Big multinational business has done a job on many countries as the history of Iran, Iraq, Liberia, Nigeria and many other nations attest. Multinationals, if unchecked, will take small countries for all that they are worth, feed corruption and leave devastated population.
But I first need to address your game: Yes, there is a direct relation between the wealth of a nation and how much they trade with the world. I commend your clever use of a definition. Rich nations are rich. The question, though, is whether or not that base of wealth is better built by being colonized by large multinational firms or by building the health of the internal economy in conjunction with the trade.
When you look at the troubled third world you see that many of the poorest nations have extremely high ratios of multinational investment to internal investment. Things get really bad when the country is essentially owned by one or two multinationals. What happens in many cases is that the multinational move into an area to extract resources, fuel corruption and leave a devasted population.
Many of the absolute poorest nations were devasted by multinationals then suffered nationalization in their attempts to throw off the colonialization.
To really improve the nation, you need to build up the rule of law and establish an economic climate where the people in the nation can build their own capital.
BTW, your examples of China and India really don't fit your thesis that multinational companies bring prosperity. Both China and India have strong anti-colonization sentiments. Both countries actively curtail and control multinational investment. India is building an IT infrastructure and invites the world to attend, but they control the game. The nations are prospering because they are building diversified structures and are building up their own internal capital and checks on multinationals.
China is doing the same. Outsourcing to China largely means that US firms can purchase for Chinese firms. China is still a communist state and actively resists foreign ownership of capital. Both your examples are countries that limit the role of multinationals.
Actually, I was thinking about the digitizing problems. If I were in the RIAA, I would do everything possible to avoid filling libraries with the pop culture music that sells well in stores. I would try to get the libraries to stock up on boring educational oriented CDs that people are not likely to copy to their MP3 collection.
For that matter, on rereading the attached articles, I actually find myself sympathizing with the RIAA's choice of donated CDs. The articles are upset because the library didn't get a boatload of the popular music that people want. To a large extent, I think collection of music at the library should be about expanding the exposure to different types of music, rather than just playing the greatest hits of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.
What I want in a library collection is a large number of obscur titles that I am likely to listen to once or twice. The only problem I have with the RIAA's selection is the large number of duplicates. It is not with the obscurity of the titles.
If the capitalism comes in the form of small ventures it probably will save Africa from famine. If it comes in the form of internationally funded corruption (aka the IMF) or in the form of mega corporations it will simply keep the people impoverished for another several decades.
Governments have very poor records in their dabbling in drugs. In the grand days of the British Empire, the west used the opium trade and essentially encouraged opium use to control the masses in China and elsewhere.
In the US, we find that the CIA actively explored the use of LSD for the purpose of mind control. Ken Kesey got hooked during government experiments.
Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take.
Sounds to me like government is still up to its old tricks of using chemicals to control minds.
Of course, immmunization against euphoria would seem like a prize to politicians. Think how much more secure we would be in our old age if the children who support us were immunized against euphoria. They would be happy little drones working their days away to our benefit. Best of all, with the big successes of Ritalin and anti euphoria drugs...government medical research will be able to get back to get back to what it does best...find ways to control people.
9/11 proved that there is just too much freedom in the world. We need to get rid of that nasty freedom thang if we want to remain free.
The RIAA is using libraries to dump overstock: "Give 'em the printed CDs that we can't sell."
The RIAA could have accomplished the goal of protecting their precious main stream pop collection by giving the library volumes of cultural stuff like Brahms, the pipers of Scotland and what not that teeny boppers never buy. The libraries would have ended up with stuff worth keeping in the collection.
The sad thing about the RIAA using the library system to dump unsold CDs is that it stifles the overstocked market. In the book industry, you end up having the unsold books flowing through dollar book stores where the less affluent can pick up new cds for rock bottom prices. Of course, the dud cds will just be distributed to the public through the library's used book sales, but the buyer doesn't get the satisfaction of breaking the seal.
BTW: There is one big difference between music and books in public libraries. It generally takes a person a week or two to read a book, while it only takes an hour or so to copy a CD. Thinking in terms of checkout days, if it takes an average of 14 checkout days for people to read the Da Vinci Code and a library system has 10,000 readers interested in reading the book in the first year then the library might do something like divide 14,000 by 300 and see that they need 47 copies of the book to fit their demand.
If a music CD averages two check out days, then they will need only 6 copies of American Idol
Humans who aren't qualified have tremendous problems writing C or Java and yet I don't see anyone trying to make those "quirky"
I know you are trying to insult me, but I am not sure what you mean here. Yes, there isn't any group trying to label c or java programmers as quirks. BTW, you do know that the WC3 has labeled HTML 1.0 - 3 as it evolve with Netscape as "quirks mode." Yes, a standards body has actually taken the stance of labeling the coding style used by a large number of people use as "quirky" and there has been a concerted effort to discredit people who use the "quirky" style of coding. The very fact that a standards body is openly insulting the HTML programming base by calling them names shows that they are out of touch.
