Mass producing goods doesn't make sense to do in North America anymore. This is something everyone accepts right now - and doing large scale IT work in North America also doesn't make any sense, or it's making less sense than it once did.
What is happening with manufacturing is what IS done here is increasingly specialized development - usually high end CNC machining, or other automation work. I do a nice side business working on controllers and other equipment to automate processes for small companies. They're not interested in laying off workers - they want the workers they have to be able to produce more.
Corporate america and SME's need to innovate to get to the next generation of products and services to make up the gap. All indications are they may.
It sucks, but $0.50 will buy more rice than you can eat in one sitting, and will probably contribute towards butter for calories, vitamin pills for nutrition, and tang to ward off scurvy. I lived off a food budget of $40-50/mo while going to school for a few months when I was stretching ends a bit.
Key is to get the 50lb bag bulk.
You are aware that is how most of the world lives, right? There is no entitlement that being born in the first world means you'll always have a good job, or food, for that matter.
There is lots of work in North America. If you can't find a job that sustains a lifestyle in NYC, move. I can't imagine why you'd want to live there anyway, but I'm not an American and YMMV. Surely with all those people and connections that are possible, you can find some way to either run a company or get employed and make enough money to live.
I don't understand the problem. I'm a Canadian, and the economy here has never been what the US economy has been. I've always admired the feeling in US cities that things are getting done, money is being made, and the government stays out of your way.
But, that's right. Move. Sell your apartment on the street and hitchhike out of town. There are loads of small towns in the US where you can eek out a living with a tech background. If it's too expensive, those boots were made for walkin'.
Or become a mechanic. Learn to weld. Move to texas and work in the oil fields - or Alaska, for that matter. Figure out how to make things out of wood. Learn to take care of old people. Learn a martial art and teach people.There's lots of ways to make money besides bitching about outsourcing. Go into business managing outsourcing operations. Etc.
My own piece of constructive advice is move to a smaller city, and get employed by a small company that can't afford to outsource and can pay a living wage - and a living wage isn't $100,000, but it isn't $10,000 either.
I thought people here were supposed to be resourceful?
You'll notice my web site is listed, that has my email in plain text. I haven't made any real attempt to hide my email since I got it in 1992. (smanley@nyx.net)
This puts me an interesting spot: I get about 1300-2000 spam mails per week that spam assasin has no problems with. When viruses are running amok, this can get up to 1000 messages/day. I never see these. Of that, there are approximately 200 mails per week that my low threshold doesn't pick up. These get downloaded into my OSX mail program; It gets almost all of these, with maybe 2-3 per week getting through with a 1 message/mo or thereabouts false positive, largely due to mistakes I may have made in training.
Bandwith issues aside, I'd say the problem has largely already been beaten if I can use this email reliably still. Perhaps it has been overblown - I don't think that the bandwidth issue is trivial though as you could say it amounts to theft.
I stopped listening to the tripe commerical radio some time ago, two or three years anyway. One of the few good things I get for the taxes is a decent public radio service via CBC. It's sometimes got a bit too much of a leftist bent for me at times, but that's probably a reflection of the local nature of the radio shows. That's right - real local radio for a few HOURS in the morning, in addition to good science programs (Quirks and Quarks!) and national news programs. Need I mention that there are no commericals to be heard anywhere.
The shows are all downloadable off the web (archives.cbc.ca) so you can burn them and take them with you on long trips, and time-shift the best programs like the aforementioned Quirks and Quarks.
Neat concept. If you get a shortwave radio from Radio Shack, you can get the BBC and others. Just stop listening to the crap. Spread the theme. Clear Channel will wise up eventually, or it really will be a clear channel. Heh.
What of the micro-station FM initiatives in the US, too?
It annoys me when people deliberately make other people's jobs harder.
In my many years of experience in education, I have come across miserable people. Some of those miserable people were/are in a position of incredible power over the future of their students. To stick it to these people, in however small a way, is immensely satisfying - especially if you do it with their own asinine rules.
You will see a similar situation in prisons where inmates will use whatever techniques are at their disposal to make life difficult for their keepers.
