...if a person can't afford to buy something, they're not morally obligated to thrash themselves with the spiked whip of capitalist ethics...
Much like if a closed source software company wants your software, but can't "afford" to abide by the rules of the GPL, they're not morally obligated to thrash themselves with the spiked whip of GNU ethics.
If, like many of us, you object to the scenario I have outlined above, you will want to vigorously support copyright law. That is the root of your moral obligation - not capitalist ethics, but your own ethics. This is very much like supporting free speech: I may object to the uses that the RIAA and MPAA make of copyright law, but I will support their right to do so.
Re:Enoch Root
on
The Confusion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Speaking of mysteries from the Baroque cycle: what's the story with the elder Duc d'Arcachon's peculiar dietary habits? I haven't seen an explanation, or even a rationale, anywhere.
Do you understand the meaning of the term "mutually beneficial"? Both sides of the deal derive some benefit. Is it "equal"? That depends on what you are comparing. But I would argue that all freely entered transactions are "equal" in terms of the perceived value to each side, otherwise the transactors wouldn't carry the deal through. An employer paying less for a worker in an oversupplied profession is no more exploiting the worker than a worker getting paid more in an undersupplied profession (like, for example, IT workers during the dotcom boom) is exploiting the company doing the paying.
I suspect that the major problem with your model is that it pays based on past performance, rather than on the quality of the product actually being delivered by the payment. As the financial community likes to say, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." Then too you have the problems that (1) if I have no past performance (i.e. I'm just getting started) then I have no way to gain revenue, and (2) since the game development is, in a sense, pre-paid I'm placed in a position where if I develop a game that's wildly popular I can only cash in on that success by developing another game. For those two reasons I don't see this being a viable model.
Which is the whole point of having a free market - individuals can make voluntary transactions to their mutual benefit. If it's not to their mutual benefit they can opt out. Unfortunately some people (like the guy complaining about people being "tools") seem to think that they have a right to force companies to enter into non-mutually beneficial transactions (e.g. forcing the companies to accept 35 hour work weeks), or to prevent other people from voluntarily entering transactions that they complainer doesn't feel are "right".
Amen to that! Requirements define the problem. The design solves the problem. The latter inherently cannot exist without the former. If you aren't designing in response to a requirement, what are you designing for? In all likelihood some vague notion of what you think the problem should be, rather than what it really is. With the result that you will most likely solve the wrong problem.
This is not to say that the very first set of requirements that are developed should be taken as gospel from then on - your understanding of the problem will inevitably evolve over the course of the project. But you do need to have some kind of formal and agreed upon definition of what that problem is at any given instant.
Wow!! I had got the impression that "Roland" was fairly prolific, btu I had no idea just how prolific he is until I looked at your "view them all" link. The guy has consistently had a story at least once every 2 days (sometimes more often) for the last several months. I wonder how he manages it, especially given how notoriously fickle the/. eds are.
Ob on topic: This wing morphing thing is hardly new. The idea has been around forever. In fact, if you go back to the original Wright Flyer you'll find that it used "wing warping" rather than actuated control surfaces to provide roll control. Admittedly not quite the same as what the Penn State guys claim to be doing, but it seems like a small conceptual leap from warping for roll control to warping for stall speed modification (i.e. a flap replacement). I also remember reading about the idea of a plane with wings (and fuselage) that morphed to change the flight characteristics way back when in Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." And the idea didn't seem all that new when I read it then...
Did you read the whole comment? I suggested that people who support such measures (clear circumvention of the Constitution and BOR) have been doing the same end-run around our rights as this particular bill proposes. All under the asupices of 'well it doesn't affect ME' and 'well, it's for the better of society'.
The problem isn't with your suggestion per se. In fact I agree with you about that. The problem is in the final sentence of your original post, in which you try to attribute these measures to the libertarian movement. This is a problem because, as the respondent to your post pointed out, libertarians oppose gun control, and oppose CFR (on first amendment grounds). So your insinuation that libertarians supported these measures is flat out wrong.
Who is Roland Piquepaille? His submissions seem to show up here every other day (and always contain a pointer to his blog so he can collect some advertising eyeballs).
Math is a hierarchical kind of knowledge. If you don't understand the foundations you won't understand the higher level stuff. It's all well and good to use a high-powered calculator to do stuff that you already know well, since, as you say, it lets you focus on the harder parts. But when you are learning the things for the first time you shouldn't be relying on the calculator.
