> The objective section is totally useless, and takes up the most valuable resume real-estate with bullshit that tells nothing to your potential employer. NOTHING. > > as for customization, if your a geek, and applying for a network heavy job, wouldnt you want to emphasize those skills, as opposed to your SQL skills?
You're both missing the point of the "Objectives:" section.
In the example you cited, your "Objective" is "To work on networks in a $BUZZ1 company in the $BUZZ2 industry."
$BUZZ1 should be an adjective taken from the company's mission statement or some other such fluff. $BUZZ2 should be the company's industry.
If it's a behemoth like Intel or Microsoft, you can do one better, by aiming for the department to which you're applying.
Suppose you're a router geek and you're replying to a position in the Windows Media Player 12 group. That leads to "To work on network optimization and design and cryptographic authentication with a leading company in the field of rights-enabled streaming media."
It doesn't matter that WMP12 is 2% of the revenue MSFT gets from Office 2008 - what matters is that your resume comes across the desk of the HR drone whose boss is convinced that streaming media, crippled with DRM, is the wave of the fy00t0re, and that you're interested in his pet project.
The HR drone will see the buzzwords her boss raves about, pass the resume to the boss, the boss will say "Gee, this guy doesn't just want a job, he wants this job. Bring him in for an interview and see if he actually knows what he's talking about."
Bonus points if you have prior experience in the field (e.g. Real, LiquidAudio, MP3.com, somelivepr0ndotcomnobodyeverheardof.com) of course. But even if you don't, if you manage to get your foot in the door (telephone interview), you can talk about how you were bored writing accounting applications for some third-rate company and how the problems you had getting live streams of stock quotes through some ODBC app were pretty much the same problems you'd seen when you started throwing streams of MP3z around your home LAN, and that you saturated it when you tried sending DiVX movies around... and how you thought it might be more fun to get paid to solve these sorts of problems than the sorts of problems you used to be getting paid to solve.
What you do at the interview is up to you. Hey, this thread was about how to get your foot in the door:)
> I don't think that is true anymore. The Gulf war didn't seem to change the economy. > > It depresses everybody it seems and they hunker down and don't spend. Plus, higher oil pricess.
In the short term, yes.
Which is why I say, once we've got our men and materiel in place, let's get the damn war started already.
Once the war's over with, and we've seized the oil fields (and/or turned them over to allied nations), oil drops to $20 (or less!), and we've got 40-year-low interest rates. Then the economy can recover.
I'd much rather see that - low oil prices - used to bail out the airlines rather than another $5B in taxpayer bucks.
> I have been told by headhunters that you should not put computer-related items in your hobbies, because it makes you look like a stereotypical geek, and turns prospective employers off unless they are also geeks (which is rare).
That's a feature, not a bug.
Your headhunter wants to get you hired anywhere, so he can collect his cut of the loot.
You what to be hired somewhere you'll want to stay, which ain't necessarily the first company with an offer.
> > the refrigerators that store the $10/pound filet mignon > > People ate well and indulged in excess long before market economies become dominant. Take a look at how the royals of Europe lived.
I have, and the ponit of my post was that as a result of free market economics, I (and hundreds of millions of "wage slaves" like me) live better than Louis XIV could have hoped to. Unless you're living on the street (unlikely), so do you.
> Building Versailles didn't save the French crown...why would fiber optics necessarily reinforce your system?
Building Versailles couldn't save the French crown. Marie said let 'em eat cake, but nobody had cake.
And yet today, I can buy a pretty nice cake for about 15 minutes' worth of work for my employer, and 10 minutes' worth of work for the Government.
The slogan of the French Revolution should have been "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Choose any two."
> Crappy patents get by because as it is now certain companies are literally shoveling patent applications at them like horse shit and some of it is bound to get through.
True enough, but please - take back that ugly slur you made against horse shit.
Warning: This is a rant - and not directed entirely at the poster. His original point was that DDOSing over a privately-owned connection in order to smash capitalism was a Dumb Idea and unlikely to effect any change. In that, he's right.
This rant isn't really directed at him, he's just the unlucky SOB who wrote the following couple of lines,
> The IMF protestors have one thing right - if you want attention you've got to break something. The Bolsheviks had it down even better - if you want real change you have to smash an entire system.
...which I'm going to take out of context, on the grounds that so many people seem not just to agree with the fact they point out, but also think they're the prescription for a good idea, and it's to them that I dedicate this rant:
So now we know what the protestors are really aiming for. Now we know what their ideal is.
