Ideas such as defined network layers, APIs, etc. offer a happy medium between proprietary and open development. The APIs become open to the public allowing different companies to integrate in an existing framework. It seems to me the ideal world would have elements of different approaches to life. Rather than OSS having to push all proprietary software out of existence through a viral legal model, or a monopoly controlling the computer horizontally from OS to Office Suite, a structured layer model could create a working ground for both models.
Great info. The point of my post was precisely that big business has corralled the American farming industry into extremely consumptive and wasteful practices. As you mentioned, we are using fertilizers made from natural gas. The big feed lot business plan has farmers expending a great deal of energy to harvest and move materials to the feed lots. Bio mass plants on the tail end of this ineffiencient structure simply reduces the amount of energy lost through the process.
For biomass to become a net producer of energy, we need to first get around the energy wasting processes of the big business agriculture.
Farmers using biomass generators is a completely different situation.
The deal is, the big energy companies CAN'T send you a bill for it,because you can own it...
I had to read this twice. This is not a failure of the free market...but a failure of big business and politics. An individual owning an asset that produces energy is the type of thing that exists in free markets. The blocks big oil and utilities put to small operations like this are anti-market forces.
he declined, it was just "too hippy" for him.
On the up side, the natural food market is strong. Large sections of the farming market are becoming hippy. In some cases there is big money in natural produces...and more of the money in natural foods gets to the farmer. There is growing support for the use of renewable energy...so the mindset of the farming community is apt to change.
it's "free and open source", the government or industry can't charge you for it directly.
In part this is backward thinking caused by seeing biomass only from the position of a consumer. A farmer that produces energy from biomass could consume it...or they could sell it. For that matter, I think there is more future in developing a market for biomass energy than simply as a way to cut costs.
You are probably right. I personally doubt that the amount of energy produced by a methane powered generating plant in a feed lot would equal the cost of the energy consumed by farmers raising crops and shipping crops to the feed lot. This is more of a way to minimize the loss of energy from our fuel dependent farm economy.
Sounds like a classic bait and switch. Of course, just about everything in the dot com and Linux worlds was built on the bait and switch business model. The sad thing is that the baiters managed to convince the world that software has to be free. The baiters have successfully driven companies trying to work on an honest, up front method out of business.
Gotta love the proprietary world.
I am not sure how you conclude that this is an evil of the proprietary world when bait and switch techniques are generally loathed by property rights advocates.
Traditional property rights advocates believe in outright ownership. You pay an up front price for something; Then you own it. Traditional property rights advocates loath the new economy business models where nothing is full purchased, and where are designed with hooks installed.
BTW, who is greeder, the people creating the bait and switch scheme, or the grubby hands clawing at the bait?
While this is good news for people suffering AIDS. I would not put it in the cure department. The article did not say the anti-HIV virus irradicated HIV, just checked its mutation into AIDS. The results of calling such a treatment a cure would probably be an increased spread of AIDS.
Why be afraid? Implanted RFID tags are the first step to a clothing optional world. The second step involves everyone finishing our Dr. Aitkins diets so we don't all look flubby...oh, and Bush's energy policy needs to finish the global warming trend so we don't get chilly.
Dude! RFID tags means we can all run around naked and get drunk all day long...uh, okay, maybe I see what you mean about being afraid.
Open Source activists that want to see Linux succeed argue that eventually, they want all intellectual property protection to end, including patents and trademarks.
Rather than just getting upset with an author that has a different point of view of OSS, we should at least understand what the author is seeing when talking about OSS.
The author does not see OSS as source code that is open for review. Nor does the author see OSS as a reaction to the abuse of intellectual property. All this author sees is that attack on the very notion of property rights.
There has been a long history of people who wanted to end all property rights and to destroy the petty bourgeoisie. The defenders of property rights have developed extremely entrenched, absolutist views. They see the rhetoric on/. the same way they see all the other calls for the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of private property.