Suffice it to say there probably was a reason for all the extra effort put into this "electronic copy". There are miserable people everywhere in this world, on both sides of the fence.
You count because eventually the odds will swing massively in your favor. You need to stay alive the the table until that happens, e.g. when the odds are horrible or medicore. You bet less then. You make it back when the odds are good.
Card counting does not require you to be a genius. Can you count on your fingers? Because that's what it comes down to.
The second world war was about gun control? I'm rather happy that "Really out of control guns" stopped a bloodthirsty genocidal dictator, combined with the sacrifice of millions of lives. World War 2 was not about guns. How about you go and drink a nice tall glass of shut the fuck up?
There are more guns per capita in Canada than the USA, yet there are only a small fraction of the gun crimes here. Gun crime is almost nonexistant. Unlike
12 billion would buy a lot of books. Imagine being able to search and buy electronically any book (screw music) you need, right there, presto-chango. I could spend a LOT of money on a service like that. It's probably just google cashing out, but hey, I can dream.
I'm on my second powerbook. One of the things apple hardware has going for it is that it depreciates very little. So take advantage of this. Right before your 1 year warranty expires, sell the notebook in good condition on Ebay. You will recover most of what you spent on it. Take the amount you lost(likely a few hundred plus taxes), then subtract the substantial cost of AppleCare. We won't put a value on the percieved value of hassles getting Apple to actually fix things. (hey, Apple, hardware reputation, Slashdot, toilet?)
Take the money and go buy a brand spanking new Powerbook. It'll be faster, pretty, AND it'll come with the new version of the operating system you'd have to pay for anyway. Don't forget to include that in the cost total.
Amortize the lost cost over that year. You'll find in most cases it is much less than 100 dollars/mo.
You can't, it's often integral to the cell, so a fair amount of surgery is involved.
All you need is the battery case and enough juice to start the notebook to pass a cursory inspection. Once cell is big enough to be replaced with anything, and anything could easily handle blowing a hole in the side of a plane. Unless you want to be strip searched and fly in a jumpsuit, security will be very poor.
This is basically dumping liquid nitrogen onto processors outside and clocking them up. There's not much of an achivement there. You can soak LEDs in liquid nitrogen and make them do all sorts of interesting tricks too. Whoop.
Why not wait until someone comes up with a indoor version, properly vented and pumped, with a compressor cycle that you can actually use on a long-term basis? That would be an achivement I'd like to see. Of course, it's orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous, too.
I have a Zero Z3 case for my Powerbook. This case has played plinko down a set of stairs, been dropped, had trunks closed on it, and aside from some cosmetic damage has not let one iota of damage happen to my computer. It still looks pretty good after 4 years of nonstop use.
The Zero 'Z' series computer cases are well lined with high density foam and a velcro mounting strap. This is bar none the best computer case I have ever seen. My only complaint is the Z3 was better suited to my vaio than the larger powerbook; I'll be getting a Z5 soon.
Most of the people suggesting alternatives do not make money with them.
Most of the open source software is a shadow of the alternatives in the commercial world. Octave is quaint, Electric.. ugh.. yeah, electric. There is spice, but there is nothing that even comes close to OrCAD, let along Analog Workbench from Cadence. The situation with digital tools for VHDL synthesis isn't much better.
3D wise, nothing compares even remotely to Solidworks or AutoCAD. Nor would I really expect it to. The best hope I have is that one of the big boys will get behind OS X and offer some of these tools for the Mac, and get them back on a UNIX platform in a useable form.
The big digital players DO have their tools available for linux, and I can give props to Mentor Graphics here (send me a t-shirt, ha). Solaris and Sun's horribly overpriced hardware have given them little choice.
Matlab is unmatched in third party support, optimizations, and speed. It is available for Mac and Linux.
But really, if you use these tools in the commercial field, their prices aren't that bad relative to the billing time or projects they're used for. I would, however, really like to see some synthesis tools for OS X from a major player, a good analog simulation tool, and SOLIDWORKS. Hey, anyone with influence. Mac. OS X. Solidworks. Dual G5. Please?
Yeah yeah yeah I can hear you call now. You could use the open source tools for a lot of stuff, but I can also design netlists on paper. Doesn't mean it's an attractive or efficient choice.