BTW, c and java are quirky from end to end. The language has evolved with its user base. c and java programmers seem to like it that way. I would love to go into a litany of all the quirky things in Linux (but I don't want another flaimbait label) If a superior being were to form a standards committee that wrenched out a third of the API and start labeling anyone using the deprecated code as "quirks", you would see a fire storm of protest. The sad fact is that the intelligensia leading the W3C has such ingrained contempt for its user base that they don't even bother listening to large install base using HTML. The W3C simply dismisses the masses with an insult.
Each and every time Sun or other standards committees try to deprecate an object or function call, there is almost always a collective cry against the action. The only times there isn't is in the rare case that the new version includes something substantially better. In most cases, Sun carries the deprecated API through multiple versions for backward compatibility.
As for you resisting it, good luck
If you did a webcrawl, you would find the majority of pages have not adopted the new standards. The intelligensia was predicting that the x languages would have replaced quirks mode by 1999. I haven't seen recent statistics, I suspect the majority of pages on the net are still using HTML 2.x, and less than 5% have gone xhtml-strict or have converted to XML. I was reading through pages published recently by PhDed professors at the local University. They were all written in quirks mode.
As for centering. If the align attribute were available, I could right align or center this paragraph. W3C has made it extremely difficult to allow the users of a forum like this to change alignment. Likewise, if this forum were to go xhtml strict, then they would have to include code to change ampersands to ampersand amps;.
I agree that people are having more fun with their digital cameras than ever before.
In discussing fake photos we need to separate the intent to deceive from simple adjustments or artistic statements.
My point is that in order for a person to effectively deceive others, they must first have a way to claim legitimacy for a photo. Creating a program that "mathematically" verifies a photo opens up the door to deceit. You can't argue with a mathematically verified photo.
Now then, if we were to get into a question of what percent of photos were "faked" my guess is that a larger percent of photos taken in the first years of photography were faked than are today. At the height of the Kodak Instamatic years, there was probably a low in the number of faked photos. The reason for my assertions is that the first photographers really had to know their art to take pictures. Today, however, people are taking billions of photos a year. Before I dropped my camera, I had taken over 7500 pictures with it.
I concede that the number of pictures faked for the purpose of manipulating others has risen sharply.
A system of mathematically verify faked photos will help detect amateurish attempts at fakes, but have the converse affect of making truly sophisticated fakes even worse by creating a way to tag the legitimacy to the faked photo.
when it was rare and difficult to fake photographys
It was never rare nor difficult to "fake photographs." From the very moment photography existed, people realized that they could control the message the photograph carried. Most of the early photographers had studied optics and developed their own film and manipulated images accordingly.
Most of the early photos you come across were staged. Taking a photograph was a big deal. People dressed up in their best outfits and the photographer would construct the scene. Often the photographer colored or otherwise enhanced the image. Photography has always been an art form. As an art form, people choose the message to convey.
Using photographs as evidence has always been problematic. The struggle is for lawyers to keep enough faith in photos to be able to use them in court. Personally, I think having a method to declare a photography mathematically correct immediately creates a problem where people with sufficient resources to fake mathematically correct fake photos will have the ability to manipulate the courts.
There never was that much faith in photographic evidence. I think we are better of having doubts about photographic evidence than we will be if we sanctify any photos as mathematically correct. The methods will have some value in quickly identifying tampered evidence, but will not have value in verifying it.
I work with several amateur web designers...they all make their pages by writing the HTML. If you surf through the net, you will find that there's millions of people who are writing their own code. Even those using frontpage spend a great deal of their time in the HTML edit mode.
Several years ago I went on the crusade to upgrade amateur coders to the new W3C think.
I watched a large numbers of people who had little difficulty learning HTML have tremendous difficulties with XHTML. It is from watching people that I realized that the new W3C standards were cutting regular humans out of the equation. The very quirkiness of the Netscape interpretation of HTML fit better with the innate quirkyness of people.
I agree 100% that XHTML is a better language for machines. But, I see first hand that people have tremendous problems with it.
The fact that so many real people are avoiding the new think indicates to me that there's problems with the new think. I now agree with and encourage those who resist XHTML.
Take something simple like centering. The decision to center a paragraph or image is often made at run time. The person designing the CSS style sheet does not know if the icon added by an end user should be right, center or left aligned. In most cases decisions about how an image flows with content are not part of the format of the page.
I agree that the box model is best for overall page layout, but the deprecated tag attributes are better for run time design decisions.
Although I am modded a troll for saying it. I think the W3C is still too much under the influence of Microsoft and other big firms and they are not giving enough thought to human needs. The fact that there are open source HTML editors and validation programs does not mean that the industry is not under the influence of organizations that want to sell expensive programs.
Look at the history of XML...Microsoft was one of the primary pushers of the techniques largely because Netscape's programming model did not fit the new standards. Yes, there are people in W3C who hate Microsoft...that does not mean that they are not working toward the end that MS desires. Again, there are open source HTML editors; however, most mainstream people will be brought under the sway of the big boys.
