As I recall Euclidean Geometry exists on a surface in hyperbolic geometry and hyperbolic geometry exists on a surface in Euclidean geometry...so you can treat one as if it were a subset of the other.
Likewise, I have no doubt you can find a way two twist things around so the tragedy of the commons is minor application of the prisoner's dilemma.
I recall this being an issue about a decade ago. Since the prisoner's dilemma involved different weights of punishments, traditionalists were opting to treat the prison's dilemma simply as an example, but the advantages of starting with the prisoner's dilemma is unquestionable.
The prisoner's dilemma does a better job of showing that individual choice, democracy and the free market are fundamentally flawed. While the tragedy of the commons simply indicates the existences of imbalances needing to be fixed.
Since you can find a way to make the two statements equivalent, I agree, it is much more politically correct to call it the prisoner's dilemma since that does a better job of indicating the academic view of free choice.
...is to for someone somewhere to actually write something in AIM that is worthwhile to encrypt.
Personally, I think the original security of instant messaging was sufficient...that is, there is so much white noise, that the data stream just isn't worth tapping into.
The common property is the public's trust (or public gullability).
The tradegy of the commons is not a subset of the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma occurs when the cost loyality to your fellow conspirators is much less than the cost of betraying them. The tragedy of the commons happens when you have a common resource that people feed on, but no one bears the cost to maintain.
I used that as a title because it is a fad in academic circles to drop reference to the tragedy of the commons and the prisoners dilemma in every single context of every single debate as if the tragedy of the commons was the primary organizing principle of the universe.
Personally, I think the effects of Indian casinos has been extremely negative. The casinos create one tiny group of extremely rich people, but leave most native Americans in poverty. For example the casinos in white American cities (where there is less tribal identity) get lots of traffic. The larger reservations don't have the foot traffic. Casino money feeds misinformation campaigns, etc..
I know people are trying extremely hard to keep the casinos regulated and to keep the games fair, but who knows if regulation works. We see that auditing in accounting doesn't work. I imagine that it is even harder when you are dealing with sovereign entities. The modern US business climate and philosophies are about bending rules, and we are gradually losing our ability to trust any industry.
This is probably illegal, as the machine is strongly implying that your guess will affect your chances
It is clearly unethical, because the companies are selling something different than people think they are buying.
Illegal? That's a different matter. Ethics are only a minor concern in law. Legal or not legal has to do with laws on books, precedents and political power. The reason lawyers are so rich is because they excel at finding legal ways to partake in unethical activity.
I would not be surprised to learn that casino owners program machines to play with themselves to change the odds or other nasty tricks. Anything for that extra edge. American businessmen are becoming scummier and scummier with each passing day.
Of course the whole industry is dependent on having a certain amount of honest casinos who let the occasional gambler to win. Without any wins, there is no way to establish that precious little addiction that the casinos crave. As such the casinos will probably dig themselves into a tragedy of the commons situation where more and more casinos opt to cheat until they kill their industry. But I guess people are stupid enough to bet on lotteries with a 60% expected pay out.
The problem with digital gaming machines is that it is too easy for the programmer to add twists to the algorithms that tweak the odds. It seems odd that they would bother, since the laws of probability come out in the casino's favor, they don't need to tweak the algorithm, just do a little basic math first.
As I recall, the Nevada casinos are required to post the expected payout and odds on the machines. For example, the expected payout might be 98%. That means the casino collects on average 2 pennies every time a patron shakes the hand of a one armed bandit with a dollar bet. The casinos don't need to pull any tricks beyond calculating the expected payouts for the different states of the machine and make sure the expected payout is less than one.
It is disconcerting knowing that there are machines which go even further.
As I understand, a well run gaming commissions tries to assure that casinos don't bend the rules any further than that.
Oracle is supporting Linux because their customers were installing Linux servers big time and Oracle wanted in on the action. Oracle's whole claim to fame had been that their software runs on many different platforms. Programs written for Oracle on Solaris run on NT, Unix, etc.. The business plan requires porting to any major new OS.
As for Microsoft bashing, the one reason I like Microsoft is because I know that if Oracle had the PC monopoly, things would be much, much worse. The reaon Oracle hates MS isn't because MS has a monopoly in the desktop OS, it is because MS ruined the nice little monopolies that the heavyweight database engines and mainframes had been working to perfect.