I started university right when things were getting crazy in IT, for better or for worse. I was sitting in my physics class in high school when I realized that there seemed to be hordes of people going into Computer Science, and I didn't think it would be particularly difficult to get through. Then I got a test on basic electronics back. I did very well; a lot of other people didn't. So I figured what the hell, I'll try the electrical engineering thing instead. I do embedded systems and communications work mainly, although I've dabbled in a bit of everything. There is more work than I can deal with in a small town, working on automation projects - the kind of projects that make companies competitive with third world producers. Show a CEO how he can turn a 10 minute process into a 2 minute process multipled out by thousands of units and I'll show you how to make yourself a nice little income.
Right now, CS/IT employed people could benefit from getting organized and professionalized to the degree to which engineers are. Engineering associations look after things like H1B visas (although I'm not an American), and other political policy matters that can directly impact your life. There seems to be an inability of extreme reluctance to do this though, largely because I suspect there are a lot of extremely good programmers without (formal) qualification.
I'm not talking about unions - historically engineering associations have been very outspoken in this respect, but then again, historically engineers weren't employees for the most part, either.
I've always drawn a distinction between programming as art, and programming as a matter of business. Art doesn't always make you money while you're alive.
I did something like this a long time ago in University. I used 144Mhz band packet radio, and I didn't add the radar detector bit - just a signal, but that's not difficult. It was very effective. There is the Amateur Radio Position Reporting system that's built right into my Kenwood handheld radio, along with a 2400baud TNC. You connect up a GPS and it broadcasts your callsign and position. Pretty slick eh.
Do you know what obstruction of justice means? This is what you would be charged with. Radar detectors are very effective, good ones will pick up leakage and/or scatter from other cars being hit. (mainly the latter). Not so useful on a country road.. but..
Aside from the obstruction of justice, a police car recognition system mounted on a couple key points along city roadsides will do the same thing. As you're using a video camera and mearly reporting the position of a police car, there is no overt act there, I don't think. If you know where the police cars are, you can usually guess where they are going and based on their rate of speed, whether or not they are trolling for speeders. More interestingly is since a lot of highways broadcast their traffic over the web, this could be used as a source of data for the application.
The applications of a mobile version of this device is left as an exercise to the reader.:-)
Music pricing is another constant. In fact, in the USA, it's gone down a bit. The average price of a CD is down to $13.50 in the US. In 1984, $9.99 was considered a decent price for an LP. That would be $17.30 in 2002 dollars. So, again, the recent huge drop in CD sales can't be attributed to pricing alone, as it's a constant.
In 1984, Movies cost around $100cdn to buy, IIRC. I see lots of DVD movies in Walmart for $14.99-24.99, including new and popular films. A large majority are priced cheaper than the movie soundtracks, something that always makes me chuckle.
I can put a collection of a years worth of "popular" and "pseudo-popular" programs on a couple DVDs. If uploading is quashed, then a much harder to regular and control sneekernet will quickly be established in schools. It's not that hard to do.
One thing I have been waiting for is a small device for doing PTP sharing in public. It would be unstoppable in a setting like a school - integrating 802.11 into an iPod is not technologically a difficult problem. I can imagine it giving people strokes in the record industry though - not just schools, but think subways, whatever.
Once the public has decided there is nothing wrong with 'free' music - then guess what, there probably will be free music. There effectively is now - think to the radio. There is no reason musicians cannot make money touring. There is good entertainment value in records. What will change, is the luxury offices for RIAA executives and private jets for the metallicas of the world will end.
This fight has never been about music copying. They're scared shitless of losing the distribution and production channels.
What's to stop me from setting up a kiosk on my property (or with the permission of a landowner) with a batch of CDs and a CDR. It's cheap enough to do this I might just do it to make a point. I don't think anyone would steal the physical CDs, but you could always jukebox them.
Under the current law, so long as I do not make any money, it is legal for someone to come up to this Kiosk and make all the copies they want. If this bullshit continues without the CDR levy being dropped, and my lawyer agrees with my interpretation of the law - I might just do this.