My first thought on the article was the same. The mathematical tests to determine fake photos will have value only until the fake photo industry builds the tests into their software. For that matter, I suspect that the main use of the Hany Falid method will be to make your fake photos even more realistic.
The most interesting line in the article was:
but computers make it easier for more and more people to manipulate images.
One could read into these lines that the ability to fake photographs was great until anyone could do it. Now that we know how easy it is to fake photographs, we no longer implicitly trust messages...but we will trust mathematically authenticated fake photographs because math is infallable.
One of my greatest dislikes of all of the new X-Style languages is that they all seem aimed to cutting human beings out of the web equation. The original HTML is sloppy, but most people can get a decent looking page by typing out code in a text editor or in a little tiny textarea box on a forum.
The different HTML-Strict DTDs are nit-picking to the point that they preclude humans from writing code. For example, you have to replace all of the ampersands in a URL with an ampersand followed by "amp;". They've eleminated monoid tags; so you have to end img, meta and br tags with a "/". Each nit-picking details decrases the ability for ma and pa kettle to pound out their own web page.
To a large extent it appears that the primary goal of the W3C is to force the market into the position where people have to buy expensive programming languages to write HTML.
Personally, I like humans more than machines. I agree with the majority of web pages on the net that we should resist the W3C.
Basically, you're right in that management views you as a resource that is somewhat replaceable.
Unfortunately, one of the goals of management is to assure that its employees are replaceable. For the health of the organization, you do not want to create a dependency on any one person or group. The company has to assure that they will still be able to function if any network admin or programmer leaves. For that matter, I believe it wise to migrate employees through different positions in the company to reduce dependencies. Likewise it is wise to keep as close as possible to standard practices making it easier to find replacements.
One of the main reasons that franchising is so successful is because the internal functioning of the franchise is so well defined that it all but eliminates the individual quirks of the employees.
Personally, I hate how this methodology marginalizes humans. I like human quirks. But most people would prefer to eat a McDonalds or shop at a Walmart where the procedures are well defined and the service is consistent to one filled with imagination.
Do you know how much coffee Microsoft had to invest to come up with the idea of double clicking.
Regardless, the difficulties involved in revoking absurd patents seems to clearly indicate that the main aim of the current patent system is not to advance technology but to feed the patent creating machine. Each time a patanteer pulls the handle and flushes out a patent...they want to preserve it.
Of course, the article fails to mention how many of the questionable patents really are not actively defended.
The unofficial rule is that a publicly traded company is to retain profits for the purpose of increasing corporate growth in the near future
The Microsoft Way of re-investing all profits really pulled one on the tech economy. This new way of business was counter to centuries of tradition and proved to be a major contributor to the tech industry bust.
A large number of companies were following the Microsoft way and of re-investing all profits until, as a collective, the industry pushed itself beyond the point where the returns were diminished. The result is the current tech recession.
Tech companies have proven to have relatively short life cycles. The intelligent action in such a market is to only reinvest that which you see leading to a positive return, and returning the rest to the investors in the form of dividends or stock buy backs. Nowhere in the wealth of nations did Mr. Smith give the rule that companies must re-invest all profits. He simply noted that companies re-invest when that seems to be the thing to do. Not only do they re-invest, but they borrow to invest when it is the correct course of action.
To have a long term stable economy, we really need to break your "unofficial rule" and get back to the point where companies have a more natural lifecycle.
I can live on about 1/10th of the food I currently eat.
Wow, you must be really large! Come to think of it most Americans are humongous; so, perhaps you are right.
I think the numbers should say, that the earth could contain at most 1.5 billion modern Americans. It could probably support 100-500 billion Indians (the asian kind).
Regardless, I think people under estimate how important the "empty" spots on the planet are. These empty spots help preserve resources for future generations.
I think you are absolutely correct about obscurity. Our dislike of companies grow when we feel forced to make decisions based on the offerings of a company. I often feel forced into a corner by Microsoft...and to a lesser extent Intel. ARM itself does not come up in the decision process of consumers...so it does not garner the loathing that we reserve for Microsoft.
Sorry, but the self-destruction of the software industry has almost nothing to do with presidential politics. It is largely the result of the life cycle of the industry itself.
Most of the big software companies existed because their was a perception that the companies were building up equity in intellectual properties.
As OSS is set against the corporate (capitalist) software industry, it seems that threads like this should be entirely about celebration...and the big question should be about how to coerce failing software firms into liberating their source code into the public domain as they close their ledgers and dispense any remaining funds to shareholders.
The real problem is not that software companies will continue to fail, but that they are leaving large numbers of customers with closed systems and no support.
Please, don't misunderstand, bashing Bush for any negative news is desirable. But, I really can't see how Bush is responsible for the natural life cycle of an industry. It also seems strange to be blaming someone for the failure of a business model that OSS opposes.
I agree that it is wise to blame one's enemies for the necessary outcome of one's actions. I certainly don't want to be blamed for follow programmers losing the livelihood, but isn't the fall of corporate giant software firms the goal of a free software movement?