Hands up, anyone who wants the kind of "change" the former Soviet Union experienced for 75 years before finally imploding and having the kind of "change" it's had for the past 10 years.
Tell you what. You keep smashing. We - the capitalists you hate - will keep building. We'll keep building the skyscrapers (even after you knock them down), the air conditioning for summer, the heating for winter, the clothes you buy at the GAP, the clothes you buy at Birkenstock's, the $0.99 burgers with the $4.00 lattes (OK, sometimes we fsck up), the refrigerators that store the $10/pound filet mignon so that you don't have to buy your food from McRaunchy's, the communications satellites, the fiber-optics, the cures for cancer, the $50 1.4 GHz CPUs... at least for now.
(If you really don't want us around, maybe we'll just leave. From whom would you get your computers and clothes and housing and food then? But don't worry about that. For now, we'll keep building.)
Meantime, it's nice to have you out of the closet.
> That's a bad, bad, BAD idea. The rich can vote on a whim. The poor simply can't afford to vote.
I'd take it one step further - $400 doesn't buy you a vote to elect a Congressdroid, $400 buys you a vote on a bill.
And at $400 per vote per bill, all of a sudden my vote counts as much as Hilary Rosen's.
Seems to me that under such a system, we'd have the DMCA repealed in a week, and there wouldn't be a goddamn thing Jack or Hilary could do about it.
> A better idea would be either service of some kind (military, non-military government, or charity), a minimum level of education, or [my favorite] a test.
I really like the idea of competency testing for voting even under our present system (I adopted this when I heard someone - seriously - advocating color-coded ballots for a municipal election so the illiterate couldn't be "discriminated against" because they couldn't read the candidates' names), so I'd combine both approaches. A competency test, and a $400 fee, per bill.
To prevent ballot stuffing by Jack and Hilary, it's still one vote per voter per bill. RIAA can still spend megabucks on a PR campaign, but they have to convince the Soccer Moms and Joe Sixpacks to spend $400 of their hard-earned money to enact the CBDTPA -- and that's gonna be much harder sell than convincing them to spend nothing to vote for "the guy with the better haircut because my favorite celebrity said to." (Or spending a few tens of kilobucks per Senator to be rewarded with a snort of coke from between a pair of plastic tits.)
One might even buy voting credits with tax dollars. Pay $40000 in tax, get 100 voting credits ("vote credits" would probably be cryptographic keys encrypted with the voter's public key) for that year.
I suppose the system could be defeated, by, say, RIAA and MPAA buying enough Congresscritters to introduce the same bill, every day, over and over again until the $100K/year (~200 votes/year) geeks finally run out of voting credits, but I'm gambling that the Copyright Cartel are like cockroaches, in that they wouldn't like to be forced out into the open like that.
> How about it Mr. Gates?" > > Oh jesus christ, you want it to crash or something?
If the goddamn thing were deorbited onto the Shuttle fleet, NASA would suddenly have a motivation to build a real heavy-lift capability.
And with the budget dollars freed up in the absence of the black-hole of ISS sucking science dollars into a low-earth-orbit white-elephant, we might even get some friggin' science done.
> I can see it now: "Sorry, we can't get the data from your experiment because we're still downloading the IMAX camera data. That'll take another 5-7 years."
OK, we'll send a DVD-burner and a bunch of blanks in a the relay station that can manage high-bandwidth communications with the probe. ("Hey d00dz! I 4m 1337! My c4s3 m0d iz in m4rz 0rb1t!")
The relay slurps the data and writes a track to the DVD, then detaches a small return vehicle that (after getting to a safe distance) flies home. For redundancy (and to piss off Jack Valenti), the blank is duplicated and stored somewhere on the main probe. (Worst-case scenario, a future probe docks with the main probe and flies back with a dozen DVD-ROMs.)
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a DVD attached to a rocket, or somethin' like that. Mebbe we can get Netflix to sponsor the return vehicle;-)
> Cassini was launched after Pathfinder, and the lunatic fringe DID get on the major networks (even causing my mostly space-clueless family to ask "Why the hell are we launching Plutonium on that damn rocket next week?").
I got the same question. Yeah, the envirol00nz really did take over the airwaves.