It is not surprising that a lot of people see OSS and/. like this. When Napster was reaching its height, a large number of voices on the far left were reaching a crescendo about how the internet would bring about a state of total revolution. P2P would tear down the horrible capitalist machine and destroy the petty little bourgeoisie that leaches off the capitalist machine. Vive la revolution...death to the bourgeoisie!
I think articles like this are great, because it shows how many influential people see OSS. Rather than just talking about how stupid the author is. I think the OSS community should understand how others might perceive OSS. For example, this author sees OSS as a complete rejection of intellectual and other intangible assets. The author fails to see that OSS itself has voices ranging from the left to right to libertarian.
There are many voices on/. who reject all notions of intellectual property. The second an idea comes out of your head, it becomes property of the collective. An individual or organization should have no sense of ownership of their ideas. There are many who would deny any legal rights to the creator of ideas.
A writer has no claim to their words. A software designer has no claim to the code they produce. All is part of the greater collective. We should give to the collective according to our ability. The collective will distribute according the political whims of the central core of the collective.
From an economic standpoint, we see that when we completely deny any claim that an author has to their work, we destroy any ability to make money from the work. By destroying the ability of intellectual creations to serve as capital, we end up undermining the economic forces that lead to the creation of new ideas, and we destroy the majority of those cushy little IT jobs that we once knew.
Looking at the IT industry, we see that the majority of high paying IT jobs were all about building up capital infrastructure. Companies invested billions in welling paying, fun IT jobs because they were looking at getting a future return from the investment. By denying the ability for IT investments to be capital, we ended up destroying the industry.
I still believe the code is mine and there's ownership to that code.
Believing something does not make it true. Nor does your belief that you own something give you any rights. Ownership and the scope of that owernship will be defined by law and custom.
What you just said echoes the beliefs of the majority of people on/.. For that matter, GPL is built on IP rights. The real arguments for OSS are not about the social revolution. The things driving OSS are IP abuses and the fact that having the source code available increases, not decreases, the value of an asset.
More than likely, the spammer will just end up sticking the phone company with the bill. If this effort generates enough traffic to actually make an impact on the spammer's finances, the spammer will probably be able to point to a malicious/. thread and get the phone company to absorb the charges.
The other innocent group getting hit right now are people who have phone number similar to the spammer. As fat fingered/.ers dial away, about 1 out of every fifty calls is dinging an innocent bystander. (assuming that there are innocent people who have 800 numbers.)
Usually really great things are translated into tons of languages. If it isn't available in english, it probably wasn't worth reading.
Yes, but none of these translations is ever pure and true to form. You really don't appreciate the dramatic differences between English translation and German original until you understand some of the profound differences in sentence structure. For example, it is possible that one of the reasons that many German philosophers prefer dialectics to syllogisms is that the German verb often comes at the end of the sentence. Such things are lost in translation.
As for the proximity argument. That is changing. It used to be that an American would have a months travel to a land of a different language. With planes it became a days travel. Now, we are a click away from different languages.
The fastest growing segments of the Internet and IT are outside the US at the moment...for US companies to maintain their top position, they need to learn to localize. So linguistic skills are paramount.
It's all in the subtle positioning of the rectangles.
The large number of people who don't have oriental language sets installed on their browser is a bit sad. Occasionally, companies and programmers have bouts of interest in localization. Such efforts often fall through.
Regardless, the Internet is a great place to learn language skills. Personally, I think all web designers should chose a second language and trying muddling their way through web sites written in a different language to understand the challenges of different cultures.
The only place I've used dual proc boxes was for servers. In both cases, the problems were hardware. In both cases I recommended replacing the boxes for 4 proc boxes. My thought was that if you are going through the grief for a dual proc box, you might as well jump to the next level and get multiple procs.
For that matter, the number of processors is currently the figure computer designers are most likely to underestimate.
The amount of ram and storage space is probably correct. My biggest question is about the "dual pentium" part. The only dual pentiums I've known have had short painful lives. It seems to me that, when you have an application requiring multiple processors, you should jump from 1 to 4.
I lived in an apartment complex where a small company was offering broadband internet access (circa 1998). Oddly, the day after they installed several grand in upgraded equipment...some jerk off broke into the telephone room and liberated the new routers. As the thief obviously knew the install dates and what to take, they figured it was either an employee or person in the supply chain.
