Too bad more people don't realize we're not a democracy. We're a Republic; and that's just great with me. Thinking of the biker idiot next door having a direct vote on our country's future sends cold chills down my spine. Of course, in his world the voting choices would be:
"YES", "NO", "NV", "PARTY ON!"
Although, with Dem majorities in Congress for so many years, the fourth option was pretty much the prevailing opinion anyway. Thank God that is over....
No, this is why people realize that there is no such things as loyalty in a company.
Trade unions are for sissies to lazy to do more than the minimum. (That's a personal observation from working too many summers in a unionized paper mill...that folded, not surprisingly.)
Good workers don't need to unionize. They either join a company that recognizes their worth or they start their own company and eat their competitors alive.
My first job after college was as a new officer in the Navy. Talk about horribly low pay (~$30K after including tax benefit) for an engineer. I also paid for ALL of my education at Boston University (a private school), racking up college loans to the tune of $65K. By being reasonable and frugal, I paid all of my monthly payments and saved. My social life wasn't anything to dream about; but it has all paid off. I'm now debt free.
Was it worth it? Heck yes! I can go where I want (with my wife and two kids) any time I want. And we have a 3 month (5 months, if we're frugal) rainy day fund built up.
It all comes down to what you think is important. Hopefully most of us have grown out of that teenager "Shop til you drop" mentality.
Check out the entries for Playboy at the LOC [loc.gov] or Playboy at the Cambridge U library [cam.ac.uk].
Not a valid argument. (1) We're talking about the United States. (2) The mission of the LOC is to pretty much keep EVERYTHING that was ever printed. The average library has no such mission or desire to have that mission.
Never seen a local library that has pr0n. And if you find one, it's probably because it's a big library where the locals don't generally know about it. Advertise that the library is stocking pr0n; and that will change very quickly....
Advocating the conveyance of pr0n is just another case where freaks are trying to make others (i.e. taxpayers) pay for their habit. It only works if they keep it a deep, dark secret from the taxpayers who are unwillingly and unknowingly forced to pay for it.
The "holier than thou" crowd has been in control for eons; and your freedoms have constantly increased.
Want to view pr0n? Get off your lazy butt and buy your own computer and access. Don't demand to use my money to access it, ya leech.
If all these arguments against censoring pr0n were true, I'd see the stupid mags on shelves at the library. Hmmm...never seen a library that had them. Guess the library saying "no" is OK. And if the library can say "no", the group giving them money can certainly tell them to say "no" if they want money.
Libraries make value decisions all the time about what content to provide. They consciously censor on whatever criteria it is they use.
Your argument about the meaning of the 1st Amendment is totally wrong. People do not have a right to have content communicated to them. If it were true, every library would be REQUIRED to provide EVERY piece of literature/video/etc ever created to ensure it was all communicated without exception. But that is NOT what the 1st Amendment is about.
The 1st Amendment says that you can create content. It doesn't require anyone to take it, or even provide the means to take it.
The First Amendment prevents the government from allowing you to publish, speak, etc., what you want to say. It does not require the govt to provide means for people to hear/read/etc it. By placing pages on a webserver you own/lease, you've published and received your 1st Amendment right. Beyond that you're on your own.
This law is right on. The problem is activist judges looking to further their freak causes rather than genuinely interpret the Constitution.
You should have known better than to install something you hadn't vigorously researched first. What kind of moron downloads software off the Net from unknown sources?
It's possible; but it will take forever to reach a final judgement and order by the court after all of the appeals by M$.
That's the thing: Sun can't REALLY expect to get cash any time soon. M$ will appeal to the last. It will be another decade before it's all finished.
The only realistic thing M$ competitors can hope is to so bog down and drain M$ with scads of lawsuits that they either go bankrupt or give in like IBM did.
Keep piling on!!! They can pay off the politicians to back off; but they can't hide hundreds of private lawsuits.
See you at the final M$ bonfire when we spit on the desicated remains of microSHAFT. I only hope Billy G is still around and cares enough to feel the pain of watching his spoiled little child go away.
Sun VMs have taken a long time to match MS VMs in perfs.