My answer was "Because it's not just the best technology for the job, it's the only technology for the job, and we've done it dozens of times before. Oh yeah, and just what do you think we spewed into the atmosphere during the dozens of surface, air, and space-burst nuke tests back in the 50s? If these envirofscks were even close to reality, we'd have all died 20 years ago."
> You have to remember who was at the helm of NASA for 10 years, Goldin did whatever was necessary to make him look good.
> That "rare combination of luck" comment was completely inappropriate and misleading. Of course the lander was supposed to bounce and roll around, that was its design, and it was brilliant.
Agreed.
My beef with NASA is that once they find a brilliant solution to a problem that works perfectly, they rarely, if ever, use it again.
"Congratulations, you solved the Mars landing problem cheaper, better, and faster. Now we're going to deploy our next lander the old-fashioned way. Heck, we'll even use old-fashioned units of measurement!"
Seemingly in parallel with this, once NASA finds an expensive solution to a problem, they keep it going for decades. The Shuttle and ISS are perfect examples of this.
Meantime, haven't these guys heard of an economy of scale? Would it have been that much more expensive to build 2, 3, or 10 Pathfinders instead of one? (I dunno, maybe - but there's a point at which it would have been cheaper to mass-produce 'em.) Keep the spares in storage and launch 'em as vehicles become available on the cheap.
(Hell, let some engineering students build a whole bunch on the cheap and use the MIRV approach on a heavy-lift vehicle to lob 10 of 'em at Mars simultaneously per launch window, thereby cutting construction costs and overwhelming the Martian space defence initiative with sheer numbers:-)
> Bigger - they're recorded in a non-lossy format shn, so a full concert is anywhere between 200-600 meg >Recording quality not as good - depending on the band, the recorder and show, the acoustics and equipment aren't as good as live CD's and certainly not as clean as studio.
I've always wondered about this - I know this sounds like a troll, but it's a sincere question:
...but, like, WTF's the point of reproducing outdoor concerts in a non-lossy format? I mean, is it really that important, after the distance between that soundstage and tape setup has eliminated most of the high frequencies, that you losslessly capture every hand-clap and "yeeeehaw, you're taping all this, right, man?" from that drunken jackass beside your mic?:-)
(OK, that doesn't apply to getting the whole show straight off the soundboard, but still, you see where I'm coming from here, right? Is this all just an outgrowth of the tape-trading tradition of never adding generations unless necessary? I grok that - and likewise, would prefer to keep an "original" MP3 than burn it to WAV on CD, lest that WAV get re-ripped and re-encoded to a 2nd-generation MP3. But lossless for live recordings just seems bizarre to me.)
> First they came for the %A; I wasnt a %A so I didnt care; > Then they came for the %B; I wasnt a %B so I didnt care; >Then they came for the me; but there was nobody left to care. > > my apologies for the Terrible paraphrase. > >can anyone correct me... and provide credit?
First they came for the Anonymous Cowards, but I had my Slashdot account, so I didn't care.
They they came for the numeric scores, but I was already above the Karma cap, so I didn't care.
They they came for the Trolls, but I still had Karma to burn, so I didn't care.
Then UCSD took down the HREF to the terrorists and the only URL I could go to was goatse.cx!
> Who's willing to eat the grits rinsed off of Natalie Portman for ten moderation points? Yes, that's ten moderation points! Any takers? Whoa!!! Okay, everyone, form a line...no shoving!!
> Computer software embodies loyalty. It doesn't work for music (or other "pure data") because those are just inactive data. When you pop a George Tennison CD into the drive, there's no Clippy popping up to say "Would you like me to reset your preferences so that you will always hear George Tennison?"
"Someday, you kids! Someday!"
- Hilary Rosen after six beers and a Palladium conference.
> > 2) Tack and Mike live to 100. Bill lives to 150. > > Switch it too: > Gates buys Abrams tanks and defends his mansion against the invading commie armies. > > Tack and Mike get killed by commies because we have no tanks
Well, with one modification. Only Mike gets killed. Tack lives to 85 because he signs on as a gunner in one of Bill's tanks. (I'd have made it to 100, but I screwed up and tried to drive through the IRS-planted minefield around the Free State of Gatesville, formerly known as Redmond:)
FWIW, I'm in favor of paying taxes for things like the common defense. For instance, against invading commie armies from outside the US. Ditto for cops and even roads.
Problem is, what if the commie armies attacking Bill aren't coming from outside the US, but are already here? (I think we're a helluvalong way from that point, and I don't think we'll get there, but as long as we're speaking hypothetically...)
