Communism's other name is "command economics". It's the idea that some wise and benevolent leader is better at allocating resources than a pack of ravenous self-interested capitalists
I think there are some Amish over there waving their hands trying to get your attention.
You forget that in the Star Trek case, the Federation has "eliminated poverty". They don't even have money any more. (Although that one was a little hard for the writers to remember all the time.)
By "eliminated poverty" I always took that to mean "Fed all the poor people into the biomass supply for the replicators."
As much as I personally hate George Bush, he had to win in a lot more states than Florida to become president. Why have we decided that individual states "decide" elections? Why didn't Texas decide that election? Why didn't "the south" decide that election?
There are some simple facts we have to face as our country has become so demonstrably polarized, and that is no system is going to get a perfect result when you have two people both getting 49% of the vote. Elections are going to be close, and close elections are sometimes going to be influenced by margins of error that normally shouldn't be relevant. But they will be. And we have to suck it up. There are a lot of countries in the world where an election result like that would have bloodshed in the streets. Take some small pride that even if you don't like the guy who won, that our country and our system is better than that. (At least for now.)
If it were up to me we would require run-off elections until someone got more than 50%, but our founding fathers in their infinite wisdom didn't feel that was necessary, and I don't see us ever changing it.
So you're saying Internet Radio will be able to survive by not offering any of the popular music that most people want to listen to?
Now, me, I don't like the majority of what's popular, so this works for me, but Pandora isn't going to put food on their table by serving people like me. They need to serve the billion people who love top 40 and "Jack" radio and whatever the heck else the teeming masses are attached to.
At my company we kept having whole networks on some office floors go down periodically. Supposedly, the problem was tracked down to the switches they had sitting in conference rooms. Apparently, if someone for some reason plugged a cable from one port directly into another port, this caused that whole vlan to become unusable. (Why would someone do that? Apparently, some people are stupid.)
The response was to remove all switches/hubs from conference rooms. When it was suggested that we just put up signs that say "Don't do that" that idea was shot down because then people would *know* how to bring the network down and could do it maliciously.
The whole thing made no sense to me, that a network could be *that* fragile, but the network team was reluctant to explain details, and the end result was never enough network ports in conference rooms.
Amusingly, there is a point to be made here. Unrelated to this survey, but at my own company we have regular employee satisfaction surveys, and the inevitable result is that whatever areas on the survey are considered to be low-scoring, the company response is to implement new policies, training, or processes that are far more annoying than any perceived complaints before.
For example, a common complaint is "feedback", some employees feel they don't get enough feedback. First, this is incredibly ambiguous as to what this really means or if it's even really true that employees don't get enough feedback, even if some think they don't. Second, it's very possible that even if "feedback" is the lowest score on the survey, it still is easily high enough to suggest that 80+% of the employees don't consider it a problem.
And yet, in that special MBA approach to things, whatever the lowest score is must be a problem to be focussed on. So the company keeps implementing increasingly onerous mandatory review and feedback processes. At this point we now have twice yearly reviews of personal goals, yearly 360 reviews, yearly "official" reviews from our manager. At least three "all-hands" quarterly meetings every quarter. It sometimes seems that you can't get any actual work done because of all mandatory "Let's make everyone happier" procedures that keep coming up. And many of these things are not even cheap! I've been told that 360 Reviews, for example, are actually fairly expensive.
In the last four minutes we went from spears and loincloths to long range missiles and synthetic fabrics. We are now the only species on the planet that can survive organ transplants, travel at hundreds of miles per hour, walk on the moon, and communicate instantly from opposite sides of the planet. All of this we gained in the last four minutes of our first day of existence as humans.
Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results.
Also, ask yourself, what have we done in the last minute, compared to the two before that? Our rate of advancement seems to have slowed considerably. Just look at what sort of things were predicted for us in the 50s and 60s that we're still no closer to seeing. Even Arthur C Clarke though we would have moonbases in 1999.