The tiny company went out of business a few monthes later.
It is sad that we can't just put things in locked rooms and call it good. Thievery like this is a major small business killer.
I dislike shower curtains...too difficult to clean. My shower has a germ infected glass door. As for the germs, the article fails to make a case that exposure to germs on shower curtains cause disease. Personally, I think limited exposure to germs helps keep the immune system in tune. I think I will continue to take showers despite the grave hazard that the exposure to germs entails.
Unfortunately, scammers and spammers often have a lot more available bandwidth than typical artists or honest business sites. Even worse, you toss up your anti-419 page that throws unwanted traffic at a page, and you increase the scammer sites rating. The various sustained DOS attacks on SCO gave SCO an Alexa Rating in the low thousands. A smart scammer might use the DOS attack to set cookies for merchant programs, and end up making money for the person you are trying to attack. We seem to forget that both good and bad publicity drive valuable traffic to sites.
Agreed, we dress for others and not for ourselves. We neither see nor smell ourselves. Dressing well shows that we understand that others see us.
BTW, I was taught that the reason people wear suits and ties was to manipulate others, and that dressing well at work was a universal sign of incompetence. It took me years to realize that the people projecting this contempt toward professionalism were often much more manipulative than the professionals they despised.
It also took many many many more years to figure out that people dress nicely as a sign of respect for others. My training, of course, was that dress is a costume used for manipulation; so the costume you wore should show transcendental superiority. I am so good I can look like a slob. It is difficult training to break. I am just glad I missed the body piercing epidemic.
Quite frankly, when I buy something, I want to get the most out of the resources I consume. My mind doesn't just churn away about dollars and cents, I hate to waste resources. Yep, I recombine soaps, mulch banana peals, recycle like crazy and reuse a ton of strange things.
What gets me upset is the trailer park mantality that consumes vast quantities of garbage because it is cheap. I would rather buy fewer high quality items that last a long time...The things I do consume, I try to get the most out of them as possible.
Rather than using print statements, I stuff error messages in an object. The object has option of writing the errors to a database (or flat file), emailing them to a sysadmin, calling a web resource, paging people, or printing the errors to the screen. Having a tidy error handling system attached to a program can increase customer loyality and the price you charge for the product. The database itself creates a nice little auditable history of program.
When you give each error a unique id, then you can develop automated help systems with up to date info on common bugs. You can also create a system to escalate problems to the correct people.
My main fears are about errors occurring in production, well beyond the debugging stage of development.
Print statements alone depend on the end user being able to decipher what the programmer was thinking when they wrote the print statement.
Yep, just like what happened with the heroes returning from Vietnam.
I seem to recall that we decided to label the Vietnam Veterans as "baby killers." Those on the far right seemed to think of them simply as losers. Regardless, the way the army ran itself in Vietnam, they managed to mess with the heads of the soldiers fighting during the war.
The fact that no-one wants to repeat the aftermath of the Vietnam War is likely to cause a different reaction. The reaction after WWII was a boom of babies.
Regardless, we will have a large number of people re-entering the US economy. It could be that they will go on a massive post war spending spree, and create jobs left and right, or they might add to economic malaise. Regardless, the return of people going abroad in the war on terrorism will have a big economic impact.
I admit, I am a bit worried about the need for a week job market to make room for the returning heros from the various US excursions abroad. Staying home and completing a CS degree and getting a low paid internship will not sound as good on a resume as fighting terrorism on its turf. That overseas experience just might become the determining factor in career success in the US for the next several decades.
Assuming US soldiers return in the next year or so; will they spur economic activity by increased domestic consumer activity, or will they re-enter a crowded employment market?
It is still the wild west. In a large number of westerns, the town sheriff is the leader of the band of outlaws.
The thing I find most interesting in the first article is:
One clause in the treaty allows a country to refuse to cooperate in an investigation if its "essential interests" are threatened by the request
In ancient history, there was a strange notion called rights. The idea was that people had rights. There was even once a Bill of Rights, and that these human rights would be the deciding factor in how the government related to the people.