It's amazing that Sun's (or any other non-M$) VM could approach the M$ VM perf considering the proprietary hooks and low-level tricks M$ used to get that kind of performance.
That's the basic sin of M$ that hurts the consumer: They ensure their monopoly of apps because they don't disclose the available APIs to get the best performance. They save those goodies only for themselves, then point fingers at how slow the other guy's app runs. NO KIDDING!! If I was able to pre-load all of my piece-of-junk apps so they open quickly then use tricks no one else can access to speed them up, I'd be doing well, too! No wonder that non-M$ apps stay slow...they only get the leftovers of the resources M$ apps hog!
Especially for an established company, there are huge negatives and few positives in the high cost areas. And who wouldn't want to slash their wage and real estate costs?
It's about time companies got a clue and left the high cost areas. You couldn't have made me move to Silicon Valley for anything. Or California, for that matter....
John McCain failed because the majority of VOTERS wanted someone else.
Deregulation is to blame? That assembly line probably wouldn't exist (or the jobs) if HP was under the weight of regulation. Without the stupidity of regulation, everyone is free to do what they want. Don't like your employer or your wage? Go find a better job...but you'd better have a skill that someone is willing to pay you more for. If not, it's your own fault you're stuck in a low-wage job.
Grow up and stop whining. Or go to France. Will send you card every few years asking if the economy has collapsed yet....
It doesn't take much effort to get a college degree. And the cost of college is no excuse, either. I'm a white kid from a lower middle-class family. Right in the middle of the ethnic and financial no-man's land of financial aid. Parent's couldn't/didn't help pay for college and Uncle Sam wouldn't help, either.
But I did it. I'm up to my eyeballs in college loans; but I own a house and I earn more than my bills cost each month.
There is no excuse for not having a good job. They are out there if you bothered to get the free education this country gave you as a gift.
For the immigrants who weren't educated here: You chose to take your chances by coming here. If it's not as easy as you thought, that's too bad.
You made your choice. Live with it and stop whining.
...the worker(s) who didn't get an education. They wouldn't be there if they'd taken school seriously instead of screwing around.
The legal immigrants are here to take a chance at a better life. No matter how much they whine, it's still better than from where they came. Otherwise, they'd go home. God forbid they have a backbone and fix their own country.
As for the illegal border-crossers, there should be a bounty on their heads anyway. Funny to hear someone say they want to be part of this country; and the first thing they do is ignore our immigration laws....
...why we went from a mostly autonomous agrarian society to an industrialized and service-based one?
Simple...TAXES.
No matter how self-sufficient you are, if the gov't can levy taxes against you, you must trade to get the money to pay them. As industrialized society inflated prices and the raw tax increased, those farms that were only marginally able to produce excess to sell were forced to cash out to pay off property taxes. Either that, or they were foreclosed.
...ideally work should be a way of serving humanity, not serving myself.
Err...no.
Work is how I pay for my and my families necessities. I serve 'humanity' by joining/forming groups outside of work, or by refusing to do work that goes against my morals and ethics (e.g. the job offer to develop ads embedded in email. I wouldn't do that to a friend; so I told them to shove it.). I'm hired to do 40 hours of work each week (Yes, I am salaried; but I'm not a slave.). I expect to be paid for each day I work; and I give them a day's work in return. Beyond that there is no other expectation that I have or that they should have. Only suckers give their lives for work to 'serve humanity' or to 'make it to the top'.
In the big scheme, work is timeconsuming; but its importance (outside of paying bills) compared to the rest of my life is nil. How I raise my children, love my wife, and care for my friends and relatives is infinitely more important.
There is a problem with taking Europe as an example. Europe forces people to contribute to the 'social good' through ridiculously high taxes. That has stripped the citizens of any feeling of responsibility for the world around them. After all, the government will take care of that, too, right?!
The challenge and opportunity here in the US is to prevent (and/or turnback) the numbing effect of socialist institutions. The impetus to contribute must be left in the hands of each individual so they decide whether and to what to contribute with their time/talent/treasure. Otherwise we'll be left with a bunch of zombies saying "The gov't will take care of it....".
Oh, great. I can work for a big corporation (like Enron) and wait to lose all of my retirement savings because I've handed my life to my big brother in a business suit.