Good to know that the FBI doesn't have anything better to do right now (like, for example, cathcing terrorists before they can kill another large group of US citizens), and can take the time to combat this obvious menace to Homeland Security. I mean, people who pirate software or music are practically as bad as terrorists in terms of the damaging effects they have on the economy, right? Right.
Disclaimer: I do not support copyright infringement. Nor should anyone who wants to see things like the GPL actually be enforced. But given our supposed National Security situation I'm a little disturbed that the Feds are devoting this much in the way of resources to something that's really inconsequential in terms of protecting American lives and livelihood.
One class does not an engineer make. If I was studying engineering and I took ONE CS class, would that make me a computer scientist?
As it turns out, I did study engineering, and I did take a couple of CS classes, but I would never claim to be a computer scientist. Nor would I claim to be any kind of scientist (although I also took chemistry and physics classes) or mathematician (although I took a large amount of math). My training is in engineering. My approach to problem solving is an engineering one, and is colored by the experiences I have had both obtaining my degree and working as an engineer. I can see this difference in perspective in my colleagues as well. I'm not saying it's better. Just different. But, like I said, seems like everyone wants to call themselves an engineer now, regardless of what their training and experience actually is.
If you search for a job as a software engineer (which you should be prepared for given a 4 year cs degree)
[sigh] This is one of my pet peeves. A computer science degree will no more prepare you to be a software engineer than it will a software sous chef. Engineering as a discipline (even software engineering) involves learning a different set of skills than the sciences.
The engineering mindset is quite different than the science mindset - it is fundamentally focused on synthesis rather than analysis (although an engineer may analyze in order to synthesize, and a scientist may synthesize in order to analyze). A CS degree may give you some of the analytical tools necessary to engineer software, but it doesn't give you the mindset. Even a CS degree that involves major programming projects will be unlikely to give the same kind of engineering design experience that an engineering degree would.
Of course, everyone and their grandmother wants to call themselves an "engineer" these days: witness the glut of "Certified <insert speciality> Engineers" out there....
Those who think that the IT jobs India is getting is lifting the country itself out of poverty need to learn about what the majority of the 1 billion people there are doing.
What the IT jobs in India are doing is injecting a massive amount of foreign money into the economy. That money is creating jobs (all those nouveau rich Indian IT workers now have much more disposable income to spend on the butcher, the baker, the builder, the accountant, and so on), and providing the capital which will allow, to use your words, "a decrease in their need to work as children so they don't forgo education."
Sure, the majority of Indians are still poor. For now. The IT boom there only just happened. The bootstrapping of the Indian economy will take some time. But the incentives and the resources are there - assuming that protectionist American IT workers don't get their way.
I'll also note here that we haven't even touched on the damage that protectionist policies do to the American economy. IT workers do not live in isolation. Protectionist policies that benefit them will harm everyone else. It's the same reason that the steel industry lobbied for steel tarriffs which were implemented early in the Bush administration and now being repealed. The tarriffs helped the steel industry, but did massive harm to all of the steel consumers in America - and pretty much everyone uses steel either directly or indirectly.
Your continued use of ad hominem attacks, rather than actually responding to the arguments in question, provides a beautiful counterpoint to that statement. Thank you.
That $1 isn't going to go very far when my employer goes out of business...
Perhaps you missed my bigger point. Please go back and re-read my post, and then think carefully about what money means, why you get paid, and why you (as an individual) buy things instead of making them yourself.
Fascinating, but what's your point?
That your attempt to instill the righteous fear of, well, you, by saying that my job should be sent overseas was meaningless? Perhaps you missed that point as well.
sounded like it was referring to the classical model of government-run foreign "aid" to me. My mistake.
That said, I stand by my statements about allowing foreign workers to compete in the global market. It's all very well to
donate to the education of the children... ensuring that children in third-world countries can go to school
but where are these educated children supposed to work when they grow up? Their countries do not have the resources to allow them to exercise their skills. The only way to get those resources is to get money through foreign trade. Often the only exportable commodity with sufficient value is the skills themselves. Skills provide foreign dollars, which provide resources, which help to bootstrap the country out of poverty and into a self-sustaining mode. But that requires access to global markets (including the US tech sector).