The failing businesses were all founded on that strange IP model that OSS rejects. The failing companies were built on the assumption that they were building an abstract thing called IP, and that they were re-investing this IP to create more IP.
Bush and his cronies were in the lead in trying to defend this IP./.ers routinely deride this concept.
It seems strange to blame Bush for not succeeding in stopping the outcome of what we desired to happen....the fall of corporate owned software. It seems to me that if you are against IP, then this article should be a cause for celebration.
We really need to streamline the patent, development and deployment process on this one and get these "boomless" fireworks into Iraq and Afghanistan so people can start celebrating their weddings again.
One does not know whether to laugh or cry. It has been quite obvious that the designers of SQL had little understanding of data fundamentals in general, and the relational model in particular
This quote needs to be placed toward the beginning of the Grand Encyclopedia of Intellectual Arrogance. Let's see, you have flat tables with a defined primary key and you form relations between these flat tables.
I do agree that SQL is not the best possible query language, but it succeeds where the other languages fail, it is easy for people to grasp and manipulate. Likewise, HTML has many faults. Plain HTML is still the preferred choice of most web designers because it is easy to learn and write.
Personally, I think the primary intellectual impulse is to add convolution to simple processes. There will never be an end to the stream of blither about how nulls cannot exist, and anyone who simply uses an sequence counter as a primary key is the devil incarnate. HTML and SQL have two things that almost all the stuff coming from arrogant snits like this author lack. They were designed by people who were actually doing stuff.
This quote needs a position in the library of intellectual arrogance as well:
Indeed, data/information management requires "some organizing principle"; that is, structure; anything "unstructured" -- and many in the industry promote XML for that purpose -- is not data, but meaningless random noise that carries no information.
A snit crassly dismisses several millenia of literature because it is unstructured.
Quite frankly, meaning and structure are independent of each other. It is possible to find meaning in things with radically different structures. It is true that there is a correlation between structure and the ability to communicate meaning, but a healthy mind can find meanings in things that have not been normalized.
Likewise, you can have meaningless garbage in relational databases. A case in point is the large number of fake web sites that do things like join the FIPS database to product names so that they can have millions of pages that show up in search engines. Likewise, we see academician filling volume after volume of publications with meaningless tripe.
Hey, I think this is a great idea. I think that every hacker should get the certified ethical hacker badge.
BTW, I will be selling the answers to the certified ethical hacker exam on my site for selling answers to the MCSE exams and other equally important certificates.
You are right. I should not have said "sell." I thought I had said "exercise." Generally employees cash in by exercising the option then immediately selling the stock.
The employee options I've had in my life have all been pegged to employment. So I would have the options from the day I joined the company to the day I left. I would have to exercise the option within 90 days of parting company with the company. NOTE, I keep being laid off in recessions so all my precious employee options have proven worthless to date. For that matter, generous option packages for employees makes mass lay off events very tempting for employers. Laying off employees in recessions automatically eliminates all of the options with a strike prices less than the current stock market value.
The really nasty downside to employee options is that, by being pegged to the employee lifecycle, they end up creating a double whamming for those employees laid off in recessions. The employee loses the paycheck and their retirement funds in one cruel stroke.
I used to be in favor of employee ownership, until I realized that employee ownership magnifies the risk of the employee. Employees need to diversify.
BTW, have you noticed how employers were more than willing to inundate new hirees with options at the height of the stock boom, but make a big deal about protecting employees from the risk of options after the market correction...now that options are a good deal again.
When there is sufficient competition, companies will end up rewarding the breakage to customers in the form of lower rates. The only time you don't see this happening is with monopolies. Rewarding customers with lower rates happens in the phone card business. You can buy phone cards for a penny and a half a minute when the cost of completing a call is greater than a penny and half because the phonecard company makes it money on the breakage.
Gift certificates are the same. Companies are often willing to sell gift certificates below their face value because they get short term interest on the cash and can count on a certain amount of breakage. Stupid laws demanding that breakage be given to the state, or other absurd bureaucratic rules, end up taking away the ability of companies to give such discounts.
There is almost always a vesting period, and employees only get to exercise an employee stock option once...so, I can see merit in the argument that employee options cool the impulse for insider trading. In most cases, the strike price is determined by the hiring date of an employee. Employees do have leaway to determine when they sell the stock. There is a very strong temptation for employees to hold onto options until they leave the company. The longer you hold your employee option, the more valuable it becomes. The primary reason for employees selling options is to purchase things. This even holds for CEOs who might exercise a set number of options each quarter.
With employee stock options, employees only have one trade...they get one chance to sell. The only risk of insider trading occurs when a stock is over valued. Their insider trade, of course, helps temper the rise of an over valued stock. I really don't see that much harm. The one trade reduces the losses of outsider investors.
The real power of options come with the fact that an employee can hold the options for several years with the value of the company rises. For most employees, the options are a long term investment strategy. For that matter, must companies have a policy that several years must pass before an employee is fully vested and can exercise their options. Are you really going to play your option on a one time blip in the market?