Come on, people, whales are not endangered because of Inuit hunters, who have a small preset number of whales they're allowed to hunt ever year. Whales are endangered because of commercial hunting by nations who don't abide by any limits and other environmental factors.
Ack, is there a greater hell than to pin your entire income on doing technical support for the rest of your life?
Seriously though, I see that suggestion often, and as someone who spent 6-7 years on a helpdesk, I can say with all certainty, there is no way in hell I would pin my income on spending a lifetime of doing technical support.
But if you're an open source developer, and you want to try and make money off of how poorly your software is built (how hard it is to install, how unintuitive it is, how poorly documented it is, how buggy it is) then seriously, more power to you. You are a better man than I. I'd be up in a bell tower with a rifle after a few more years of that.
In all seriousness though, one suggestion I would have for the OP would be to consider releasing your product as a virtual appliance, at least for demo/trial purposes. Being able to test software by firing up a pre-installed and configured virtual machine is often a very nice option these days.
I have no scientific proof that my wife isn't cheating on me right now. In fact, statistically, there is a strong chance that she is. But I choose to believe that she isn't, because part of having a successful relationship is having trust, even having faith in one's partner.
There *is* a place for faith in human life. It simply doesn't belong in science.
Why is the abortion debate involved in this at all? Stem cells used in research are not acquired from abortions! Abortions are a terrible source of stem cells for research purposes.
You don't have to be religious or hate sex to think that abortion is murder. In almost all cases, if no one does anything to a pregnant woman, a child will be born.
Actually, the fetus will naturally miscarry a significant percentage of the time, with that percentage getting fairly high depending on various factors. Is a 45 year old women who gets pregnant guilty of reckless endangerment?
Prospective studies using very sensitive early pregnancy tests have found that 25% of pregnancies are miscarried by the sixth week LMP (since the woman's Last Menstrual Period).[13][14] The risk of miscarriage decreases sharply after the 8th week, i.e. when the fetal stage begins.[15] Clinical miscarriages (those occurring after the sixth week LMP) occur in 8% of pregnancies.[14]
The prevalence of miscarriage increases considerably with age of the parents. Pregnancies from men younger than twenty-five years are 40% less likely to end in miscarriage than pregnancies from men 25-29 years. Pregnancies from men older than forty years are 60% more like to end in miscarriage than the 25-29 year age group.[16] The increased risk of miscarriage in pregnancies from older men is mainly seen in the first trimester.[17] In women, by the age of forty-five, 75% of pregnancies may end in miscarriage.[18]
Or, to come at it from another angle, how much can I discount my prices in exchange for selling customer's information with their consent? Customers want to pay less for things, so how much are they willing to trade to pay less for a gallon of milk? How much is their demographic information worth to them?
There were hard-drive mp3 players on the market before the iPod too, I used to own one of them long before the iPod came out. Who's the follower now?
Not that I'm predicting the iPhone will sweep the cell phone market. I think that's going to be a much harder market to dominate. But just because there are competitors out there now doesn't mean a new company can't come in and take the lead.
One might suggest that you go back and review what words like "tend to" mean. As a math person, you might find it somewhat correlated to concepts like "probabilities" rather than "absolutes".
Not all games require all the speed you can get. Not even all new games. And if someone wants to play some old favorite windows game the performance on a modern machine should be more than adequate even when virtualized.
I wonder why they didn't call the writers/producers of The Lone Gunmen. They had a storyline about a plane being flown into the World Trade Center in March, 2001.
Wait a minute...maybe we should be *arresting* them!!!
just turn on the Discovery Channel the next time they're running that "Dirty Jobs" program. There are people who do pretty unbelievable stuff for a living; shoveling garbage, standing waist-deep in feces, working ridiculous hours in uncomfortable conditions, dodging machinery that could crush or tear you in half if you're not quick. But they don't do it for cheap.