How is this any different than uploading a ripped version of the CD anyway?
"Judgement Day", really is inevitable. It's just a matter of what's going to be judged, who's going to do it, and when it will happen. The growth rates of technology all point to a climax in the near term.
Re:Processing power will determine usefullness
on
The Robots are Coming
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Another 20 years.. it's always another 20 years. Have you seen Asimo? It's jaw-dropping how good he is. I think we're going to start to see humanoid robots deployed much, much sooner than that. People claimed it was impossible to do what Asimo is doing now.
People are mistaken when they think the robot has to be smart, at least right away. Most of blue collar labour in the manufacturing sector revolves around humans are general-purpose movers and fitters of pieces. Some fixed machines can be used to speed this process, but much of the final work requires flexibility that you need a person for.
If you have a robot that can duplicate all the motions of a human, then you can replace a very large percentage of manufacturing labour - and you have a generic platform to reprogram for specialty tasks. Just as a person can do two things on an assembly line, so can a robot. Robots don't need to stop, either.
Honda isn't stupid, either - if you can mass produce cars, then you can certainly mass produce robots. One car is horrifically expensive. Make a million of them and the cost goes down by several orders of magnitude. The only real question will be if there is going to be a tremendous worker backlash - and with much work being done in countries where worker backlashes are put down with rifles, perhaps the North American worker will not have the chance.
remember working at a research firm for an internship, and the head of our department said over lunch one day that he actually spent more time dealing with problems he was having with his computer than actually doing any useful work. I've noticed this with myself also, and even though I enjoy figuring out what's going on with my computer, I imagine many people don't.
That's why I bought a powerbook. OSX, unix without the hassles.
These contracts are not enforceable in many locales. Also, it's only a problem if they can prove you developed code while you were working for them: Who's to say you didn't write it all the week after you quit, for example.
I make it clear that work done on an employer's dime and equipment is theirs. Work done on MY time and equipment is mine. Everyone should do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Rats - it's called tupperware containers. $4-6 at walmart. Protects food indefinately.
Mass producing goods doesn't make sense to do in North America anymore. This is something everyone accepts right now - and doing large scale IT work in North America also doesn't make any sense, or it's making less sense than it once did.
What is happening with manufacturing is what IS done here is increasingly specialized development - usually high end CNC machining, or other automation work. I do a nice side business working on controllers and other equipment to automate processes for small companies. They're not interested in laying off workers - they want the workers they have to be able to produce more.
Corporate america and SME's need to innovate to get to the next generation of products and services to make up the gap. All indications are they may.
It sucks, but $0.50 will buy more rice than you can eat in one sitting, and will probably contribute towards butter for calories, vitamin pills for nutrition, and tang to ward off scurvy. I lived off a food budget of $40-50/mo while going to school for a few months when I was stretching ends a bit.
Key is to get the 50lb bag bulk.
You are aware that is how most of the world lives, right? There is no entitlement that being born in the first world means you'll always have a good job, or food, for that matter.
There is lots of work in North America. If you can't find a job that sustains a lifestyle in NYC, move. I can't imagine why you'd want to live there anyway, but I'm not an American and YMMV. Surely with all those people and connections that are possible, you can find some way to either run a company or get employed and make enough money to live.
I don't understand the problem. I'm a Canadian, and the economy here has never been what the US economy has been. I've always admired the feeling in US cities that things are getting done, money is being made, and the government stays out of your way.
But, that's right. Move. Sell your apartment on the street and hitchhike out of town. There are loads of small towns in the US where you can eek out a living with a tech background. If it's too expensive, those boots were made for walkin'.
Or become a mechanic. Learn to weld. Move to texas and work in the oil fields - or Alaska, for that matter. Figure out how to make things out of wood. Learn to take care of old people. Learn a martial art and teach people.There's lots of ways to make money besides bitching about outsourcing. Go into business managing outsourcing operations. Etc.
My own piece of constructive advice is move to a smaller city, and get employed by a small company that can't afford to outsource and can pay a living wage - and a living wage isn't $100,000, but it isn't $10,000 either.
I thought people here were supposed to be resourceful?
