israel took from them last week.. ..That with US help, we have let Israel kill more palastinians/arabs just to take more land from them than were killed in 9/11 in NYC.
Yep, I can see why arabs might be mad that we help Israel...
At the moment, Israel is a racist aparthied state, like South Africa was in those dark days..
We shouldn't be helping them really.
And we wouldn't be if it wasn't for the all the special interest lobbying on Capital hill. Only different is that instead of something like the DMCA (another travesty brought on by capital hill lobbying), this time, people (ie. arabs) die, because are government is acting the way the lobbyists want, and not doing the right thing. Americans die too, when we get things like 9/11 as a result..
Nothing for Americans to really be proud of (most aren't event aware what our government does there anyways, but go there and have a look some day, like I did.. you'll be in for a shock..), and it goes very far in explaining things like why arabs hate us, 9/11, and other things that otherwise make no sense to most Americans..
It will be interesting to see this develop as the next 'DRM' intellectual property war..
... you're busted."
"That is an 'illegal' unlicenced wingnut
Cost of living in Canada versus 40% pay cuts..
It will depend. If you are coming from California, or a high cost city in a high tax state, then moving to Canada probably makes sense, as standard of living, and taxation (about 50% or more in Canada) will be about the same.
If you are coming from anywhere else in the continental US, where housing costs are more reasonable, and taxes are reasonable (most places except CA and NY), your standard of living is likely to go down moving to Canada, where (relative to income) housing is much more expensive, and costs of many imported goods, cars, fuel..etc, are much higher than in the US relative to the new lower salary you will be making.
On the upside, your kids can go to university cheaply, and the free health care is good (though if you get 'expensive treatment' diseases, you are better off in the US as the treatment is not likely to be (as) available in Canada).
Its very cold in Winter, but there is hockey, and the women are beautiful in Montreal and Quebec!
Did you remember to attach that $10,000 'donation' to your letter..
.. must just be another clueless constituant...
Oh, you didn't... thats too bad.. off to the wastebin file
[sarcasm (insight?) off]
So George W. can get to be president without winning the election again!!
Yay!
[sarcasm off]
Your honor,
I am moving, please tell the govt to let me take my GPS co-ordinates with me!
doh...
A lot of the problems that apply to proprietary software (and which open source solves), also apply to modern democracies. Ie. paradigms like 'the one with the most money wins'..etc.
Would it be possible to build an open source (possibly web, or possibly not) system to enable people to run for office, and let people 'moderate' the candidates somehow (like slashdot moderation), so that the crackpots, spams and flames get weeded out, leaving a few reasonable choice or choices that people could vote for, that would end up on the traditional ballot along with the candidates of the regular parties.
This could work well in pretty much any modern democracy where money/politics have gotten too intertwined with each other (which is then what causes pretty much all the other problems that the said country then has).
The great thing about this of course, is that it (because of open source IT), would cost almost no money, and so by definition, be more fair, open and democratic (ie. the corporations with fat open checkbooks wouldn't be running everything (ie. like in the US right now, and some Western European countries as well).. Rather the voters would run things again).
Anyone working on such a project to 'open source democracy?'. I guess it would be more a project like Gorklaw rather than a specifically IT only type project..
Only in the US (and maybe some other places where lobbyists rule rather than good sense?) does "right of first sale" (ie. you can resell it) not apply to software.
In HK, and even Japan, that has reasonably well enforced intellectual property laws, software is completely transferrable, if you have the original disk, no matter what the company may have printed on the CD/license pack saying you can/cannot do with it. Most shops in Akihabara Tokyo sell all sorts of older versions of MS Software (original CDs), and there isn't a damn thing that MS can do about it, in spite of what they print on their CDs.
Which is sensible really, why shouldn't you be able to sell something you legitimately paid for and no longer want to someone else?
Ah..the rights you used to have in the USA long long ago before the lawyers and corporate lobbyists took over everything...
I am wondering something about all these supposed 'productivity gains' in the US, like because of outsourcing their math used in calculating productivity is wrong (which is why it looks like it keeps going up so much).
I mean if you have a company in the US with 100 people, and 50 IT staff working on stuff. You fire 45 of the IT/software staff and outsource their work to India (5 staff have to stay with the company for network maintenance work..etc).
Now you have a company with 55 staff (rather than 100), far lower IT costs, and a line item that says 'IT oursourcing services'. So now 'productivity' has shot up, hasn't it!?!
Well not really.. Probably you now have in India 150 people doing the same work as the 45 you fired, but since they work almost for free, it doesn't matter.
So productivity hasn't gone up at all (in fact it has gone down!). What has just happened is you replaced americans doing the work, with people elsewhere who work just for food..
This is just a numbers fudge..productivity in the US hasn't gone up at all...
Consciousness is most likely related to some laws of physics that we haven't discovered/fully understood yet,. possibly related to quantum mechanics.
Most likely, As we get better at observing interactions at the very small level between atoms and particles, we are going to find some very unexpected behaviors, some of which will explain the interface between consciousness, and the physical world we know around us. Then things will get very interesting indeed as it will then be possible to manfacture beings/things that exhibit those properties..etc.
The solution is simple. Devalue the dollar.
This helps the workers in the US (we get jobs again at pay rates that we can live on), but hurts some rich people who already have lots of assets in $ they want to use overseas).
Yes import prices will go up, but guess what..that means more production will move here...so yes... more jobs! more money for US workers..! It is win win for the regular american..