How does taking someone who is educated, invested in a degree, and obtained certifications, and then idling the person, and ultimately turning the person homeless helpful to anyone?
It's not really helpful to anyone is it? So why do so many Americans seems to favor doing exactly that to their Indian counterparts?
Instead of trying to idle Americans, and increasing the homeless problem, how about we instead attemt to get Americans to increase contributions to relieve poverty, both in American and in third-world countries?
Foreign aid doesn't fix poverty. It causes financial dependency. It's the old saw about feeding a man to fish versus teaching him to fish. Allowing foreign workers to compete for jobs in the global market is akin to "teaching a man to fish."
And here's a thought... how about we increase jobs in India and China without sacrificing jobs in the US?
This is not a new thought. Did it ever occur to you that offshore outsourcing does exactly that? I have seen a number of articles that describe the ways in which outsourcing to India has also resulted in more jobs in the US. Don't have any references handy, but I seem to recall that the NY Times' Thomas Friedman had an article in this a few weeks back, if you wanted to try to dig it up.
The heartlessness it takes to wish this is beyond comprehension.
Exactly how heartless do you need to be in order to condemn entire thrid-world countries to poverty so that a few Americans can continue to afford their SUV's? Is that level of heartlessness beyond comprehension as well?
I can always rely on Slashdot for well-reasoned debate...
If you're such a good capitalist, how could you fail to see that quality and price aren't the only ways to establish the "value" of a product?
I don't recall saying that they were. But if you can point out where I did, then by all means do so.
I'd have to be an unfathomable idiot to think that I should buy a Thing from Walmart and save $1 instead of buy it through my own business or the business that employs me.
It's possible that you are an unfathomable idiot. That $1 that you save by buying from Walmart can then be used for other things you wouldn't otherwise be able to buy. It's the same reason that you don't grow your own food - it's cheaper to pay a farmer to do so, while you spend your time and energy doing other, more valuable things.
Isolationism means excluding outside influences out of hand for no reason other than it's from the outside. The original poster suggested that you buy from companies that do not fire American workers and hire foreign workers.
Ah. And what praytell is your reason for excluding foreign workers from the market, other than the fact that they are foreign?
let me suggest your job is the next to go to some far-side-of-the-world country while you experience warm fuzzies for abusing six syllable words.
You seem to be assuming that (a) I'm not already in "some far-side-of-the-world country", (b) I wouldn't be willing to move to "some far-side-of-the-world country" if that's where the good jobs are, and (c) that my skillset is sufficiently inflexible that having my job shipped to "some far-side-of-the-world country" would somehow result in my being unable to work at all. These are not necessarily good assumptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Much like if a closed source software company wants your software, but can't "afford" to abide by the rules of the GPL, they're not morally obligated to thrash themselves with the spiked whip of GNU ethics.
If, like many of us, you object to the scenario I have outlined above, you will want to vigorously support copyright law. That is the root of your moral obligation - not capitalist ethics, but your own ethics. This is very much like supporting free speech: I may object to the uses that the RIAA and MPAA make of copyright law, but I will support their right to do so.
Speaking of mysteries from the Baroque cycle: what's the story with the elder Duc d'Arcachon's peculiar dietary habits? I haven't seen an explanation, or even a rationale, anywhere.
According to Linus even Linux "sux0rz". It just "sux0rz" less than anything else.
Do you understand the meaning of the term "mutually beneficial"? Both sides of the deal derive some benefit. Is it "equal"? That depends on what you are comparing. But I would argue that all freely entered transactions are "equal" in terms of the perceived value to each side, otherwise the transactors wouldn't carry the deal through. An employer paying less for a worker in an oversupplied profession is no more exploiting the worker than a worker getting paid more in an undersupplied profession (like, for example, IT workers during the dotcom boom) is exploiting the company doing the paying.
I suspect that the major problem with your model is that it pays based on past performance, rather than on the quality of the product actually being delivered by the payment. As the financial community likes to say, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." Then too you have the problems that (1) if I have no past performance (i.e. I'm just getting started) then I have no way to gain revenue, and (2) since the game development is, in a sense, pre-paid I'm placed in a position where if I develop a game that's wildly popular I can only cash in on that success by developing another game. For those two reasons I don't see this being a viable model.