The point is that the CorelDRAWS! ability to make money ends as soon as there is an open source program to put the final nails in the coffin. There are few reasons for current customers to buy new licenses, and there is not compelling need for more people in the graphics market. The company passed its peak in its product life cycle and is not too far from the point where they should open source the product and let the hackers maintain the code.
It is always a pleasure when someone catches and understands the sarcastic remark.
The people who get hit hardest are the working poor and middle class. When the working poor divide their $50 cable bill over the two hours of TV they watch a month, it comes to $25 an hour. The person watching 500 hours a month is doling out only a dime per hour. The working class is the one group that the industry and our leaders don't bother considering in their plans.
Being free marketeers, I suspect the administration is wanting to put the spectrum on the market where people can bid for it openingly...letting the market determine the bandwidth allocation.
The problem, however, is that the activity that generates the most monetary transactions is not necessarily the most efficient use of the airwaves. For example TV and radio do an efficient job of distributing large amounts of information to the public...these uses don't generate that many monetary transactions since they are difficult to track.
Open bidding for airwaves is likely to result in the situation where all airwaves are used by technologies that can track and charge for usage...like cell phones.
The big downside for individuals is that we will gradually be coralled into technologies that track everything we do or say in a blind drive to create more and more monetary transactions.
You'd think that Corel Draw sales alone would make that investment worthwhile
CorelDRAW! is still software. Hasn't the whole tech bubble, and OSS pretty much proven that you cannot count on the long term value of software. Drawing programs are way over priced, can you really count on people always paying substantially more for CorelDRAW! that OSS graphics programs like the Gimp?
Doesn't CorelDRAW! still own Wordperfect? Five years ago I would would have thought the Wordperfect office suite was a lucrative holding. If the company is still losing money this late in their product's life cycle, then it is a time for investors to panic.
Rural areas tend to have large amounts of unused broadcasting bandwidth, while cities tend to have tighter bandwidth constraints. So in a free market, rural areas would probably keep their broadcast TV.
The group most affected would be the rural area just on the edge of a big city as they live in the worst of both worlds.
The group that gets hit the hardest are those that just don't watch that much TV. The cost of cable is prohibitive when you watch only an hour or so a month
As for the uneducated lazy asses on welfare who watch 500 or so hours of TV a month...they have cable. I suspect that the group that is least likely to have cable is the young professional working 80 hours a week, or students struggling to pay tuition, and who watch only a few hours a month.
Go down to the local trail park...yep...most have a satellite dish pointed to the great teet in the sky.
The one year rule makes sense. I assume also that it is one year from the matter being intentionally published, and not unintentionally leaked.
Of course, this particular MS patent sounds more like a crap shoot than an advancement of science. Every three years you try a new wording for the patent in VOD in the hope that you might land that one lucrative patent that lets you sue start ups in the industry out existence.
Do a search on google for "microsoft tiger video on demand server" and you'll see they had this out in 1995, years before they filed the patent. Sorry, it's in the public domain, microsnot.
If you can use a company's internal documentation and beta tests or previous products as a proof of prior art, then you could probably manage to over turn any patent in the system. In general things get designed, written up and tested before submitting patents. Since this design work generally exists before the patent, then it should be easy to toss out all patents.
The only patent that I ever had seen filed was in production before the completion of the patent process. So, I guess, you could use the working product as proof of prior art.
I suspect, however, that patent courts don't overturn patents for prior art that comes from the holder of the patent. Yet, there is probably a good chance that if you insult your enemy by calling them "Microsnot" the courts might side with you. A good well timed insult can usually win most arguments.
>> Why can't the earlier/seperate publication be considered seperately?
Authors often get the same material included in multiple publications that target different markets. There are some publications that are pretty much 100% formerly published works. As I recall, both Readers Digest and UTNE Reader reprint works that appeared in different sources.
Such secondary sources probably don't bother keeping up copyrights...problems would arise if a person assumed that the articles in a secondary source are public domain because the secondary source did not renew the copyright.
Forcing authors to keep track of every place their articles appear would be an un do burden. Conversely, people might get sued for republishing material that they thought was public domain, but was really just a secondary copy.
If we considered separate publications separately, then we might even see an industry form that looks for these secondary sources that an author may have forgotten about. Imagine if a writer let their local church include a story in the church bulletin and forgot about it? That gaffaw would cost them their copyright.
Multiple editions of books would pose a challenge as well. Do you have to resubmit every edition of a book to retain a copyright or just the most recent?
Lawyers are generally willing to rack up huge amounts of billed hours over petty details.