Isn't it also usually true that those "dirty jobs" are full-time jobs? That's another factor, it isn't just that the immigrants will work for cheaper, it's that they'll happily take a job for a day, or a week, or whatever. They're willing to get up every morning not knowing if they will get work that day. Relatively few Americans are going to be comfortable with that scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are some Amish over there waving their hands trying to get your attention.
You forget that in the Star Trek case, the Federation has "eliminated poverty". They don't even have money any more. (Although that one was a little hard for the writers to remember all the time.)
By "eliminated poverty" I always took that to mean "Fed all the poor people into the biomass supply for the replicators."
I'm virtually certain that AAA's online Triptik system has let you do stuff like this for a long time.
As much as I personally hate George Bush, he had to win in a lot more states than Florida to become president. Why have we decided that individual states "decide" elections? Why didn't Texas decide that election? Why didn't "the south" decide that election?
There are some simple facts we have to face as our country has become so demonstrably polarized, and that is no system is going to get a perfect result when you have two people both getting 49% of the vote. Elections are going to be close, and close elections are sometimes going to be influenced by margins of error that normally shouldn't be relevant. But they will be. And we have to suck it up. There are a lot of countries in the world where an election result like that would have bloodshed in the streets. Take some small pride that even if you don't like the guy who won, that our country and our system is better than that. (At least for now.)
If it were up to me we would require run-off elections until someone got more than 50%, but our founding fathers in their infinite wisdom didn't feel that was necessary, and I don't see us ever changing it.
Whoa, the executive branch has the power to levy taxes now????
So you're saying Internet Radio will be able to survive by not offering any of the popular music that most people want to listen to?
Now, me, I don't like the majority of what's popular, so this works for me, but Pandora isn't going to put food on their table by serving people like me. They need to serve the billion people who love top 40 and "Jack" radio and whatever the heck else the teeming masses are attached to.
But it's possible to use youtube, and the various google apps also supposedly work, no? What are they using?
At my company we kept having whole networks on some office floors go down periodically. Supposedly, the problem was tracked down to the switches they had sitting in conference rooms. Apparently, if someone for some reason plugged a cable from one port directly into another port, this caused that whole vlan to become unusable. (Why would someone do that? Apparently, some people are stupid.)
The response was to remove all switches/hubs from conference rooms. When it was suggested that we just put up signs that say "Don't do that" that idea was shot down because then people would *know* how to bring the network down and could do it maliciously.
The whole thing made no sense to me, that a network could be *that* fragile, but the network team was reluctant to explain details, and the end result was never enough network ports in conference rooms.
How hard is it to make a VOIP application that works in Safari? If it works in Safari, it works on the iPhone, no?
Amusingly, there is a point to be made here. Unrelated to this survey, but at my own company we have regular employee satisfaction surveys, and the inevitable result is that whatever areas on the survey are considered to be low-scoring, the company response is to implement new policies, training, or processes that are far more annoying than any perceived complaints before.
For example, a common complaint is "feedback", some employees feel they don't get enough feedback. First, this is incredibly ambiguous as to what this really means or if it's even really true that employees don't get enough feedback, even if some think they don't. Second, it's very possible that even if "feedback" is the lowest score on the survey, it still is easily high enough to suggest that 80+% of the employees don't consider it a problem.
And yet, in that special MBA approach to things, whatever the lowest score is must be a problem to be focussed on. So the company keeps implementing increasingly onerous mandatory review and feedback processes. At this point we now have twice yearly reviews of personal goals, yearly 360 reviews, yearly "official" reviews from our manager. At least three "all-hands" quarterly meetings every quarter. It sometimes seems that you can't get any actual work done because of all mandatory "Let's make everyone happier" procedures that keep coming up. And many of these things are not even cheap! I've been told that 360 Reviews, for example, are actually fairly expensive.
Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results.
Also, ask yourself, what have we done in the last minute, compared to the two before that? Our rate of advancement seems to have slowed considerably. Just look at what sort of things were predicted for us in the 50s and 60s that we're still no closer to seeing. Even Arthur C Clarke though we would have moonbases in 1999.