The US was a weak Democracy in a world run by kings and emperors. Rather than trying to say what is right or wrong, our policy was pretty much to look after this nebulous thing called "national interests."
As anything on a global media has the potential of being global, we get to flip things around and make the concept of "essential interests" override the forgotten antiquated notion of rights. Leo Strauss would approve of this transition.
What I feel towards my Windows box is something other than loyalty....
Windows realize that you get much greater control over people with a love/hate relation. It does something nice for you, like install a driver for a Flash Card reader by simply plugging the device into a smiley faced USB port.
It then gets angry at you and blue screens, or slows down and demands a reboot. "I am sorry, I did not mean to anger your delicate temperment. Could you please give me back that last hour's work on my term paper..."
Cults have known how to manipulate people with rewards and punishments for centuries.
PS, I find it helps to keep an alter to The Bill, and burn incense while working.
do you really want to jump headlong into 80 hours a week, on call, etc?
They can suck you into the 80 hour week at any salary. Likewise, many $50k plus people are adept at avoiding the 80 hour work week. You only get 45 hours of work done in an 80 hour week anyway.
I really would be looking more at the company and projects than the salary. If the company is full of people making good money, then you will likely get good raises.
Employers look for progression in your salary. Going in low and getting a good raise in the first year can really jump start a resume. Leaving without a good raise makes you look bad.
So, if it looks like a company pays well, then going in low is a wise choice.
How do the Salmon fertilize the forests?... then mostly get washed back to sea.
The relation between salmon and nitrogen is the favorite new story that eco-jabbering meadow muffins like me enjoy. Googling "salmon nitrogen" gets quite a few hits. Here is a research paper with big words Salmon Derived Nitrogen in terrestrial invertebrates). They have the same propaganda on all the PBS stations.
Nitrogen seems to also explain while the soil in drainages with salmon runs tends to be a lot more fertile than those without salmon runs.
Considering the shear bio mass of salmon swimming upstream, it only takes a small portion of the biomass to change the soil. BTW, have you seen the large number of critters that feed on the salmon harvest.
Think of the salmon that swims 1000 miles in land. How much of that biomass really is going to get washed out to sea? It is going to be eaten by all the little critters and bugs in the water. The story seems plausible to me. But so did the relation between the ozone hole and CFCs.
The main thing I like about DSL is the persistent connection. If I need an internet resource, I can grab it quickly...without having to wait for the modem.
The people I know who are staying with phone lines do so because they like getting all of their internet chores done is a single short session.
I think the overall download speed really is a secondary issue to how you organize your online time.
Slashdot Mirror
Ideas such as defined network layers, APIs, etc. offer a happy medium between proprietary and open development. The APIs become open to the public allowing different companies to integrate in an existing framework. It seems to me the ideal world would have elements of different approaches to life. Rather than OSS having to push all proprietary software out of existence through a viral legal model, or a monopoly controlling the computer horizontally from OS to Office Suite, a structured layer model could create a working ground for both models.
Great info. The point of my post was precisely that big business has corralled the American farming industry into extremely consumptive and wasteful practices. As you mentioned, we are using fertilizers made from natural gas. The big feed lot business plan has farmers expending a great deal of energy to harvest and move materials to the feed lots. Bio mass plants on the tail end of this ineffiencient structure simply reduces the amount of energy lost through the process.
For biomass to become a net producer of energy, we need to first get around the energy wasting processes of the big business agriculture.
Farmers using biomass generators is a completely different situation.
I had to read this twice. This is not a failure of the free market...but a failure of big business and politics. An individual owning an asset that produces energy is the type of thing that exists in free markets. The blocks big oil and utilities put to small operations like this are anti-market forces.
On the up side, the natural food market is strong. Large sections of the farming market are becoming hippy. In some cases there is big money in natural produces...and more of the money in natural foods gets to the farmer. There is growing support for the use of renewable energy...so the mindset of the farming community is apt to change.