Variable copyright dates make it extremely difficult for people to know what is and what is not copyrighted. Since articles and storied might appear in multiple publications, there will probably be quite a few mistakes made where people think an item wasn't copyrighted because it appeared in volume XXX...while it was copyrighted as part of volume YYY.
The fifty year limit sounds like an interesting start.
Practicing on slower, clunkier equipment lets you concentrate on fundamentals that people with more sophosticated computers might have ignored.
The goal of such hackers isn't to create kewl programs, but to find clever tricks that waste the resources of others; so working at the fundamental machine level might give you an in. Sometimes having obstacles to overcome helps you acheive your goal. My experience is that people who learned to code on slower machines write tighter, more efficient code.
Of course, most of the security holes the hackers discover have probably been patched, but the fact that you have older equipment doesn't necessarily mean your training is worse.
In reading the article, I can't help but wonder if anyone is really foolish enough to trust Kazaa with their money? As an advertiser, I would always wonder if the paid downloads really happened (was it actually a person downloading or a hackering mimicking downloads for cash?)
As a host, I wouldn't put much faith in actually ever receiving cash from the company. Schemes like this tend to have a history of absconding with the cash.
Of course, it would be nice if there were an easy way for college students to make a little bit of cash by selling their school's bandwidth.
I thought this was a really fun lawsuit. Basically Search King is upset that Google found a way to counter Search King's manipulation of the algorithm. This is like a shop lifter suing the kwikimart for putting the cigarettes behind the counter where they are out of reach.
Yes, not being able to manipulate the results hurts Search King. Google's changing the results helped those who weren't in the SEO business. Thank goodness a judge tossed out the case. Let's hope more suits get thrown out in the future.
A car is more efficient then walking...but notice how people took this great efficiency machine and managed to make their lives incredibly inefficient? Look at an aerial photo of a US town, about a third of the area is used by our great efficiency machine.
We burn up our efficiency at our jobs by buying bigger inefficient cars.
The music industry got fat by creating an extremely inefficient mechanism for recording and distributing music. We've essentially eliminated the need to pay the high distribution costs, so the RIAA is trying desparately to find other ways to make their industry inefficient. It was the inefficiencies that made it possible to charge people for music. It would be better for the people in the music industry to move on to something else.
We freed up all of those people from jobs in the manufacturing and production industries...so now we all work in the less inefficient service economy. Where do we go if we introduce efficiency in the service economy?
The fast food industry is over built, same with retail, apparel, hotels, tourism, etc..
People are not going to start having 20 work weeks. What will happen is that they will still be throwing in 60 hour weeks to survive, they will just be spinning their wheels on less profitable endeavors.
Finally, you can't say wages will go up because of efficiencies. For the most part, wages are commodities. High wages are the worst of all economic inefficiencies. Paying a CS major $30 a hour to do a job a high school drop out could do for $5 a hour is an inefficiency. Paying an American $20 an hour for a programming job that could be done in Pujab for $3 an hour is a serious waste of resources.
We are going to be in serious trouble if our economy cannot produce enough minimum wage paying jobs to keep people busy. Of course, the solution is to end minimum wage so that the economy can create subminimum wage jobs...but these jobs will most likely be in extremely unproductive areas of the economy.
Well, at least the people complaining about having to process the resumes have a job. Think of the additional thousands that would be pounding the street if the HR business suddenly got efficient.
If businesses ran at peak efficiency, there would probably be only about 10% employment. The rest of us would have to run around and find a way to make the market inefficient enough so that we can get food in our mouths.
The article also misses the cause of the problem. The problem is not too broad a defintion of an application. The problem is that the companies are storing the resumes in paper form. Storing the resumes in electronic form would save a few thousand acres of file cabinets and a few forests full of trees. Microsoft could fit all of its resumes on a $100 drive.
To be honest, I think companies revel in the tens of thousands of resumes they receive. When you have 100,000 resumes piled up, it makes it a lot easier for the company to hire who you want as you can flood the court will a torrent of documents when the lawyers come to sue, and when you have that many documents you can prove anything you want.
Isn't the Porn Industry Already Doing This?
on
The Searchable Life
·
· Score: 1, Funny
I wonder why the government is spending money on a program to document EVERYTHING a person does in their life...I mean, isn't the porn industry already doing this? Why spend taxpayer's money when, if you add a little a backstabbing element and a cash prize the networks would call it a reality show and do it for free?