No thanks.
If you have so little ambition that you need a company to take care of you, you deserve to be tossed around like a play thing.
I worked for a paper mill in Maine where people from the town believed it was their right to work there. Their father did and their grandfather did. They were the laziest bunch of pigs I've ever met. They made $20/hr for minimally sophisticated jobs (e.g. use the forklift to move this roll of paper from here to there) and pissed it away (literally) on drinking and other activities. Almost no one had any savings, despite making great money and often being single. When the end came and the company folded from its own inefficiency, people were dumbstruck. They hadn't bothered to think ahead and prepare (by saving and planning) for the possibility of losing their job. They were pathetic.
I much prefer to have control of my own salary, my own skills, my own medical plan; and my own retirement saving. My wife and I have taken things seriously and saved like mad dogs instead of wasting money on the latest toys. Now we have enough money in savings to last 4 months or more if I'm laid off. Our retirement savings is well on its way to being enough for retirement if we contribute no more. And our (2) kids are all but guaranteed a free college ride thanks to us. All before I'm 35-years-old!!
I'm not a CEO or other especially highly paid person. I've taken my life and career seriously. Now I am more confident and secure than any sugar-daddy company could ever make me feel. All it took was some planning and discipline. There is no excuse for those who don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad more people don't realize we're not a democracy. We're a Republic; and that's just great with me. Thinking of the biker idiot next door having a direct vote on our country's future sends cold chills down my spine. Of course, in his world the voting choices would be:
"YES", "NO", "NV", "PARTY ON!"
Although, with Dem majorities in Congress for so many years, the fourth option was pretty much the prevailing opinion anyway. Thank God that is over....
No, this is why people realize that there is no such things as loyalty in a company.
Trade unions are for sissies to lazy to do more than the minimum. (That's a personal observation from working too many summers in a unionized paper mill...that folded, not surprisingly.)
Good workers don't need to unionize. They either join a company that recognizes their worth or they start their own company and eat their competitors alive.
I don't buy your story.
My first job after college was as a new officer in the Navy. Talk about horribly low pay (~$30K after including tax benefit) for an engineer. I also paid for ALL of my education at Boston University (a private school), racking up college loans to the tune of $65K. By being reasonable and frugal, I paid all of my monthly payments and saved. My social life wasn't anything to dream about; but it has all paid off. I'm now debt free.
Was it worth it? Heck yes! I can go where I want (with my wife and two kids) any time I want. And we have a 3 month (5 months, if we're frugal) rainy day fund built up.
It all comes down to what you think is important. Hopefully most of us have grown out of that teenager "Shop til you drop" mentality.
Check out the entries for Playboy at the LOC [loc.gov] or Playboy at the Cambridge U library [cam.ac.uk].
Not a valid argument.
(1) We're talking about the United States.
(2) The mission of the LOC is to pretty much keep EVERYTHING that was ever printed. The average library has no such mission or desire to have that mission.
Never seen a local library that has pr0n. And if you find one, it's probably because it's a big library where the locals don't generally know about it. Advertise that the library is stocking pr0n; and that will change very quickly....
Advocating the conveyance of pr0n is just another case where freaks are trying to make others (i.e. taxpayers) pay for their habit. It only works if they keep it a deep, dark secret from the taxpayers who are unwillingly and unknowingly forced to pay for it.
Sure. But, as soon as you reject 60% to 90% of your paycheck, what happens?
So people/orgs should hold their moral/ethical position only if it has no consequences?
If getting a wad of money is more important than some set of values they supposedly aspire to, then they're not very important values, are they?
A bunch of whiners who don't want to make a stand if it has consequences. Typical.
That's correct. Where you go wrong is by thinking it forces the govt to do anything for you.
What Article X in effect says is "get your own computer and ISP, you lazy pr0n-loving slug".
By your reasoning, the govt would be required to wipe your butt for you.
The "holier than thou" crowd has been in control for eons; and your freedoms have constantly increased.
Want to view pr0n? Get off your lazy butt and buy your own computer and access. Don't demand to use my money to access it, ya leech.