If a country can stick to "Bill should give up some of his money in order to provide for things like cops and soldiers", it's probably OK in the long run.
But when it starts to adopt notions like "Bill should give up some of his money because he's got more than everyone else does", I get worried, because it's not too far a jump from there to "...and Bill should die earlier so that others can live longer."
Does Bill have a right to his own life, or does he have a right to his life only as long as he can be a milch-cow for us?
(Which is where I'll sign off, as we're probably the only two people reading this anymore. But it's been good debating with you. Our threads will likely cross again:)
> [ life, liberty, pursuit of happiness ] So to return to the context, is denial of medical care a violation of an American's right to life?
When I (through voting for representatives who will pass laws that authorize the IRS to) take $1000 out of Bill Gates' pocket to buy me medical care that I couldn't otherwise afford, who's being denied medical care?
The crux of our disagreement is on the notion of "right" is.
So - in my view - Bill's got the "right" to buy medical care, and so do I. His purchase of a CellGenomix SuperGeneHacker2048 to give himself another 10 years of life doesn't affect my right to do the same thing. Bill's right to an SGH2048 denies me nothing.
(Yes, this argument smacks of "Bill Gates has as much right to sleep in a cardboard box as any homeless guy":)
But I fail to see by what "right" I can take $1000 of Bill's money to buy myself a Ronco Gene-o-matic at WalMart that gives me an extra week or two, and in so doing, deny Bill the right to spend $1000 on the upgrade to an SGH2049?
> Uh huh. In any event, it doesn't take guns (unless Gates decides to fight), it takes a majority in Congress
You mean, if I ignore what a majority of Congresscritters write on a piece of paper, nobody with guns will come and take me away?
When did this happen, and why didn't someone tell me?!? This is so cool! I no longer have to pay any taxes at all, and I'm gonna start distributing DeCSS, and I'm gonna set up a big P2P MP3-sharing network, and...
Oh, wait. There's some folks with guns at my door telling me to stop all that.
Or do you mean that Gates shouldn't (in some moral sense) fight when his rights are violated. In which case, I suppose the DMCA is also just and fair and proper.
(FWIW, I comply with the DMCA for the same reason I do with the tax laws -- not because I believe them to be moral or just, but because it's more expensive, in terms of guys with guns making my life miserable -- to resist than to comply. Bill, on the other hand, might actually be rich enough, and Congress might be dumb enough, to pass tax laws where it would be cheaper for him to build an island outside territorial waters and raise an army of clones to defend it. YMMV.:-)
> So you think that if the rich live for say 30 years longer than the poor, the poor will still feel ok with it because they live longer than the kings of the 1600s? Or because they still live longer than the warlords in Sudan? How about if the rich live 50 years longer?
You're saying you'd rather live in this world:
1) Tack and Mike live to 90. Bill lives to 120.
...than:
2) Tack and Mike live to 100. Bill lives to 150.
...even if the net effect of your choosing #1 over #2 is that nobody builds gene-hackers because there's no profit in it. (This would be much like how we still don't have a Malaria vaccine, because those who would benefit most can't afford it). That leads to an increased probability of the status quo:
3) Tack and Mike and Bill live to 80.
I dunno about you, but I'll be quite happy the extra 10 years from door #2, even if it means we all have 20 more years of Outlook worms to deal with:)
> How much would I get if I blew up the building that housed hotmail.com?
Nothing. The spam doesn't come from Hotmail. Spammers forge hotmail.com dropboxes into the headers, but typically spam through dedicated machines hosted by spam-friendly providers.
If someone were to go apeshit with a SuperSoaker full of saline solution in ELI.NET's or Level3's datacenter, for instance, your load of inbound spam would probably decrease substantially.
There are some "ISPs" allegedly in Mexico and Brazil (but hosted via US-based backbones) that are no more than spammer fronts.
> While this is not robbing my local economy, it does not help it in any way. Potholes on streets will go unfixed, fewer policeman will be there to help, and state employees will have to do more with less in general, because the funds are less than expected. All from a simple ebay [ebay.com] purchase.
If you believe you have an obligation to fund it, cut a check to the Treasury of whatever government you choose. Most tax-collecting agencies have means through which citizens can say "Here, in addition to the money your laws already tell me I owe you, I'd like you to freely give you some more." Research them and pay whatever you think they deserve.