...and a real drag for the John Smith's of the world. Create such a law, and you would rush to have even weirder spellings for their children's birth names to give them that extra notice in life. You would also see people lining up to change their legal names. Future generations will hear: "My name is Puffy Pants...but you can call my by my nickname...John Smith."
Slashdot Mirror
As I recall Euclidean Geometry exists on a surface in hyperbolic geometry and hyperbolic geometry exists on a surface in Euclidean geometry...so you can treat one as if it were a subset of the other.
Likewise, I have no doubt you can find a way two twist things around so the tragedy of the commons is minor application of the prisoner's dilemma.
I recall this being an issue about a decade ago. Since the prisoner's dilemma involved different weights of punishments, traditionalists were opting to treat the prison's dilemma simply as an example, but the advantages of starting with the prisoner's dilemma is unquestionable.
The prisoner's dilemma does a better job of showing that individual choice, democracy and the free market are fundamentally flawed. While the tragedy of the commons simply indicates the existences of imbalances needing to be fixed.
Since you can find a way to make the two statements equivalent, I agree, it is much more politically correct to call it the prisoner's dilemma since that does a better job of indicating the academic view of free choice.
...is to for someone somewhere to actually write something in AIM that is worthwhile to encrypt.
Personally, I think the original security of instant messaging was sufficient...that is, there is so much white noise, that the data stream just isn't worth tapping into.
The common property is the public's trust (or public gullability).
The tradegy of the commons is not a subset of the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma occurs when the cost loyality to your fellow conspirators is much less than the cost of betraying them. The tragedy of the commons happens when you have a common resource that people feed on, but no one bears the cost to maintain.
I used that as a title because it is a fad in academic circles to drop reference to the tragedy of the commons and the prisoners dilemma in every single context of every single debate as if the tragedy of the commons was the primary organizing principle of the universe.
Personally, I think the effects of Indian casinos has been extremely negative. The casinos create one tiny group of extremely rich people, but leave most native Americans in poverty. For example the casinos in white American cities (where there is less tribal identity) get lots of traffic. The larger reservations don't have the foot traffic. Casino money feeds misinformation campaigns, etc..
I know people are trying extremely hard to keep the casinos regulated and to keep the games fair, but who knows if regulation works. We see that auditing in accounting doesn't work. I imagine that it is even harder when you are dealing with sovereign entities. The modern US business climate and philosophies are about bending rules, and we are gradually losing our ability to trust any industry.
This is probably illegal, as the machine is strongly implying that your guess will affect your chances
It is clearly unethical, because the companies are selling something different than people think they are buying.
Illegal? That's a different matter. Ethics are only a minor concern in law. Legal or not legal has to do with laws on books, precedents and political power. The reason lawyers are so rich is because they excel at finding legal ways to partake in unethical activity.
I would not be surprised to learn that casino owners program machines to play with themselves to change the odds or other nasty tricks. Anything for that extra edge. American businessmen are becoming scummier and scummier with each passing day.
Of course the whole industry is dependent on having a certain amount of honest casinos who let the occasional gambler to win. Without any wins, there is no way to establish that precious little addiction that the casinos crave. As such the casinos will probably dig themselves into a tragedy of the commons situation where more and more casinos opt to cheat until they kill their industry. But I guess people are stupid enough to bet on lotteries with a 60% expected pay out.
The problem with digital gaming machines is that it is too easy for the programmer to add twists to the algorithms that tweak the odds. It seems odd that they would bother, since the laws of probability come out in the casino's favor, they don't need to tweak the algorithm, just do a little basic math first.
As I recall, the Nevada casinos are required to post the expected payout and odds on the machines. For example, the expected payout might be 98%. That means the casino collects on average 2 pennies every time a patron shakes the hand of a one armed bandit with a dollar bet. The casinos don't need to pull any tricks beyond calculating the expected payouts for the different states of the machine and make sure the expected payout is less than one.
It is disconcerting knowing that there are machines which go even further.
As I understand, a well run gaming commissions tries to assure that casinos don't bend the rules any further than that.
Oracle is supporting Linux because their customers were installing Linux servers big time and Oracle wanted in on the action. Oracle's whole claim to fame had been that their software runs on many different platforms. Programs written for Oracle on Solaris run on NT, Unix, etc.. The business plan requires porting to any major new OS.
As for Microsoft bashing, the one reason I like Microsoft is because I know that if Oracle had the PC monopoly, things would be much, much worse. The reaon Oracle hates MS isn't because MS has a monopoly in the desktop OS, it is because MS ruined the nice little monopolies that the heavyweight database engines and mainframes had been working to perfect.