If all these arguments against censoring pr0n were true, I'd see the stupid mags on shelves at the library. Hmmm...never seen a library that had them. Guess the library saying "no" is OK. And if the library can say "no", the group giving them money can certainly tell them to say "no" if they want money.
"The analogy to selecting books is flawed."
No...it's an almost perfect analogy.
Libraries make value decisions all the time about what content to provide. They consciously censor on whatever criteria it is they use.
Your argument about the meaning of the 1st Amendment is totally wrong. People do not have a right to have content communicated to them. If it were true, every library would be REQUIRED to provide EVERY piece of literature/video/etc ever created to ensure it was all communicated without exception. But that is NOT what the 1st Amendment is about.
The 1st Amendment says that you can create content. It doesn't require anyone to take it, or even provide the means to take it.
It wasn't a ruling. It was the personal opinion of an individual jurist.
Your statement is almost as specious as when people say a given attorney general 'rules' on a matter.
Are people totally clueless about courts and the law, or just living in their own dream world?
The First Amendment prevents the government from allowing you to publish, speak, etc., what you want to say. It does not require the govt to provide means for people to hear/read/etc it. By placing pages on a webserver you own/lease, you've published and received your 1st Amendment right. Beyond that you're on your own.
This law is right on. The problem is activist judges looking to further their freak causes rather than genuinely interpret the Constitution.
"because commercial component makers have contracts to keep them in line."
REALLY? And how much did M$ pay you for losing your data when their POS system crashed after 72 hours of use?
The only one to protect you and your interests is you. Stop using crappy systems and crappy software.
You should have known better than to install something you hadn't vigorously researched first. What kind of moron downloads software off the Net from unknown sources?
It's possible; but it will take forever to reach a final judgement and order by the court after all of the appeals by M$.
That's the thing: Sun can't REALLY expect to get cash any time soon. M$ will appeal to the last. It will be another decade before it's all finished.
The only realistic thing M$ competitors can hope is to so bog down and drain M$ with scads of lawsuits that they either go bankrupt or give in like IBM did.
Keep piling on!!! They can pay off the politicians to back off; but they can't hide hundreds of private lawsuits.
See you at the final M$ bonfire when we spit on the desicated remains of microSHAFT. I only hope Billy G is still around and cares enough to feel the pain of watching his spoiled little child go away.
It's amazing that Sun's (or any other non-M$) VM could approach the M$ VM perf considering the proprietary hooks and low-level tricks M$ used to get that kind of performance.
That's the basic sin of M$ that hurts the consumer: They ensure their monopoly of apps because they don't disclose the available APIs to get the best performance. They save those goodies only for themselves, then point fingers at how slow the other guy's app runs. NO KIDDING!! If I was able to pre-load all of my piece-of-junk apps so they open quickly then use tricks no one else can access to speed them up, I'd be doing well, too! No wonder that non-M$ apps stay slow...they only get the leftovers of the resources M$ apps hog!
Especially for an established company, there are huge negatives and few positives in the high cost areas. And who wouldn't want to slash their wage and real estate costs?
It's about time companies got a clue and left the high cost areas. You couldn't have made me move to Silicon Valley for anything. Or California, for that matter....
What a stupid, pathetic show.
Only its avid watchers are more pathetic.
To its fans: "Get a life."
"...The rest of them are lawyers, teachers, mechanics, lighting designers, HR, etc, all in non-tech companies..."
BIG FAMILY!!
Wah...wah...wah.
John McCain failed because the majority of VOTERS wanted someone else.
Deregulation is to blame? That assembly line probably wouldn't exist (or the jobs) if HP was under the weight of regulation. Without the stupidity of regulation, everyone is free to do what they want. Don't like your employer or your wage? Go find a better job...but you'd better have a skill that someone is willing to pay you more for. If not, it's your own fault you're stuck in a low-wage job.
Grow up and stop whining. Or go to France. Will send you card every few years asking if the economy has collapsed yet....
Good call!!
It doesn't take much effort to get a college degree. And the cost of college is no excuse, either. I'm a white kid from a lower middle-class family. Right in the middle of the ethnic and financial no-man's land of financial aid. Parent's couldn't/didn't help pay for college and Uncle Sam wouldn't help, either.