I believe, employee stock options encourage long term thinking. It is a far superior means for preventing insider trades than employee stock ownership plans where employees actually have their funds at risk.
In theory, employee options should temper employees interest in trading their company stock. Smart investors diversify their portfolio. It is plain stupid to have your salary, options and investments all dependent on the same source. Smart companies that offer options should strongly discourage their employees from owning the stock. Of course, there are many Enron's out there that actively sell stock to employees. A company that has the best interests of its employees at heart would discourage stock ownership by employees.
Slashdot Mirror
Big multinational business has done a job on many countries as the history of Iran, Iraq, Liberia, Nigeria and many other nations attest. Multinationals, if unchecked, will take small countries for all that they are worth, feed corruption and leave devastated population.
But I first need to address your game: Yes, there is a direct relation between the wealth of a nation and how much they trade with the world. I commend your clever use of a definition. Rich nations are rich. The question, though, is whether or not that base of wealth is better built by being colonized by large multinational firms or by building the health of the internal economy in conjunction with the trade.
When you look at the troubled third world you see that many of the poorest nations have extremely high ratios of multinational investment to internal investment. Things get really bad when the country is essentially owned by one or two multinationals. What happens in many cases is that the multinational move into an area to extract resources, fuel corruption and leave a devasted population.
Many of the absolute poorest nations were devasted by multinationals then suffered nationalization in their attempts to throw off the colonialization.
To really improve the nation, you need to build up the rule of law and establish an economic climate where the people in the nation can build their own capital.
BTW, your examples of China and India really don't fit your thesis that multinational companies bring prosperity. Both China and India have strong anti-colonization sentiments. Both countries actively curtail and control multinational investment. India is building an IT infrastructure and invites the world to attend, but they control the game. The nations are prospering because they are building diversified structures and are building up their own internal capital and checks on multinationals.
China is doing the same. Outsourcing to China largely means that US firms can purchase for Chinese firms. China is still a communist state and actively resists foreign ownership of capital. Both your examples are countries that limit the role of multinationals.
For that matter, on rereading the attached articles, I actually find myself sympathizing with the RIAA's choice of donated CDs. The articles are upset because the library didn't get a boatload of the popular music that people want. To a large extent, I think collection of music at the library should be about expanding the exposure to different types of music, rather than just playing the greatest hits of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.
What I want in a library collection is a large number of obscur titles that I am likely to listen to once or twice. The only problem I have with the RIAA's selection is the large number of duplicates. It is not with the obscurity of the titles.
If the capitalism comes in the form of small ventures it probably will save Africa from famine. If it comes in the form of internationally funded corruption (aka the IMF) or in the form of mega corporations it will simply keep the people impoverished for another several decades.
Governments have very poor records in their dabbling in drugs. In the grand days of the British Empire, the west used the opium trade and essentially encouraged opium use to control the masses in China and elsewhere.
In the US, we find that the CIA actively explored the use of LSD for the purpose of mind control. Ken Kesey got hooked during government experiments.
Sounds to me like government is still up to its old tricks of using chemicals to control minds.
Of course, immmunization against euphoria would seem like a prize to politicians. Think how much more secure we would be in our old age if the children who support us were immunized against euphoria. They would be happy little drones working their days away to our benefit. Best of all, with the big successes of Ritalin and anti euphoria drugs...government medical research will be able to get back to get back to what it does best...find ways to control people.
9/11 proved that there is just too much freedom in the world. We need to get rid of that nasty freedom thang if we want to remain free.
The RIAA is using libraries to dump overstock: "Give 'em the printed CDs that we can't sell."
The RIAA could have accomplished the goal of protecting their precious main stream pop collection by giving the library volumes of cultural stuff like Brahms, the pipers of Scotland and what not that teeny boppers never buy. The libraries would have ended up with stuff worth keeping in the collection.
The sad thing about the RIAA using the library system to dump unsold CDs is that it stifles the overstocked market. In the book industry, you end up having the unsold books flowing through dollar book stores where the less affluent can pick up new cds for rock bottom prices. Of course, the dud cds will just be distributed to the public through the library's used book sales, but the buyer doesn't get the satisfaction of breaking the seal.
BTW: There is one big difference between music and books in public libraries. It generally takes a person a week or two to read a book, while it only takes an hour or so to copy a CD. Thinking in terms of checkout days, if it takes an average of 14 checkout days for people to read the Da Vinci Code and a library system has 10,000 readers interested in reading the book in the first year then the library might do something like divide 14,000 by 300 and see that they need 47 copies of the book to fit their demand.
If a music CD averages two check out days, then they will need only 6 copies of American Idol
I know you are trying to insult me, but I am not sure what you mean here. Yes, there isn't any group trying to label c or java programmers as quirks. BTW, you do know that the WC3 has labeled HTML 1.0 - 3 as it evolve with Netscape as "quirks mode." Yes, a standards body has actually taken the stance of labeling the coding style used by a large number of people use as "quirky" and there has been a concerted effort to discredit people who use the "quirky" style of coding. The very fact that a standards body is openly insulting the HTML programming base by calling them names shows that they are out of touch.