The point is that the CorelDRAWS! ability to make money ends as soon as there is an open source program to put the final nails in the coffin. There are few reasons for current customers to buy new licenses, and there is not compelling need for more people in the graphics market. The company passed its peak in its product life cycle and is not too far from the point where they should open source the product and let the hackers maintain the code.
It is always a pleasure when someone catches and understands the sarcastic remark.
The people who get hit hardest are the working poor and middle class. When the working poor divide their $50 cable bill over the two hours of TV they watch a month, it comes to $25 an hour. The person watching 500 hours a month is doling out only a dime per hour. The working class is the one group that the industry and our leaders don't bother considering in their plans.
Being free marketeers, I suspect the administration is wanting to put the spectrum on the market where people can bid for it openingly...letting the market determine the bandwidth allocation.
The problem, however, is that the activity that generates the most monetary transactions is not necessarily the most efficient use of the airwaves. For example TV and radio do an efficient job of distributing large amounts of information to the public...these uses don't generate that many monetary transactions since they are difficult to track.
Open bidding for airwaves is likely to result in the situation where all airwaves are used by technologies that can track and charge for usage...like cell phones.
The big downside for individuals is that we will gradually be coralled into technologies that track everything we do or say in a blind drive to create more and more monetary transactions.
CorelDRAW! is still software. Hasn't the whole tech bubble, and OSS pretty much proven that you cannot count on the long term value of software. Drawing programs are way over priced, can you really count on people always paying substantially more for CorelDRAW! that OSS graphics programs like the Gimp?
Doesn't CorelDRAW! still own Wordperfect? Five years ago I would would have thought the Wordperfect office suite was a lucrative holding. If the company is still losing money this late in their product's life cycle, then it is a time for investors to panic.
Rural areas tend to have large amounts of unused broadcasting bandwidth, while cities tend to have tighter bandwidth constraints. So in a free market, rural areas would probably keep their broadcast TV.
The group most affected would be the rural area just on the edge of a big city as they live in the worst of both worlds.
The group that gets hit the hardest are those that just don't watch that much TV. The cost of cable is prohibitive when you watch only an hour or so a month
As for the uneducated lazy asses on welfare who watch 500 or so hours of TV a month...they have cable. I suspect that the group that is least likely to have cable is the young professional working 80 hours a week, or students struggling to pay tuition, and who watch only a few hours a month.
Go down to the local trail park...yep...most have a satellite dish pointed to the great teet in the sky.
The one year rule makes sense. I assume also that it is one year from the matter being intentionally published, and not unintentionally leaked.
Of course, this particular MS patent sounds more like a crap shoot than an advancement of science. Every three years you try a new wording for the patent in VOD in the hope that you might land that one lucrative patent that lets you sue start ups in the industry out existence.
If you can use a company's internal documentation and beta tests or previous products as a proof of prior art, then you could probably manage to over turn any patent in the system. In general things get designed, written up and tested before submitting patents. Since this design work generally exists before the patent, then it should be easy to toss out all patents.
The only patent that I ever had seen filed was in production before the completion of the patent process. So, I guess, you could use the working product as proof of prior art.
I suspect, however, that patent courts don't overturn patents for prior art that comes from the holder of the patent. Yet, there is probably a good chance that if you insult your enemy by calling them "Microsnot" the courts might side with you. A good well timed insult can usually win most arguments.
>> Why can't the earlier/seperate publication be considered seperately?
Authors often get the same material included in multiple publications that target different markets. There are some publications that are pretty much 100% formerly published works. As I recall, both Readers Digest and UTNE Reader reprint works that appeared in different sources.
Such secondary sources probably don't bother keeping up copyrights...problems would arise if a person assumed that the articles in a secondary source are public domain because the secondary source did not renew the copyright.
Forcing authors to keep track of every place their articles appear would be an un do burden. Conversely, people might get sued for republishing material that they thought was public domain, but was really just a secondary copy.
If we considered separate publications separately, then we might even see an industry form that looks for these secondary sources that an author may have forgotten about. Imagine if a writer let their local church include a story in the church bulletin and forgot about it? That gaffaw would cost them their copyright.
Multiple editions of books would pose a challenge as well. Do you have to resubmit every edition of a book to retain a copyright or just the most recent?
Lawyers are generally willing to rack up huge amounts of billed hours over petty details.