In part this is backward thinking caused by seeing biomass only from the position of a consumer. A farmer that produces energy from biomass could consume it...or they could sell it. For that matter, I think there is more future in developing a market for biomass energy than simply as a way to cut costs.
You are probably right. I personally doubt that the amount of energy produced by a methane powered generating plant in a feed lot would equal the cost of the energy consumed by farmers raising crops and shipping crops to the feed lot. This is more of a way to minimize the loss of energy from our fuel dependent farm economy.
Sounds like a classic bait and switch. Of course, just about everything in the dot com and Linux worlds was built on the bait and switch business model. The sad thing is that the baiters managed to convince the world that software has to be free. The baiters have successfully driven companies trying to work on an honest, up front method out of business.
I am not sure how you conclude that this is an evil of the proprietary world when bait and switch techniques are generally loathed by property rights advocates.
Traditional property rights advocates believe in outright ownership. You pay an up front price for something; Then you own it. Traditional property rights advocates loath the new economy business models where nothing is full purchased, and where are designed with hooks installed.
BTW, who is greeder, the people creating the bait and switch scheme, or the grubby hands clawing at the bait?
While this is good news for people suffering AIDS. I would not put it in the cure department. The article did not say the anti-HIV virus irradicated HIV, just checked its mutation into AIDS. The results of calling such a treatment a cure would probably be an increased spread of AIDS.
Why be afraid? Implanted RFID tags are the first step to a clothing optional world. The second step involves everyone finishing our Dr. Aitkins diets so we don't all look flubby...oh, and Bush's energy policy needs to finish the global warming trend so we don't get chilly.
Dude! RFID tags means we can all run around naked and get drunk all day long...uh, okay, maybe I see what you mean about being afraid.
Rather than just getting upset with an author that has a different point of view of OSS, we should at least understand what the author is seeing when talking about OSS.
The author does not see OSS as source code that is open for review. Nor does the author see OSS as a reaction to the abuse of intellectual property. All this author sees is that attack on the very notion of property rights.
There has been a long history of people who wanted to end all property rights and to destroy the petty bourgeoisie. The defenders of property rights have developed extremely entrenched, absolutist views. They see the rhetoric on /. the same way they see all the other calls for the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of private property.
It is not surprising that a lot of people see OSS and /. like this. When Napster was reaching its height, a large number of voices on the far left were reaching a crescendo about how the internet would bring about a state of total revolution. P2P would tear down the horrible capitalist machine and destroy the petty little bourgeoisie that leaches off the capitalist machine. Vive la revolution...death to the bourgeoisie!
I think articles like this are great, because it shows how many influential people see OSS. Rather than just talking about how stupid the author is. I think the OSS community should understand how others might perceive OSS. For example, this author sees OSS as a complete rejection of intellectual and other intangible assets. The author fails to see that OSS itself has voices ranging from the left to right to libertarian.
There are many voices on /. who reject all notions of intellectual property. The second an idea comes out of your head, it becomes property of the collective. An individual or organization should have no sense of ownership of their ideas. There are many who would deny any legal rights to the creator of ideas.
A writer has no claim to their words. A software designer has no claim to the code they produce. All is part of the greater collective. We should give to the collective according to our ability. The collective will distribute according the political whims of the central core of the collective.
From an economic standpoint, we see that when we completely deny any claim that an author has to their work, we destroy any ability to make money from the work. By destroying the ability of intellectual creations to serve as capital, we end up undermining the economic forces that lead to the creation of new ideas, and we destroy the majority of those cushy little IT jobs that we once knew.
Looking at the IT industry, we see that the majority of high paying IT jobs were all about building up capital infrastructure. Companies invested billions in welling paying, fun IT jobs because they were looking at getting a future return from the investment. By denying the ability for IT investments to be capital, we ended up destroying the industry.
Believing something does not make it true. Nor does your belief that you own something give you any rights. Ownership and the scope of that owernship will be defined by law and custom.
What you just said echoes the beliefs of the majority of people on /.. For that matter, GPL is built on IP rights. The real arguments for OSS are not about the social revolution. The things driving OSS are IP abuses and the fact that having the source code available increases, not decreases, the value of an asset.