Which is the whole point of having a free market - individuals can make voluntary transactions to their mutual benefit. If it's not to their mutual benefit they can opt out. Unfortunately some people (like the guy complaining about people being "tools") seem to think that they have a right to force companies to enter into non-mutually beneficial transactions (e.g. forcing the companies to accept 35 hour work weeks), or to prevent other people from voluntarily entering transactions that they complainer doesn't feel are "right".
Yeah, but it's HIS CHOICE to be a tool, if that's the choice he wants to make.
Amen to that! Requirements define the problem. The design solves the problem. The latter inherently cannot exist without the former. If you aren't designing in response to a requirement, what are you designing for? In all likelihood some vague notion of what you think the problem should be, rather than what it really is. With the result that you will most likely solve the wrong problem.
This is not to say that the very first set of requirements that are developed should be taken as gospel from then on - your understanding of the problem will inevitably evolve over the course of the project. But you do need to have some kind of formal and agreed upon definition of what that problem is at any given instant.
How about providing some links to multiple documented studies that explicitly prove the Bible? Without proof there is no reason to believe.
Ob on topic: This wing morphing thing is hardly new. The idea has been around forever. In fact, if you go back to the original Wright Flyer you'll find that it used "wing warping" rather than actuated control surfaces to provide roll control. Admittedly not quite the same as what the Penn State guys claim to be doing, but it seems like a small conceptual leap from warping for roll control to warping for stall speed modification (i.e. a flap replacement). I also remember reading about the idea of a plane with wings (and fuselage) that morphed to change the flight characteristics way back when in Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." And the idea didn't seem all that new when I read it then...
The problem isn't with your suggestion per se. In fact I agree with you about that. The problem is in the final sentence of your original post, in which you try to attribute these measures to the libertarian movement. This is a problem because, as the respondent to your post pointed out, libertarians oppose gun control, and oppose CFR (on first amendment grounds). So your insinuation that libertarians supported these measures is flat out wrong.
Who is Roland Piquepaille? His submissions seem to show up here every other day (and always contain a pointer to his blog so he can collect some advertising eyeballs).
Math is a hierarchical kind of knowledge. If you don't understand the foundations you won't understand the higher level stuff. It's all well and good to use a high-powered calculator to do stuff that you already know well, since, as you say, it lets you focus on the harder parts. But when you are learning the things for the first time you shouldn't be relying on the calculator.
Disclaimer: I do not support copyright infringement. Nor should anyone who wants to see things like the GPL actually be enforced. But given our supposed National Security situation I'm a little disturbed that the Feds are devoting this much in the way of resources to something that's really inconsequential in terms of protecting American lives and livelihood.
As it turns out, I did study engineering, and I did take a couple of CS classes, but I would never claim to be a computer scientist. Nor would I claim to be any kind of scientist (although I also took chemistry and physics classes) or mathematician (although I took a large amount of math). My training is in engineering. My approach to problem solving is an engineering one, and is colored by the experiences I have had both obtaining my degree and working as an engineer. I can see this difference in perspective in my colleagues as well. I'm not saying it's better. Just different. But, like I said, seems like everyone wants to call themselves an engineer now, regardless of what their training and experience actually is.
[sigh] This is one of my pet peeves. A computer science degree will no more prepare you to be a software engineer than it will a software sous chef. Engineering as a discipline (even software engineering) involves learning a different set of skills than the sciences.
The engineering mindset is quite different than the science mindset - it is fundamentally focused on synthesis rather than analysis (although an engineer may analyze in order to synthesize, and a scientist may synthesize in order to analyze). A CS degree may give you some of the analytical tools necessary to engineer software, but it doesn't give you the mindset. Even a CS degree that involves major programming projects will be unlikely to give the same kind of engineering design experience that an engineering degree would.
Of course, everyone and their grandmother wants to call themselves an "engineer" these days: witness the glut of "Certified <insert speciality> Engineers" out there....
What the IT jobs in India are doing is injecting a massive amount of foreign money into the economy. That money is creating jobs (all those nouveau rich Indian IT workers now have much more disposable income to spend on the butcher, the baker, the builder, the accountant, and so on), and providing the capital which will allow, to use your words, "a decrease in their need to work as children so they don't forgo education."
Sure, the majority of Indians are still poor. For now. The IT boom there only just happened. The bootstrapping of the Indian economy will take some time. But the incentives and the resources are there - assuming that protectionist American IT workers don't get their way.