The Chinese currency is cheap to the US Dollar (I was just there BTW), because the Chinese govt. forces it that way, so they can be able to dump lots of stuff on our shores for us to buy at cheap prices, while giving jobs to their people. This is the game we need to play..
Basically, we need to do to these countries (China, India) what they do to us..fight with a low valued currency. Then Indian programmers..etc., are no longer 'cheap', and the offshoring will stop.
Nothing, beside currency value re adjustments, is going to fix this... nothing..
Imagine I want to make a popup box that draws a circle and says 'hello world' with a 'press me' button to close the window.
How to do it in linux for a php/perl type programmer? Almost impossible!
Yes, I know about php-gimp rpm... impossible to get working in Redhat though (why isn't it default?), the config script crashes on install... when you ask on the net... no one knows the answer, as almost no one else can get it to work either...
This I think is part of the problem..
In VB, this stuff is a piece of cake (opening windows, displaying text/pictures, getting input from buttons). In linux, we are still nowhere on this...
Lots of companies want to (or feel forced to) outsource to take advantage of prices/conditions in the third world.
But when you take the advantages of operating business on the 3rd world model, you get the unexpected baggage too, like >99% of users copying and not buying your games (which is the sit. in Russia, China..etc now).
It will be the same too in America after no one can afford to buy them since everyone's gotten their jobs outsourced. And no one will feel guilty about it since its not American's jobs anyways anymore...
Can't see how this is a business model...
We'll, since Indian programmers are so cheap, and there are zillions of them, why doesn't IBM just hire a whole bunch of them there and re-write MS office from scratch.
Probably wouldn't cost that much, especially since they are moving all their software development there from the states anyhow so all the infrastructure to do this is already...
[sarcasm off]
..addressed in the article:
20th century, gaps shrank, then widened again in 21st..
That is simply because of globalization, not nanotech or other things. We have now integrated first world economies with third world ones, so the result, is an economy somewhere in the middle.
Skilled people get paid (comparatively) far more than those without skills, so we get something between the US of the 1960s and the China of today, disparity wise, which is what has happened now.
Eventually (probably after we are all retired), when the 3rd world catches up with the first world, low level laborers wages will then push up, bands will narrow just as they did in the 20th century in the USA before the US economy got integrated with everything else like it has the last few years.
Then the problem will go away. But then that will be in 50..75 years, so for this generation, whether we are factory workers or IT programmers, yes we are fS&cked. Our grandchildren though, should be OK..
they are very very good at putting pressure on suppliers to cut prices, because they are such a big volume seller.
They know now, that without all the distribution costs of physical media, that the 90cents / track that Apple currently pays to the RIAA, can be cut down to 50 cents or less because they know this is all just pure profit for the RIAA right now. This is all fat, Walmart knows it and they have the buyer market power to make this price cut happen.
Then they will sell those tracks to us for 60 cents, undercutting Apple, and Walmart still will make money.
This is how Walmart always does it with whatever they sell. No reason it will be any different this time.
So windows is in suspended animation till 2006.
That now gives everyone 3 years to get a plan together to get off the windows licensing and upgrade treadmill and onto linux, before MS moves the bar/formats again.
This means there is no better time than now to switch to Linux..
Machiavelli:
..does the RIAA?
It is good if your subjects love you.
But better if you can make them fear you.
But you do *NOT* want them to hate you..
Tested with time, over the centuries...
I can already see where this is ultimately headed...
Links to kazaa lite are gone in Japan google too..
Gee, since when did the DMCA apply in Japan?
uhh... it doesn't... even now..
So google should show such links in other countries that are not currently in the internet dark ages like the US is, and keep that country's problems out of here..
Well, lets see, RIAA sets up a cartel, overcharges for CDs (and still does), gets convicted for it, and uses bribed politicians to get out of it with 50 cent coupons for purchase of more inflated priced music.
RIAA buys more laws with more bribe money not to charge customers to copy the above music 50 cents per violation (like they got away with above), but rather to hit them with multi thousand dollar lawsuits.
RIAA then buys more laws making copyrights to be infinate in length (effectively).
Then some wonder why people have no respect for copyright laws as they are now. Uh... why should we? The current laws were all bought and paid for, and represent the interests of 'we the people' in no way whatsoever. So screw them..
If CD's sold for $5 per disk (which is what they should sell for without all the cartel and payola action), the problem would pretty much go away, as most people wouldn't have a problem buying CDs for that price rather than hassle with looking for downloading them.
The web is a massive time waster. I didn't
need it (didnt have it!) when I was in college.
Cancel it, or pick up a 2400 baud modem. You can use that to check your mail, but it will keep you off the web because it will be just to slow..
Now you can get your work done instead of reading Slashdot, and all sorts of other silly webpages..
>Seriously, I've been through a couple of IT recessions, and it's never pretty.
No, this time it is different. IT in the US is going to go the way of shoe manufacturing went... offshore.
If all this en mass outsourcing wasn't happening now, the recession in IT would be over by now, and there would be job shortages in the US.
The fact is, with the Internet, programmers/project managers can be in India, or Romania, and it is the same as if they were in Miami, except that they can be paid $2/hr.
That is the future I am afraid. If you work in IT in the USA, I would seriously starting looking at other options in the long term, because IT isn't one of them (unless you want to go live in Bangalore or Mumbai).