You'll notice my web site is listed, that has my email in plain text. I haven't made any real attempt to hide my email since I got it in 1992. (smanley@nyx.net)
This puts me an interesting spot: I get about 1300-2000 spam mails per week that spam assasin has no problems with. When viruses are running amok, this can get up to 1000 messages/day. I never see these. Of that, there are approximately 200 mails per week that my low threshold doesn't pick up. These get downloaded into my OSX mail program; It gets almost all of these, with maybe 2-3 per week getting through with a 1 message/mo or thereabouts false positive, largely due to mistakes I may have made in training.
Bandwith issues aside, I'd say the problem has largely already been beaten if I can use this email reliably still. Perhaps it has been overblown - I don't think that the bandwidth issue is trivial though as you could say it amounts to theft.
Gates isn't exactly making earthshattering news.
Ogg is like beta. Technically superior, but (almost) nobody cares.
I stopped listening to the tripe commerical radio some time ago, two or three years anyway. One of the few good things I get for the taxes is a decent public radio service via CBC. It's sometimes got a bit too much of a leftist bent for me at times, but that's probably a reflection of the local nature of the radio shows. That's right - real local radio for a few HOURS in the morning, in addition to good science programs (Quirks and Quarks!) and national news programs. Need I mention that there are no commericals to be heard anywhere.
The shows are all downloadable off the web (archives.cbc.ca) so you can burn them and take them with you on long trips, and time-shift the best programs like the aforementioned Quirks and Quarks.
Neat concept. If you get a shortwave radio from Radio Shack, you can get the BBC and others. Just stop listening to the crap. Spread the theme. Clear Channel will wise up eventually, or it really will be a clear channel. Heh.
What of the micro-station FM initiatives in the US, too?
It annoys me when people deliberately make other people's jobs harder.
In my many years of experience in education, I have come across miserable people. Some of those miserable people were/are in a position of incredible power over the future of their students. To stick it to these people, in however small a way, is immensely satisfying - especially if you do it with their own asinine rules.
You will see a similar situation in prisons where inmates will use whatever techniques are at their disposal to make life difficult for their keepers.
Suffice it to say there probably was a reason for all the extra effort put into this "electronic copy". There are miserable people everywhere in this world, on both sides of the fence.
You count because eventually the odds will swing massively in your favor. You need to stay alive the the table until that happens, e.g. when the odds are horrible or medicore. You bet less then. You make it back when the odds are good.
Card counting does not require you to be a genius. Can you count on your fingers? Because that's what it comes down to.
Comps add another dimension to the puzzle.
The second world war was about gun control? I'm rather happy that "Really out of control guns" stopped a bloodthirsty genocidal dictator, combined with the sacrifice of millions of lives. World War 2 was not about guns. How about you go and drink a nice tall glass of shut the fuck up?
There are more guns per capita in Canada than the USA, yet there are only a small fraction of the gun crimes here. Gun crime is almost nonexistant. Unlike
12 billion would buy a lot of books. Imagine being able to search and buy electronically any book (screw music) you need, right there, presto-chango. I could spend a LOT of money on a service like that. It's probably just google cashing out, but hey, I can dream.
I'm on my second powerbook. One of the things apple hardware has going for it is that it depreciates very little. So take advantage of this. Right before your 1 year warranty expires, sell the notebook in good condition on Ebay. You will recover most of what you spent on it. Take the amount you lost(likely a few hundred plus taxes), then subtract the substantial cost of AppleCare. We won't put a value on the percieved value of hassles getting Apple to actually fix things. (hey, Apple, hardware reputation, Slashdot, toilet?)
Take the money and go buy a brand spanking new Powerbook. It'll be faster, pretty, AND it'll come with the new version of the operating system you'd have to pay for anyway. Don't forget to include that in the cost total.
Amortize the lost cost over that year. You'll find in most cases it is much less than 100 dollars/mo.
You can't, it's often integral to the cell, so a fair amount of surgery is involved.
All you need is the battery case and enough juice to start the notebook to pass a cursory inspection. Once cell is big enough to be replaced with anything, and anything could easily handle blowing a hole in the side of a plane. Unless you want to be strip searched and fly in a jumpsuit, security will be very poor.