BTW, c and java are quirky from end to end. The language has evolved with its user base. c and java programmers seem to like it that way. I would love to go into a litany of all the quirky things in Linux (but I don't want another flaimbait label) If a superior being were to form a standards committee that wrenched out a third of the API and start labeling anyone using the deprecated code as "quirks", you would see a fire storm of protest. The sad fact is that the intelligensia leading the W3C has such ingrained contempt for its user base that they don't even bother listening to large install base using HTML. The W3C simply dismisses the masses with an insult.
Each and every time Sun or other standards committees try to deprecate an object or function call, there is almost always a collective cry against the action. The only times there isn't is in the rare case that the new version includes something substantially better. In most cases, Sun carries the deprecated API through multiple versions for backward compatibility.
If you did a webcrawl, you would find the majority of pages have not adopted the new standards. The intelligensia was predicting that the x languages would have replaced quirks mode by 1999. I haven't seen recent statistics, I suspect the majority of pages on the net are still using HTML 2.x, and less than 5% have gone xhtml-strict or have converted to XML. I was reading through pages published recently by PhDed professors at the local University. They were all written in quirks mode.
As for centering. If the align attribute were available, I could right align or center this paragraph. W3C has made it extremely difficult to allow the users of a forum like this to change alignment. Likewise, if this forum were to go xhtml strict, then they would have to include code to change ampersands to ampersand amps;.
I agree that people are having more fun with their digital cameras than ever before.
In discussing fake photos we need to separate the intent to deceive from simple adjustments or artistic statements.
My point is that in order for a person to effectively deceive others, they must first have a way to claim legitimacy for a photo. Creating a program that "mathematically" verifies a photo opens up the door to deceit. You can't argue with a mathematically verified photo.
Now then, if we were to get into a question of what percent of photos were "faked" my guess is that a larger percent of photos taken in the first years of photography were faked than are today. At the height of the Kodak Instamatic years, there was probably a low in the number of faked photos. The reason for my assertions is that the first photographers really had to know their art to take pictures. Today, however, people are taking billions of photos a year. Before I dropped my camera, I had taken over 7500 pictures with it.
I concede that the number of pictures faked for the purpose of manipulating others has risen sharply.
A system of mathematically verify faked photos will help detect amateurish attempts at fakes, but have the converse affect of making truly sophisticated fakes even worse by creating a way to tag the legitimacy to the faked photo.
Most of the early photos you come across were staged. Taking a photograph was a big deal. People dressed up in their best outfits and the photographer would construct the scene. Often the photographer colored or otherwise enhanced the image. Photography has always been an art form. As an art form, people choose the message to convey.
Using photographs as evidence has always been problematic. The struggle is for lawyers to keep enough faith in photos to be able to use them in court. Personally, I think having a method to declare a photography mathematically correct immediately creates a problem where people with sufficient resources to fake mathematically correct fake photos will have the ability to manipulate the courts.
There never was that much faith in photographic evidence. I think we are better of having doubts about photographic evidence than we will be if we sanctify any photos as mathematically correct. The methods will have some value in quickly identifying tampered evidence, but will not have value in verifying it.
I work with several amateur web designers...they all make their pages by writing the HTML. If you surf through the net, you will find that there's millions of people who are writing their own code. Even those using frontpage spend a great deal of their time in the HTML edit mode.
Several years ago I went on the crusade to upgrade amateur coders to the new W3C think.
I watched a large numbers of people who had little difficulty learning HTML have tremendous difficulties with XHTML. It is from watching people that I realized that the new W3C standards were cutting regular humans out of the equation. The very quirkiness of the Netscape interpretation of HTML fit better with the innate quirkyness of people.
I agree 100% that XHTML is a better language for machines. But, I see first hand that people have tremendous problems with it.
The fact that so many real people are avoiding the new think indicates to me that there's problems with the new think. I now agree with and encourage those who resist XHTML.
Take something simple like centering. The decision to center a paragraph or image is often made at run time. The person designing the CSS style sheet does not know if the icon added by an end user should be right, center or left aligned. In most cases decisions about how an image flows with content are not part of the format of the page.
I agree that the box model is best for overall page layout, but the deprecated tag attributes are better for run time design decisions.
Although I am modded a troll for saying it. I think the W3C is still too much under the influence of Microsoft and other big firms and they are not giving enough thought to human needs. The fact that there are open source HTML editors and validation programs does not mean that the industry is not under the influence of organizations that want to sell expensive programs.
Look at the history of XML...Microsoft was one of the primary pushers of the techniques largely because Netscape's programming model did not fit the new standards. Yes, there are people in W3C who hate Microsoft...that does not mean that they are not working toward the end that MS desires. Again, there are open source HTML editors; however, most mainstream people will be brought under the sway of the big boys.