I'll also note here that we haven't even touched on the damage that protectionist policies do to the American economy. IT workers do not live in isolation. Protectionist policies that benefit them will harm everyone else. It's the same reason that the steel industry lobbied for steel tarriffs which were implemented early in the Bush administration and now being repealed. The tarriffs helped the steel industry, but did massive harm to all of the steel consumers in America - and pretty much everyone uses steel either directly or indirectly.
Your continued use of ad hominem attacks, rather than actually responding to the arguments in question, provides a beautiful counterpoint to that statement. Thank you.
That $1 isn't going to go very far when my employer goes out of business...
Perhaps you missed my bigger point. Please go back and re-read my post, and then think carefully about what money means, why you get paid, and why you (as an individual) buy things instead of making them yourself.
Fascinating, but what's your point?
That your attempt to instill the righteous fear of, well, you, by saying that my job should be sent overseas was meaningless? Perhaps you missed that point as well.
That said, I stand by my statements about allowing foreign workers to compete in the global market. It's all very well to
but where are these educated children supposed to work when they grow up? Their countries do not have the resources to allow them to exercise their skills. The only way to get those resources is to get money through foreign trade. Often the only exportable commodity with sufficient value is the skills themselves. Skills provide foreign dollars, which provide resources, which help to bootstrap the country out of poverty and into a self-sustaining mode. But that requires access to global markets (including the US tech sector).It's not really helpful to anyone is it? So why do so many Americans seems to favor doing exactly that to their Indian counterparts?
Instead of trying to idle Americans, and increasing the homeless problem, how about we instead attemt to get Americans to increase contributions to relieve poverty, both in American and in third-world countries?
Foreign aid doesn't fix poverty. It causes financial dependency. It's the old saw about feeding a man to fish versus teaching him to fish. Allowing foreign workers to compete for jobs in the global market is akin to "teaching a man to fish."
And here's a thought... how about we increase jobs in India and China without sacrificing jobs in the US?
This is not a new thought. Did it ever occur to you that offshore outsourcing does exactly that? I have seen a number of articles that describe the ways in which outsourcing to India has also resulted in more jobs in the US. Don't have any references handy, but I seem to recall that the NY Times' Thomas Friedman had an article in this a few weeks back, if you wanted to try to dig it up.
Exactly how heartless do you need to be in order to condemn entire thrid-world countries to poverty so that a few Americans can continue to afford their SUV's? Is that level of heartlessness beyond comprehension as well?
I can always rely on Slashdot for well-reasoned debate...
If you're such a good capitalist, how could you fail to see that quality and price aren't the only ways to establish the "value" of a product?
I don't recall saying that they were. But if you can point out where I did, then by all means do so.
I'd have to be an unfathomable idiot to think that I should buy a Thing from Walmart and save $1 instead of buy it through my own business or the business that employs me.
It's possible that you are an unfathomable idiot. That $1 that you save by buying from Walmart can then be used for other things you wouldn't otherwise be able to buy. It's the same reason that you don't grow your own food - it's cheaper to pay a farmer to do so, while you spend your time and energy doing other, more valuable things.
Isolationism means excluding outside influences out of hand for no reason other than it's from the outside. The original poster suggested that you buy from companies that do not fire American workers and hire foreign workers.
Ah. And what praytell is your reason for excluding foreign workers from the market, other than the fact that they are foreign?
let me suggest your job is the next to go to some far-side-of-the-world country while you experience warm fuzzies for abusing six syllable words.
You seem to be assuming that (a) I'm not already in "some far-side-of-the-world country", (b) I wouldn't be willing to move to "some far-side-of-the-world country" if that's where the good jobs are, and (c) that my skillset is sufficiently inflexible that having my job shipped to "some far-side-of-the-world country" would somehow result in my being unable to work at all. These are not necessarily good assumptions.
Heh. And someone was trying to accuse me of attempting to play "the Nazi card" ;-)
Just because someone buys from a local company doesn't mean the are the spawn of satan.
You're right, it doesn't. But refusing to but from any company that obtains goods or services from overseas does mean that they are isolationist.
Perhaps you haven't been watching CNN lately. I encourage you to tune in, and look for stories about this place called "Iraq".
Probably because none of the moderators actually bothered to read the linked /. article...