> The more tax-free money spent on the internet = less money to fund services that affect your daily life.
The more tax-free money spent on the internet, the less money to fund pork-barrel programs that don't affect your daily life.
> Taxes are always a necessary evil.
Fair enough, but who defines what level of taxation is "necessary", and how to ensure that every tax dollar collected goes towards necessary expenditures? Do you seriously believe that every dollar collected goes towards fixing potholes and protecting you from crime?
Frankly, given the number of state employees involved in $DUMB_IDEA (At the municipal level, Republicans would find "diversity initiatives" a dumb idea, Democrats would find "shutting down nightclubs due to Ecstasy scares" dumb idea, and Libertarians would find both to be dumb ideas:), I'd say the less tax money the government - any government - has to waste, the better.
The way to cut down on government waste is to starve it at the source. Anything less is like giving a 40-oz bottle of Stoli to a lifetime alcoholic every day, and expecting him to kick the habit.
> So you see no problem with a rich person living for 3 or more decades longer than a poor person? No conflict there with the "inalienable rights" guaranteed to all?
The inalienable right is to purchase one's own medical care with wealth one has acquired through productive work.
You have a right to purchase whatever medical care you can with the dollars you earn, as do I, as does Bill Gates.
The medical care I purchase won't be as good as what Gates purchases. If it's not good enough for me, I have the right to do without or save my money. I may not like Bill very much, but I fail to see how I have a right to take money from Mr. Gates to fund my purchase.
> BTW, why are you assuming I'm attacking capitalism? Does "capitalism" require a huge difference between the rich and the poor? Does capitalism require that the rich live much longer and healthier lives than the poor?
I base the assumption on my observation that most who view society as being composed of "the rich" and "ordinary folks" tend to oppose capitalism.
In answer to your questions, (wide wealth gap, rich living longer/healthier) no and no. Capitalism doesn't require these things at all, although I'll admit that these things typically result alongside capitalism.
The problem is, any system that prohibits these things is antithetical to capitalism. I've got nothing against encouraging charity, for instance, as a way for a rich guy to get rid of money he doesn't want. But that doesn't prevent wealth disparity under capitalism, since someone else is always free not to donate.
In order to prevent such disparities, eventually someone's gotta pick up a gun and say "Yo, Gates. Too much money. Too many toys. Too high a standard of living. You're giving that money to charity or we're taking it from you."
I don't have a problem with charity, but I do have a problem with picking up a gun and pointing it at someone and taking his stuff.
> Finally, what is the point of your dystopic vision of a post-nuclear world? Are you saying that the only choice available is accepting gross divisions between rich and poor or nuking the place?
OK, guilty as charged of hyperbole.:)
But that's not too far from we lived up until the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. If it weren't for rich folks funding investments in order to please themselves ("Yo, Mike-lo, paint my chapel ceiling, something with lots of cherubs!" and "Hey, that steam engine hooked up to a spinning wheel and another one hooked up to a loom could replace a lot of manual labor"), that's pretty much where we'd still be.
Witness the former Soviet Union - in their failed attempts to achived socialist utopia, 70 years after "ordinary folks got p***ed off at the rich", all they have to show for it is some good, cheap, reliable heavy-lift vehicles (originally designed for lobbing nukes, not space exploration), a best-on-the-planet biowarfare programme, and a life expectancy not too far removed from that of 300 years ago.
You can argue that "pure Capitalism" is an unreachable ideal, just as "pure Communism" is unreachable. (And I'd agree with both sentiments.)
But if you compare standards of living around the world, you'll find that "the poor" have done a damn sight better under countries with (flawed as they inevitably are) implementations of Capitalism versus any other social system.
Someone living on welfare in America today probably a higher standard of living (more toys, more food, refrigeration, better health care) than most of our grandparents. And as far "living longer and healthier" goes, 400 years of capitalism have left him better off than most kings of the 1600s.
> This kind of reminds me of an old question I used to go around asking people: Would you rather know the date of your death, or the method of your death? > > Inevitably, most people would stumble around a bit, and then finally settle on "neither", because nobody wants to live knowing that they'd only have 10 or so years left or this world, nor knowing that each time they stepped on an airplane could be their last.
I'll buy the argument for "method" but have never understood the argument for "date". If we assume our fate is predetermined (which we have to, for the question is meaningless without it), why wouldn't anyone want to know the date of their death?