This is basically dumping liquid nitrogen onto processors outside and clocking them up. There's not much of an achivement there. You can soak LEDs in liquid nitrogen and make them do all sorts of interesting tricks too. Whoop.
Why not wait until someone comes up with a indoor version, properly vented and pumped, with a compressor cycle that you can actually use on a long-term basis? That would be an achivement I'd like to see. Of course, it's orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous, too.
I have a Zero Z3 case for my Powerbook. This case has played plinko down a set of stairs, been dropped, had trunks closed on it, and aside from some cosmetic damage has not let one iota of damage happen to my computer. It still looks pretty good after 4 years of nonstop use.
The Zero 'Z' series computer cases are well lined with high density foam and a velcro mounting strap. This is bar none the best computer case I have ever seen. My only complaint is the Z3 was better suited to my vaio than the larger powerbook; I'll be getting a Z5 soon.
Most of the people suggesting alternatives do not make money with them.
Most of the open source software is a shadow of the alternatives in the commercial world. Octave is quaint, Electric.. ugh.. yeah, electric. There is spice, but there is nothing that even comes close to OrCAD, let along Analog Workbench from Cadence. The situation with digital tools for VHDL synthesis isn't much better.
3D wise, nothing compares even remotely to Solidworks or AutoCAD. Nor would I really expect it to. The best hope I have is that one of the big boys will get behind OS X and offer some of these tools for the Mac, and get them back on a UNIX platform in a useable form.
The big digital players DO have their tools available for linux, and I can give props to Mentor Graphics here (send me a t-shirt, ha). Solaris and Sun's horribly overpriced hardware have given them little choice.
Matlab is unmatched in third party support, optimizations, and speed. It is available for Mac and Linux.
But really, if you use these tools in the commercial field, their prices aren't that bad relative to the billing time or projects they're used for. I would, however, really like to see some synthesis tools for OS X from a major player, a good analog simulation tool, and SOLIDWORKS. Hey, anyone with influence. Mac. OS X. Solidworks. Dual G5. Please?
Yeah yeah yeah I can hear you call now. You could use the open source tools for a lot of stuff, but I can also design netlists on paper. Doesn't mean it's an attractive or efficient choice.
I started university right when things were getting crazy in IT, for better or for worse. I was sitting in my physics class in high school when I realized that there seemed to be hordes of people going into Computer Science, and I didn't think it would be particularly difficult to get through. Then I got a test on basic electronics back. I did very well; a lot of other people didn't. So I figured what the hell, I'll try the electrical engineering thing instead. I do embedded systems and communications work mainly, although I've dabbled in a bit of everything. There is more work than I can deal with in a small town, working on automation projects - the kind of projects that make companies competitive with third world producers. Show a CEO how he can turn a 10 minute process into a 2 minute process multipled out by thousands of units and I'll show you how to make yourself a nice little income.
Right now, CS/IT employed people could benefit from getting organized and professionalized to the degree to which engineers are. Engineering associations look after things like H1B visas (although I'm not an American), and other political policy matters that can directly impact your life. There seems to be an inability of extreme reluctance to do this though, largely because I suspect there are a lot of extremely good programmers without (formal) qualification.
I'm not talking about unions - historically engineering associations have been very outspoken in this respect, but then again, historically engineers weren't employees for the most part, either.
I've always drawn a distinction between programming as art, and programming as a matter of business. Art doesn't always make you money while you're alive.
I did something like this a long time ago in University. I used 144Mhz band packet radio, and I didn't add the radar detector bit - just a signal, but that's not difficult. It was very effective. There is the Amateur Radio Position Reporting system that's built right into my Kenwood handheld radio, along with a 2400baud TNC. You connect up a GPS and it broadcasts your callsign and position. Pretty slick eh.
:-)
Do you know what obstruction of justice means? This is what you would be charged with. Radar detectors are very effective, good ones will pick up leakage and/or scatter from other cars being hit. (mainly the latter). Not so useful on a country road.. but..