More than likely, the spammer will just end up sticking the phone company with the bill. If this effort generates enough traffic to actually make an impact on the spammer's finances, the spammer will probably be able to point to a malicious /. thread and get the phone company to absorb the charges.
/.ers dial away, about 1 out of every fifty calls is dinging an innocent bystander. (assuming that there are innocent people who have 800 numbers.)
The other innocent group getting hit right now are people who have phone number similar to the spammer. As fat fingered
Yes, but none of these translations is ever pure and true to form. You really don't appreciate the dramatic differences between English translation and German original until you understand some of the profound differences in sentence structure. For example, it is possible that one of the reasons that many German philosophers prefer dialectics to syllogisms is that the German verb often comes at the end of the sentence. Such things are lost in translation.
As for the proximity argument. That is changing. It used to be that an American would have a months travel to a land of a different language. With planes it became a days travel. Now, we are a click away from different languages.
The fastest growing segments of the Internet and IT are outside the US at the moment...for US companies to maintain their top position, they need to learn to localize. So linguistic skills are paramount.
It's all in the subtle positioning of the rectangles.
The large number of people who don't have oriental language sets installed on their browser is a bit sad. Occasionally, companies and programmers have bouts of interest in localization. Such efforts often fall through.
Regardless, the Internet is a great place to learn language skills. Personally, I think all web designers should chose a second language and trying muddling their way through web sites written in a different language to understand the challenges of different cultures.
The only place I've used dual proc boxes was for servers. In both cases, the problems were hardware. In both cases I recommended replacing the boxes for 4 proc boxes. My thought was that if you are going through the grief for a dual proc box, you might as well jump to the next level and get multiple procs.
For that matter, the number of processors is currently the figure computer designers are most likely to underestimate.
The amount of ram and storage space is probably correct. My biggest question is about the "dual pentium" part. The only dual pentiums I've known have had short painful lives. It seems to me that, when you have an application requiring multiple processors, you should jump from 1 to 4.
I lived in an apartment complex where a small company was offering broadband internet access (circa 1998). Oddly, the day after they installed several grand in upgraded equipment...some jerk off broke into the telephone room and liberated the new routers. As the thief obviously knew the install dates and what to take, they figured it was either an employee or person in the supply chain.
The tiny company went out of business a few monthes later.
It is sad that we can't just put things in locked rooms and call it good. Thievery like this is a major small business killer.
I dislike shower curtains...too difficult to clean. My shower has a germ infected glass door. As for the germs, the article fails to make a case that exposure to germs on shower curtains cause disease. Personally, I think limited exposure to germs helps keep the immune system in tune. I think I will continue to take showers despite the grave hazard that the exposure to germs entails.
Unfortunately, scammers and spammers often have a lot more available bandwidth than typical artists or honest business sites. Even worse, you toss up your anti-419 page that throws unwanted traffic at a page, and you increase the scammer sites rating. The various sustained DOS attacks on SCO gave SCO an Alexa Rating in the low thousands. A smart scammer might use the DOS attack to set cookies for merchant programs, and end up making money for the person you are trying to attack. We seem to forget that both good and bad publicity drive valuable traffic to sites.
Agreed, we dress for others and not for ourselves. We neither see nor smell ourselves. Dressing well shows that we understand that others see us.
BTW, I was taught that the reason people wear suits and ties was to manipulate others, and that dressing well at work was a universal sign of incompetence. It took me years to realize that the people projecting this contempt toward professionalism were often much more manipulative than the professionals they despised.
It also took many many many more years to figure out that people dress nicely as a sign of respect for others. My training, of course, was that dress is a costume used for manipulation; so the costume you wore should show transcendental superiority. I am so good I can look like a slob. It is difficult training to break. I am just glad I missed the body piercing epidemic.
Quite frankly, when I buy something, I want to get the most out of the resources I consume. My mind doesn't just churn away about dollars and cents, I hate to waste resources. Yep, I recombine soaps, mulch banana peals, recycle like crazy and reuse a ton of strange things.