If I have 80 years to go, I can invest long-term, and should probably keep my current job for another decade or two.
If I have 10 years to go, I can either work for another 5 years and live for 5 years of a moderate party lifestyle, or retire tomorrow and read Slashdot and play CounterStrike for the rest of my days.
If I have one year left, I can tell my boss to eat my shorts now, buy a Ferrari and a couple of hookers tomorrow, and haul ass across America, leaving a trail of burned rubber, pissed-off cops, 10-20 dead Black Angus cattle, and 200 very happy bartenders in my wake. W00T!
> Imagine how many starving children could be fed if those millionaires donated the $621,500 to charity instead of getting their genes mapped and finding out what illness might kill them.
Imagine what a wonderful world we'd have if the millionaires of 50-60 years ago had given the money to charity instead of investing in companies that mass-produced cheap effective vaccines against diptheria, tetanus, polio and smallpox.
> How much longer will the rich have to live before ordinary folks get really p**d off, do you think? >A decade? (you're right, probably already there when accidents are corrected out) > 2 decades? >3?
Yep. Damn those "rich" people for funding companies like Celera. Damn them to hell! Damn those big pharmaceuticals! Smash capitalism forever!
Life was so much more effective 400 years ago, when the average life expectancy was around half of what it is today.
Yes, I can see your utopia coming true in 30 years. I have visions of a small group of illiterate former humans scrabbling through the ashes of what was once a laboratory. I see one of them picking up a gene sequencer. I see him using the gene sequencer to advance his tribe's position.
Of course, he's using it by shoving it out a broken window so that it lands on top of a neighboring tribe's leader, crushing his skull like a bug. But hey, at least you got rid of capitalism, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
>
> as for customization, if your a geek, and applying for a network heavy job, wouldnt you want to emphasize those skills, as opposed to your SQL skills?
You're both missing the point of the "Objectives:" section.
In the example you cited, your "Objective" is "To work on networks in a $BUZZ1 company in the $BUZZ2 industry."
$BUZZ1 should be an adjective taken from the company's mission statement or some other such fluff. $BUZZ2 should be the company's industry.
If it's a behemoth like Intel or Microsoft, you can do one better, by aiming for the department to which you're applying.
Suppose you're a router geek and you're replying to a position in the Windows Media Player 12 group. That leads to "To work on network optimization and design and cryptographic authentication with a leading company in the field of rights-enabled streaming media."
It doesn't matter that WMP12 is 2% of the revenue MSFT gets from Office 2008 - what matters is that your resume comes across the desk of the HR drone whose boss is convinced that streaming media, crippled with DRM, is the wave of the fy00t0re, and that you're interested in his pet project.
The HR drone will see the buzzwords her boss raves about, pass the resume to the boss, the boss will say "Gee, this guy doesn't just want a job, he wants this job. Bring him in for an interview and see if he actually knows what he's talking about."
Bonus points if you have prior experience in the field (e.g. Real, LiquidAudio, MP3.com, somelivepr0ndotcomnobodyeverheardof.com) of course. But even if you don't, if you manage to get your foot in the door (telephone interview), you can talk about how you were bored writing accounting applications for some third-rate company and how the problems you had getting live streams of stock quotes through some ODBC app were pretty much the same problems you'd seen when you started throwing streams of MP3z around your home LAN, and that you saturated it when you tried sending DiVX movies around... and how you thought it might be more fun to get paid to solve these sorts of problems than the sorts of problems you used to be getting paid to solve.
What you do at the interview is up to you. Hey, this thread was about how to get your foot in the door :)
>
> It depresses everybody it seems and they hunker down and don't spend. Plus, higher oil pricess.
In the short term, yes.
Which is why I say, once we've got our men and materiel in place, let's get the damn war started already.
Once the war's over with, and we've seized the oil fields (and/or turned them over to allied nations), oil drops to $20 (or less!), and we've got 40-year-low interest rates. Then the economy can recover.
I'd much rather see that - low oil prices - used to bail out the airlines rather than another $5B in taxpayer bucks.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Your headhunter wants to get you hired anywhere, so he can collect his cut of the loot.
You what to be hired somewhere you'll want to stay, which ain't necessarily the first company with an offer.
>
> People ate well and indulged in excess long before market economies become dominant. Take a look at how the royals of Europe lived.
I have, and the ponit of my post was that as a result of free market economics, I (and hundreds of millions of "wage slaves" like me) live better than Louis XIV could have hoped to. Unless you're living on the street (unlikely), so do you.