But I did it. I'm up to my eyeballs in college loans; but I own a house and I earn more than my bills cost each month.
There is no excuse for not having a good job. They are out there if you bothered to get the free education this country gave you as a gift.
For the immigrants who weren't educated here: You chose to take your chances by coming here. If it's not as easy as you thought, that's too bad.
You made your choice. Live with it and stop whining.
...the worker(s) who didn't get an education. They wouldn't be there if they'd taken school seriously instead of screwing around.
The legal immigrants are here to take a chance at a better life. No matter how much they whine, it's still better than from where they came. Otherwise, they'd go home. God forbid they have a backbone and fix their own country.
As for the illegal border-crossers, there should be a bounty on their heads anyway. Funny to hear someone say they want to be part of this country; and the first thing they do is ignore our immigration laws....
...when I first heard Qwest was out to screw us over to MSN. Are people so clueless they don't know about MSN/Hotmail security-gaping-caverns?
FastQ is awesome. I'm much happier than I was at Qwest.net
...why we went from a mostly autonomous agrarian society to an industrialized and service-based one?
Simple...TAXES.
No matter how self-sufficient you are, if the gov't can levy taxes against you, you must trade to get the money to pay them. As industrialized society inflated prices and the raw tax increased, those farms that were only marginally able to produce excess to sell were forced to cash out to pay off property taxes. Either that, or they were foreclosed.
It's that simple.
...ideally work should be a way of serving humanity, not serving myself.
Err...no.
Work is how I pay for my and my families necessities. I serve 'humanity' by joining/forming groups outside of work, or by refusing to do work that goes against my morals and ethics (e.g. the job offer to develop ads embedded in email. I wouldn't do that to a friend; so I told them to shove it.). I'm hired to do 40 hours of work each week (Yes, I am salaried; but I'm not a slave.). I expect to be paid for each day I work; and I give them a day's work in return. Beyond that there is no other expectation that I have or that they should have. Only suckers give their lives for work to 'serve humanity' or to 'make it to the top'.
In the big scheme, work is timeconsuming; but its importance (outside of paying bills) compared to the rest of my life is nil. How I raise my children, love my wife, and care for my friends and relatives is infinitely more important.
There is a problem with taking Europe as an example. Europe forces people to contribute to the 'social good' through ridiculously high taxes. That has stripped the citizens of any feeling of responsibility for the world around them. After all, the government will take care of that, too, right?!
The challenge and opportunity here in the US is to prevent (and/or turnback) the numbing effect of socialist institutions. The impetus to contribute must be left in the hands of each individual so they decide whether and to what to contribute with their time/talent/treasure. Otherwise we'll be left with a bunch of zombies saying "The gov't will take care of it....".
Oh, great. I can work for a big corporation (like Enron) and wait to lose all of my retirement savings because I've handed my life to my big brother in a business suit.
No thanks.
If you have so little ambition that you need a company to take care of you, you deserve to be tossed around like a play thing.
I worked for a paper mill in Maine where people from the town believed it was their right to work there. Their father did and their grandfather did. They were the laziest bunch of pigs I've ever met. They made $20/hr for minimally sophisticated jobs (e.g. use the forklift to move this roll of paper from here to there) and pissed it away (literally) on drinking and other activities. Almost no one had any savings, despite making great money and often being single. When the end came and the company folded from its own inefficiency, people were dumbstruck. They hadn't bothered to think ahead and prepare (by saving and planning) for the possibility of losing their job. They were pathetic.
I much prefer to have control of my own salary, my own skills, my own medical plan; and my own retirement saving. My wife and I have taken things seriously and saved like mad dogs instead of wasting money on the latest toys. Now we have enough money in savings to last 4 months or more if I'm laid off. Our retirement savings is well on its way to being enough for retirement if we contribute no more. And our (2) kids are all but guaranteed a free college ride thanks to us. All before I'm 35-years-old!!
I'm not a CEO or other especially highly paid person. I've taken my life and career seriously. Now I am more confident and secure than any sugar-daddy company could ever make me feel. All it took was some planning and discipline. There is no excuse for those who don't.