What gets me upset is the trailer park mantality that consumes vast quantities of garbage because it is cheap. I would rather buy fewer high quality items that last a long time...The things I do consume, I try to get the most out of them as possible.
Rather than using print statements, I stuff error messages in an object. The object has option of writing the errors to a database (or flat file), emailing them to a sysadmin, calling a web resource, paging people, or printing the errors to the screen. Having a tidy error handling system attached to a program can increase customer loyality and the price you charge for the product. The database itself creates a nice little auditable history of program.
When you give each error a unique id, then you can develop automated help systems with up to date info on common bugs. You can also create a system to escalate problems to the correct people.
My main fears are about errors occurring in production, well beyond the debugging stage of development.
Print statements alone depend on the end user being able to decipher what the programmer was thinking when they wrote the print statement.
I seem to recall that we decided to label the Vietnam Veterans as "baby killers." Those on the far right seemed to think of them simply as losers. Regardless, the way the army ran itself in Vietnam, they managed to mess with the heads of the soldiers fighting during the war.
The fact that no-one wants to repeat the aftermath of the Vietnam War is likely to cause a different reaction. The reaction after WWII was a boom of babies.
Regardless, we will have a large number of people re-entering the US economy. It could be that they will go on a massive post war spending spree, and create jobs left and right, or they might add to economic malaise. Regardless, the return of people going abroad in the war on terrorism will have a big economic impact.
I admit, I am a bit worried about the need for a week job market to make room for the returning heros from the various US excursions abroad. Staying home and completing a CS degree and getting a low paid internship will not sound as good on a resume as fighting terrorism on its turf. That overseas experience just might become the determining factor in career success in the US for the next several decades.
Assuming US soldiers return in the next year or so; will they spur economic activity by increased domestic consumer activity, or will they re-enter a crowded employment market?
It is still the wild west. In a large number of westerns, the town sheriff is the leader of the band of outlaws.
The thing I find most interesting in the first article is:
In ancient history, there was a strange notion called rights. The idea was that people had rights. There was even once a Bill of Rights, and that these human rights would be the deciding factor in how the government related to the people.
The US was a weak Democracy in a world run by kings and emperors. Rather than trying to say what is right or wrong, our policy was pretty much to look after this nebulous thing called "national interests."
As anything on a global media has the potential of being global, we get to flip things around and make the concept of "essential interests" override the forgotten antiquated notion of rights. Leo Strauss would approve of this transition.
They can suck you into the 80 hour week at any salary. Likewise, many $50k plus people are adept at avoiding the 80 hour work week. You only get 45 hours of work done in an 80 hour week anyway.
I really would be looking more at the company and projects than the salary. If the company is full of people making good money, then you will likely get good raises.
Employers look for progression in your salary. Going in low and getting a good raise in the first year can really jump start a resume. Leaving without a good raise makes you look bad.
So, if it looks like a company pays well, then going in low is a wise choice.
The relation between salmon and nitrogen is the favorite new story that eco-jabbering meadow muffins like me enjoy. Googling "salmon nitrogen" gets quite a few hits. Here is a research paper with big words Salmon Derived Nitrogen in terrestrial invertebrates). They have the same propaganda on all the PBS stations.
Nitrogen seems to also explain while the soil in drainages with salmon runs tends to be a lot more fertile than those without salmon runs.
Considering the shear bio mass of salmon swimming upstream, it only takes a small portion of the biomass to change the soil. BTW, have you seen the large number of critters that feed on the salmon harvest.
Think of the salmon that swims 1000 miles in land. How much of that biomass really is going to get washed out to sea? It is going to be eaten by all the little critters and bugs in the water. The story seems plausible to me. But so did the relation between the ozone hole and CFCs.
The main thing I like about DSL is the persistent connection. If I need an internet resource, I can grab it quickly...without having to wait for the modem.
The people I know who are staying with phone lines do so because they like getting all of their internet chores done is a single short session.
I think the overall download speed really is a secondary issue to how you organize your online time.