> Building Versailles didn't save the French crown...why would fiber optics necessarily reinforce your system?
Building Versailles couldn't save the French crown. Marie said let 'em eat cake, but nobody had cake.
And yet today, I can buy a pretty nice cake for about 15 minutes' worth of work for my employer, and 10 minutes' worth of work for the Government.
The slogan of the French Revolution should have been "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Choose any two."
True enough, but please - take back that ugly slur you made against horse shit.
This rant isn't really directed at him, he's just the unlucky SOB who wrote the following couple of lines,
> The IMF protestors have one thing right - if you want attention you've got to break something. The Bolsheviks had it down even better - if you want real change you have to smash an entire system.
So now we know what the protestors are really aiming for. Now we know what their ideal is.
Hands up, anyone who wants the kind of "change" the former Soviet Union experienced for 75 years before finally imploding and having the kind of "change" it's had for the past 10 years.
Tell you what. You keep smashing. We - the capitalists you hate - will keep building. We'll keep building the skyscrapers (even after you knock them down), the air conditioning for summer, the heating for winter, the clothes you buy at the GAP, the clothes you buy at Birkenstock's, the $0.99 burgers with the $4.00 lattes (OK, sometimes we fsck up), the refrigerators that store the $10/pound filet mignon so that you don't have to buy your food from McRaunchy's, the communications satellites, the fiber-optics, the cures for cancer, the $50 1.4 GHz CPUs... at least for now.
(If you really don't want us around, maybe we'll just leave. From whom would you get your computers and clothes and housing and food then? But don't worry about that. For now, we'll keep building.)
Meantime, it's nice to have you out of the closet.
I'd take it one step further - $400 doesn't buy you a vote to elect a Congressdroid, $400 buys you a vote on a bill.
And at $400 per vote per bill, all of a sudden my vote counts as much as Hilary Rosen's.
Seems to me that under such a system, we'd have the DMCA repealed in a week, and there wouldn't be a goddamn thing Jack or Hilary could do about it.
> A better idea would be either service of some kind (military, non-military government, or charity), a minimum level of education, or [my favorite] a test.
I really like the idea of competency testing for voting even under our present system (I adopted this when I heard someone - seriously - advocating color-coded ballots for a municipal election so the illiterate couldn't be "discriminated against" because they couldn't read the candidates' names), so I'd combine both approaches. A competency test, and a $400 fee, per bill.
To prevent ballot stuffing by Jack and Hilary, it's still one vote per voter per bill. RIAA can still spend megabucks on a PR campaign, but they have to convince the Soccer Moms and Joe Sixpacks to spend $400 of their hard-earned money to enact the CBDTPA -- and that's gonna be much harder sell than convincing them to spend nothing to vote for "the guy with the better haircut because my favorite celebrity said to." (Or spending a few tens of kilobucks per Senator to be rewarded with a snort of coke from between a pair of plastic tits.)
One might even buy voting credits with tax dollars. Pay $40000 in tax, get 100 voting credits ("vote credits" would probably be cryptographic keys encrypted with the voter's public key) for that year.
I suppose the system could be defeated, by, say, RIAA and MPAA buying enough Congresscritters to introduce the same bill, every day, over and over again until the $100K/year (~200 votes/year) geeks finally run out of voting credits, but I'm gambling that the Copyright Cartel are like cockroaches, in that they wouldn't like to be forced out into the open like that.
>
> Oh jesus christ, you want it to crash or something?
If the goddamn thing were deorbited onto the Shuttle fleet, NASA would suddenly have a motivation to build a real heavy-lift capability.
And with the budget dollars freed up in the absence of the black-hole of ISS sucking science dollars into a low-earth-orbit white-elephant, we might even get some friggin' science done.
So yeah, how 'bout it, Mr. Gates? :)
I think I speak for all of Slashdot when I say "Evil. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
OK, we'll send a DVD-burner and a bunch of blanks in a the relay station that can manage high-bandwidth communications with the probe. ("Hey d00dz! I 4m 1337! My c4s3 m0d iz in m4rz 0rb1t!")
The relay slurps the data and writes a track to the DVD, then detaches a small return vehicle that (after getting to a safe distance) flies home. For redundancy (and to piss off Jack Valenti), the blank is duplicated and stored somewhere on the main probe. (Worst-case scenario, a future probe docks with the main probe and flies back with a dozen DVD-ROMs.)