Variable copyright dates make it extremely difficult for people to know what is and what is not copyrighted. Since articles and storied might appear in multiple publications, there will probably be quite a few mistakes made where people think an item wasn't copyrighted because it appeared in volume XXX...while it was copyrighted as part of volume YYY.
The fifty year limit sounds like an interesting start.
Practicing on slower, clunkier equipment lets you concentrate on fundamentals that people with more sophosticated computers might have ignored.
The goal of such hackers isn't to create kewl programs, but to find clever tricks that waste the resources of others; so working at the fundamental machine level might give you an in. Sometimes having obstacles to overcome helps you acheive your goal. My experience is that people who learned to code on slower machines write tighter, more efficient code.
Of course, most of the security holes the hackers discover have probably been patched, but the fact that you have older equipment doesn't necessarily mean your training is worse.
In reading the article, I can't help but wonder if anyone is really foolish enough to trust Kazaa with their money? As an advertiser, I would always wonder if the paid downloads really happened (was it actually a person downloading or a hackering mimicking downloads for cash?)
As a host, I wouldn't put much faith in actually ever receiving cash from the company. Schemes like this tend to have a history of absconding with the cash.
Of course, it would be nice if there were an easy way for college students to make a little bit of cash by selling their school's bandwidth.
I thought this was a really fun lawsuit. Basically Search King is upset that Google found a way to counter Search King's manipulation of the algorithm. This is like a shop lifter suing the kwikimart for putting the cigarettes behind the counter where they are out of reach.
Yes, not being able to manipulate the results hurts Search King. Google's changing the results helped those who weren't in the SEO business. Thank goodness a judge tossed out the case. Let's hope more suits get thrown out in the future.
A car is more efficient then walking...but notice how people took this great efficiency machine and managed to make their lives incredibly inefficient? Look at an aerial photo of a US town, about a third of the area is used by our great efficiency machine.
We burn up our efficiency at our jobs by buying bigger inefficient cars.
The music industry got fat by creating an extremely inefficient mechanism for recording and distributing music. We've essentially eliminated the need to pay the high distribution costs, so the RIAA is trying desparately to find other ways to make their industry inefficient. It was the inefficiencies that made it possible to charge people for music. It would be better for the people in the music industry to move on to something else.
We freed up all of those people from jobs in the manufacturing and production industries...so now we all work in the less inefficient service economy. Where do we go if we introduce efficiency in the service economy?
The fast food industry is over built, same with retail, apparel, hotels, tourism, etc..
People are not going to start having 20 work weeks. What will happen is that they will still be throwing in 60 hour weeks to survive, they will just be spinning their wheels on less profitable endeavors.
Finally, you can't say wages will go up because of efficiencies. For the most part, wages are commodities. High wages are the worst of all economic inefficiencies. Paying a CS major $30 a hour to do a job a high school drop out could do for $5 a hour is an inefficiency. Paying an American $20 an hour for a programming job that could be done in Pujab for $3 an hour is a serious waste of resources.
We are going to be in serious trouble if our economy cannot produce enough minimum wage paying jobs to keep people busy. Of course, the solution is to end minimum wage so that the economy can create subminimum wage jobs...but these jobs will most likely be in extremely unproductive areas of the economy.
Well, at least the people complaining about having to process the resumes have a job. Think of the additional thousands that would be pounding the street if the HR business suddenly got efficient.
If businesses ran at peak efficiency, there would probably be only about 10% employment. The rest of us would have to run around and find a way to make the market inefficient enough so that we can get food in our mouths.
The article also misses the cause of the problem. The problem is not too broad a defintion of an application. The problem is that the companies are storing the resumes in paper form. Storing the resumes in electronic form would save a few thousand acres of file cabinets and a few forests full of trees. Microsoft could fit all of its resumes on a $100 drive.
To be honest, I think companies revel in the tens of thousands of resumes they receive. When you have 100,000 resumes piled up, it makes it a lot easier for the company to hire who you want as you can flood the court will a torrent of documents when the lawyers come to sue, and when you have that many documents you can prove anything you want.
I wonder why the government is spending money on a program to document EVERYTHING a person does in their life...I mean, isn't the porn industry already doing this? Why spend taxpayer's money when, if you add a little a backstabbing element and a cash prize the networks would call it a reality show and do it for free?
...and a real drag for the John Smith's of the world. Create such a law, and you would rush to have even weirder spellings for their children's birth names to give them that extra notice in life. You would also see people lining up to change their legal names. Future generations will hear: "My name is Puffy Pants...but you can call my by my nickname...John Smith."