My first thought on the article was the same. The mathematical tests to determine fake photos will have value only until the fake photo industry builds the tests into their software. For that matter, I suspect that the main use of the Hany Falid method will be to make your fake photos even more realistic.
The most interesting line in the article was:
One could read into these lines that the ability to fake photographs was great until anyone could do it. Now that we know how easy it is to fake photographs, we no longer implicitly trust messages...but we will trust mathematically authenticated fake photographs because math is infallable.
I will be checking out the new specs.
One of my greatest dislikes of all of the new X-Style languages is that they all seem aimed to cutting human beings out of the web equation. The original HTML is sloppy, but most people can get a decent looking page by typing out code in a text editor or in a little tiny textarea box on a forum.
The different HTML-Strict DTDs are nit-picking to the point that they preclude humans from writing code. For example, you have to replace all of the ampersands in a URL with an ampersand followed by "amp;". They've eleminated monoid tags; so you have to end img, meta and br tags with a "/". Each nit-picking details decrases the ability for ma and pa kettle to pound out their own web page.
To a large extent it appears that the primary goal of the W3C is to force the market into the position where people have to buy expensive programming languages to write HTML.
Personally, I like humans more than machines. I agree with the majority of web pages on the net that we should resist the W3C.
Unfortunately, one of the goals of management is to assure that its employees are replaceable. For the health of the organization, you do not want to create a dependency on any one person or group. The company has to assure that they will still be able to function if any network admin or programmer leaves. For that matter, I believe it wise to migrate employees through different positions in the company to reduce dependencies. Likewise it is wise to keep as close as possible to standard practices making it easier to find replacements.
One of the main reasons that franchising is so successful is because the internal functioning of the franchise is so well defined that it all but eliminates the individual quirks of the employees.
Personally, I hate how this methodology marginalizes humans. I like human quirks. But most people would prefer to eat a McDonalds or shop at a Walmart where the procedures are well defined and the service is consistent to one filled with imagination.
Do you know how much coffee Microsoft had to invest to come up with the idea of double clicking.
Regardless, the difficulties involved in revoking absurd patents seems to clearly indicate that the main aim of the current patent system is not to advance technology but to feed the patent creating machine. Each time a patanteer pulls the handle and flushes out a patent...they want to preserve it.
Of course, the article fails to mention how many of the questionable patents really are not actively defended.
A large number of companies were following the Microsoft way and of re-investing all profits until, as a collective, the industry pushed itself beyond the point where the returns were diminished. The result is the current tech recession.
Tech companies have proven to have relatively short life cycles. The intelligent action in such a market is to only reinvest that which you see leading to a positive return, and returning the rest to the investors in the form of dividends or stock buy backs. Nowhere in the wealth of nations did Mr. Smith give the rule that companies must re-invest all profits. He simply noted that companies re-invest when that seems to be the thing to do. Not only do they re-invest, but they borrow to invest when it is the correct course of action.
To have a long term stable economy, we really need to break your "unofficial rule" and get back to the point where companies have a more natural lifecycle.
Wow, you must be really large! Come to think of it most Americans are humongous; so, perhaps you are right.
I think the numbers should say, that the earth could contain at most 1.5 billion modern Americans. It could probably support 100-500 billion Indians (the asian kind).
Regardless, I think people under estimate how important the "empty" spots on the planet are. These empty spots help preserve resources for future generations.
I think you are absolutely correct about obscurity. Our dislike of companies grow when we feel forced to make decisions based on the offerings of a company. I often feel forced into a corner by Microsoft...and to a lesser extent Intel. ARM itself does not come up in the decision process of consumers...so it does not garner the loathing that we reserve for Microsoft.
Sorry, but the self-destruction of the software industry has almost nothing to do with presidential politics. It is largely the result of the life cycle of the industry itself.
/.ers routinely deride this concept.
Most of the big software companies existed because their was a perception that the companies were building up equity in intellectual properties.
As OSS is set against the corporate (capitalist) software industry, it seems that threads like this should be entirely about celebration...and the big question should be about how to coerce failing software firms into liberating their source code into the public domain as they close their ledgers and dispense any remaining funds to shareholders.
The real problem is not that software companies will continue to fail, but that they are leaving large numbers of customers with closed systems and no support.
Please, don't misunderstand, bashing Bush for any negative news is desirable. But, I really can't see how Bush is responsible for the natural life cycle of an industry. It also seems strange to be blaming someone for the failure of a business model that OSS opposes.
I agree that it is wise to blame one's enemies for the necessary outcome of one's actions. I certainly don't want to be blamed for follow programmers losing the livelihood, but isn't the fall of corporate giant software firms the goal of a free software movement?
The failing businesses were all founded on that strange IP model that OSS rejects. The failing companies were built on the assumption that they were building an abstract thing called IP, and that they were re-investing this IP to create more IP.
Bush and his cronies were in the lead in trying to defend this IP.
It seems strange to blame Bush for not succeeding in stopping the outcome of what we desired to happen....the fall of corporate owned software. It seems to me that if you are against IP, then this article should be a cause for celebration.