Aside from the obstruction of justice, a police car recognition system mounted on a couple key points along city roadsides will do the same thing. As you're using a video camera and mearly reporting the position of a police car, there is no overt act there, I don't think. If you know where the police cars are, you can usually guess where they are going and based on their rate of speed, whether or not they are trolling for speeders. More interestingly is since a lot of highways broadcast their traffic over the web, this could be used as a source of data for the application.
The applications of a mobile version of this device is left as an exercise to the reader.
Music pricing is another constant. In fact, in the USA, it's gone down a bit. The average price of a CD is down to $13.50 in the US. In 1984, $9.99 was considered a decent price for an LP. That would be $17.30 in 2002 dollars. So, again, the recent huge drop in CD sales can't be attributed to pricing alone, as it's a constant.
In 1984, Movies cost around $100cdn to buy, IIRC. I see lots of DVD movies in Walmart for $14.99-24.99, including new and popular films. A large majority are priced cheaper than the movie soundtracks, something that always makes me chuckle.
I can put a collection of a years worth of "popular" and "pseudo-popular" programs on a couple DVDs. If uploading is quashed, then a much harder to regular and control sneekernet will quickly be established in schools. It's not that hard to do.
One thing I have been waiting for is a small device for doing PTP sharing in public. It would be unstoppable in a setting like a school - integrating 802.11 into an iPod is not technologically a difficult problem. I can imagine it giving people strokes in the record industry though - not just schools, but think subways, whatever.
Once the public has decided there is nothing wrong with 'free' music - then guess what, there probably will be free music. There effectively is now - think to the radio. There is no reason musicians cannot make money touring. There is good entertainment value in records. What will change, is the luxury offices for RIAA executives and private jets for the metallicas of the world will end.
This fight has never been about music copying. They're scared shitless of losing the distribution and production channels.
What's to stop me from setting up a kiosk on my property (or with the permission of a landowner) with a batch of CDs and a CDR. It's cheap enough to do this I might just do it to make a point. I don't think anyone would steal the physical CDs, but you could always jukebox them.
Under the current law, so long as I do not make any money, it is legal for someone to come up to this Kiosk and make all the copies they want. If this bullshit continues without the CDR levy being dropped, and my lawyer agrees with my interpretation of the law - I might just do this.
How is this any different than uploading a ripped version of the CD anyway?
Go out and vote, maybe we will have some choice in the next election. The smugmess exhibited by the Liberals and Paul Martin make me sick.
"Judgement Day", really is inevitable. It's just a matter of what's going to be judged, who's going to do it, and when it will happen. The growth rates of technology all point to a climax in the near term.
Another 20 years.. it's always another 20 years. Have you seen Asimo? It's jaw-dropping how good he is. I think we're going to start to see humanoid robots deployed much, much sooner than that. People claimed it was impossible to do what Asimo is doing now.
People are mistaken when they think the robot has to be smart, at least right away. Most of blue collar labour in the manufacturing sector revolves around humans are general-purpose movers and fitters of pieces. Some fixed machines can be used to speed this process, but much of the final work requires flexibility that you need a person for.
If you have a robot that can duplicate all the motions of a human, then you can replace a very large percentage of manufacturing labour - and you have a generic platform to reprogram for specialty tasks. Just as a person can do two things on an assembly line, so can a robot. Robots don't need to stop, either.
Honda isn't stupid, either - if you can mass produce cars, then you can certainly mass produce robots. One car is horrifically expensive. Make a million of them and the cost goes down by several orders of magnitude. The only real question will be if there is going to be a tremendous worker backlash - and with much work being done in countries where worker backlashes are put down with rifles, perhaps the North American worker will not have the chance.
remember working at a research firm for an internship, and the head of our department said over lunch one day that he actually spent more time dealing with problems he was having with his computer than actually doing any useful work. I've noticed this with myself also, and even though I enjoy figuring out what's going on with my computer, I imagine many people don't.
That's why I bought a powerbook. OSX, unix without the hassles.
These contracts are not enforceable in many locales. Also, it's only a problem if they can prove you developed code while you were working for them: Who's to say you didn't write it all the week after you quit, for example.
I make it clear that work done on an employer's dime and equipment is theirs. Work done on MY time and equipment is mine. Everyone should do the same.