Come on, people, whales are not endangered because of Inuit hunters, who have a small preset number of whales they're allowed to hunt ever year. Whales are endangered because of commercial hunting by nations who don't abide by any limits and other environmental factors.
Ack, is there a greater hell than to pin your entire income on doing technical support for the rest of your life?
Seriously though, I see that suggestion often, and as someone who spent 6-7 years on a helpdesk, I can say with all certainty, there is no way in hell I would pin my income on spending a lifetime of doing technical support.
But if you're an open source developer, and you want to try and make money off of how poorly your software is built (how hard it is to install, how unintuitive it is, how poorly documented it is, how buggy it is) then seriously, more power to you. You are a better man than I. I'd be up in a bell tower with a rifle after a few more years of that.
In all seriousness though, one suggestion I would have for the OP would be to consider releasing your product as a virtual appliance, at least for demo/trial purposes. Being able to test software by firing up a pre-installed and configured virtual machine is often a very nice option these days.
And yet a place like Boston is one of the most racist cities in the country. It's almost like you have assholes everywhere.
I have no scientific proof that my wife isn't cheating on me right now. In fact, statistically, there is a strong chance that she is. But I choose to believe that she isn't, because part of having a successful relationship is having trust, even having faith in one's partner.
There *is* a place for faith in human life. It simply doesn't belong in science.
Why is the abortion debate involved in this at all? Stem cells used in research are not acquired from abortions! Abortions are a terrible source of stem cells for research purposes.
Actually, the fetus will naturally miscarry a significant percentage of the time, with that percentage getting fairly high depending on various factors. Is a 45 year old women who gets pregnant guilty of reckless endangerment?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage#Prevalen
Prospective studies using very sensitive early pregnancy tests have found that 25% of pregnancies are miscarried by the sixth week LMP (since the woman's Last Menstrual Period).[13][14] The risk of miscarriage decreases sharply after the 8th week, i.e. when the fetal stage begins.[15] Clinical miscarriages (those occurring after the sixth week LMP) occur in 8% of pregnancies.[14]
The prevalence of miscarriage increases considerably with age of the parents. Pregnancies from men younger than twenty-five years are 40% less likely to end in miscarriage than pregnancies from men 25-29 years. Pregnancies from men older than forty years are 60% more like to end in miscarriage than the 25-29 year age group.[16] The increased risk of miscarriage in pregnancies from older men is mainly seen in the first trimester.[17] In women, by the age of forty-five, 75% of pregnancies may end in miscarriage.[18]
Or, to come at it from another angle, how much can I discount my prices in exchange for selling customer's information with their consent? Customers want to pay less for things, so how much are they willing to trade to pay less for a gallon of milk? How much is their demographic information worth to them?
There were hard-drive mp3 players on the market before the iPod too, I used to own one of them long before the iPod came out. Who's the follower now?
Not that I'm predicting the iPhone will sweep the cell phone market. I think that's going to be a much harder market to dominate. But just because there are competitors out there now doesn't mean a new company can't come in and take the lead.
One might suggest that you go back and review what words like "tend to" mean. As a math person, you might find it somewhat correlated to concepts like "probabilities" rather than "absolutes".
Not all games require all the speed you can get. Not even all new games. And if someone wants to play some old favorite windows game the performance on a modern machine should be more than adequate even when virtualized.
I wonder why they didn't call the writers/producers of The Lone Gunmen. They had a storyline about a plane being flown into the World Trade Center in March, 2001.
Wait a minute...maybe we should be *arresting* them!!!
Sorry, the Wii left out digital distribution? Isn't that what the Virtual Console is?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Console
"You don't win a war by holding back."
Yes, but how do you win a police action?
Isn't it also usually true that those "dirty jobs" are full-time jobs? That's another factor, it isn't just that the immigrants will work for cheaper, it's that they'll happily take a job for a day, or a week, or whatever. They're willing to get up every morning not knowing if they will get work that day. Relatively few Americans are going to be comfortable with that scenario.