I wonder if you can claim as prior art the languages that have words for "one", "two" and the word "many".
We really need to streamline the patent, development and deployment process on this one and get these "boomless" fireworks into Iraq and Afghanistan so people can start celebrating their weddings again.
This quote needs to be placed toward the beginning of the Grand Encyclopedia of Intellectual Arrogance. Let's see, you have flat tables with a defined primary key and you form relations between these flat tables.
I do agree that SQL is not the best possible query language, but it succeeds where the other languages fail, it is easy for people to grasp and manipulate. Likewise, HTML has many faults. Plain HTML is still the preferred choice of most web designers because it is easy to learn and write.
Personally, I think the primary intellectual impulse is to add convolution to simple processes. There will never be an end to the stream of blither about how nulls cannot exist, and anyone who simply uses an sequence counter as a primary key is the devil incarnate. HTML and SQL have two things that almost all the stuff coming from arrogant snits like this author lack. They were designed by people who were actually doing stuff.
This quote needs a position in the library of intellectual arrogance as well:
A snit crassly dismisses several millenia of literature because it is unstructured.
Quite frankly, meaning and structure are independent of each other. It is possible to find meaning in things with radically different structures. It is true that there is a correlation between structure and the ability to communicate meaning, but a healthy mind can find meanings in things that have not been normalized.
Likewise, you can have meaningless garbage in relational databases. A case in point is the large number of fake web sites that do things like join the FIPS database to product names so that they can have millions of pages that show up in search engines. Likewise, we see academician filling volume after volume of publications with meaningless tripe.
The hacker certificate raises the interesting question of whether cheating on the final exam is a greater badge of honor than acing the test.
Hey, I think this is a great idea. I think that every hacker should get the certified ethical hacker badge.
BTW, I will be selling the answers to the certified ethical hacker exam on my site for selling answers to the MCSE exams and other equally important certificates.
You are right. I should not have said "sell." I thought I had said "exercise." Generally employees cash in by exercising the option then immediately selling the stock.
The employee options I've had in my life have all been pegged to employment. So I would have the options from the day I joined the company to the day I left. I would have to exercise the option within 90 days of parting company with the company. NOTE, I keep being laid off in recessions so all my precious employee options have proven worthless to date. For that matter, generous option packages for employees makes mass lay off events very tempting for employers. Laying off employees in recessions automatically eliminates all of the options with a strike prices less than the current stock market value.
The really nasty downside to employee options is that, by being pegged to the employee lifecycle, they end up creating a double whamming for those employees laid off in recessions. The employee loses the paycheck and their retirement funds in one cruel stroke.
I used to be in favor of employee ownership, until I realized that employee ownership magnifies the risk of the employee. Employees need to diversify.
BTW, have you noticed how employers were more than willing to inundate new hirees with options at the height of the stock boom, but make a big deal about protecting employees from the risk of options after the market correction...now that options are a good deal again.
When there is sufficient competition, companies will end up rewarding the breakage to customers in the form of lower rates. The only time you don't see this happening is with monopolies. Rewarding customers with lower rates happens in the phone card business. You can buy phone cards for a penny and a half a minute when the cost of completing a call is greater than a penny and half because the phonecard company makes it money on the breakage.
Gift certificates are the same. Companies are often willing to sell gift certificates below their face value because they get short term interest on the cash and can count on a certain amount of breakage. Stupid laws demanding that breakage be given to the state, or other absurd bureaucratic rules, end up taking away the ability of companies to give such discounts.
There is almost always a vesting period, and employees only get to exercise an employee stock option once...so, I can see merit in the argument that employee options cool the impulse for insider trading. In most cases, the strike price is determined by the hiring date of an employee. Employees do have leaway to determine when they sell the stock. There is a very strong temptation for employees to hold onto options until they leave the company. The longer you hold your employee option, the more valuable it becomes. The primary reason for employees selling options is to purchase things. This even holds for CEOs who might exercise a set number of options each quarter.
With employee stock options, employees only have one trade...they get one chance to sell. The only risk of insider trading occurs when a stock is over valued. Their insider trade, of course, helps temper the rise of an over valued stock. I really don't see that much harm. The one trade reduces the losses of outsider investors.
The real power of options come with the fact that an employee can hold the options for several years with the value of the company rises. For most employees, the options are a long term investment strategy. For that matter, must companies have a policy that several years must pass before an employee is fully vested and can exercise their options. Are you really going to play your option on a one time blip in the market?
I believe, employee stock options encourage long term thinking. It is a far superior means for preventing insider trades than employee stock ownership plans where employees actually have their funds at risk.
In theory, employee options should temper employees interest in trading their company stock. Smart investors diversify their portfolio. It is plain stupid to have your salary, options and investments all dependent on the same source. Smart companies that offer options should strongly discourage their employees from owning the stock. Of course, there are many Enron's out there that actively sell stock to employees. A company that has the best interests of its employees at heart would discourage stock ownership by employees.