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a DVD attached to a rocket, or somethin' like that. Mebbe we can get Netflix to sponsor the return vehicle ;-)
I got the same question. Yeah, the envirol00nz really did take over the airwaves.
My answer was "Because it's not just the best technology for the job, it's the only technology for the job, and we've done it dozens of times before. Oh yeah, and just what do you think we spewed into the atmosphere during the dozens of surface, air, and space-burst nuke tests back in the 50s? If these envirofscks were even close to reality, we'd have all died 20 years ago."
> You have to remember who was at the helm of NASA for 10 years, Goldin did whatever was necessary to make him look good.
Yep. And he was a complete failure at that, too.
Agreed.
My beef with NASA is that once they find a brilliant solution to a problem that works perfectly, they rarely, if ever, use it again.
"Congratulations, you solved the Mars landing problem cheaper, better, and faster. Now we're going to deploy our next lander the old-fashioned way. Heck, we'll even use old-fashioned units of measurement!"
Seemingly in parallel with this, once NASA finds an expensive solution to a problem, they keep it going for decades. The Shuttle and ISS are perfect examples of this.
Meantime, haven't these guys heard of an economy of scale? Would it have been that much more expensive to build 2, 3, or 10 Pathfinders instead of one? (I dunno, maybe - but there's a point at which it would have been cheaper to mass-produce 'em.) Keep the spares in storage and launch 'em as vehicles become available on the cheap.
(Hell, let some engineering students build a whole bunch on the cheap and use the MIRV approach on a heavy-lift vehicle to lob 10 of 'em at Mars simultaneously per launch window, thereby cutting construction costs and overwhelming the Martian space defence initiative with sheer numbers :-)
D'oh! (I was so close to getting it, but missed that obvious-in-retrospect point! Thanks for the encluement.)
>Recording quality not as good - depending on the band, the recorder and show, the acoustics and equipment aren't as good as live CD's and certainly not as clean as studio.
I've always wondered about this - I know this sounds like a troll, but it's a sincere question:
(OK, that doesn't apply to getting the whole show straight off the soundboard, but still, you see where I'm coming from here, right? Is this all just an outgrowth of the tape-trading tradition of never adding generations unless necessary? I grok that - and likewise, would prefer to keep an "original" MP3 than burn it to WAV on CD, lest that WAV get re-ripped and re-encoded to a 2nd-generation MP3. But lossless for live recordings just seems bizarre to me.)
> Then they came for the %B; I wasnt a %B so I didnt care;
>Then they came for the me; but there was nobody left to care.
>
> my apologies for the Terrible paraphrase.
>
>can anyone correct me... and provide credit?
First they came for the Anonymous Cowards, but I had my Slashdot account, so I didn't care.
They they came for the numeric scores, but I was already above the Karma cap, so I didn't care.
They they came for the Trolls, but I still had Karma to burn, so I didn't care.
Then UCSD took down the HREF to the terrorists and the only URL I could go to was goatse.cx!
(+10, Gritty)
OK, where's my grits? :-)
"Someday, you kids! Someday!"
- Hilary Rosen after six beers and a Palladium conference.
>
> Switch it too:
> Gates buys Abrams tanks and defends his mansion against the invading commie armies.
>
> Tack and Mike get killed by commies because we have no tanks
Well, with one modification. Only Mike gets killed. Tack lives to 85 because he signs on as a gunner in one of Bill's tanks. (I'd have made it to 100, but I screwed up and tried to drive through the IRS-planted minefield around the Free State of Gatesville, formerly known as Redmond :)
FWIW, I'm in favor of paying taxes for things like the common defense. For instance, against invading commie armies from outside the US. Ditto for cops and even roads.
Problem is, what if the commie armies attacking Bill aren't coming from outside the US, but are already here? (I think we're a helluvalong way from that point, and I don't think we'll get there, but as long as we're speaking hypothetically...)
If a country can stick to "Bill should give up some of his money in order to provide for things like cops and soldiers", it's probably OK in the long run.
But when it starts to adopt notions like "Bill should give up some of his money because he's got more than everyone else does", I get worried, because it's not too far a jump from there to "...and Bill should die earlier so that others can live longer."
Does Bill have a right to his own life, or does he have a right to his life only as long as he can be a milch-cow for us?
(Which is where I'll sign off, as we're probably the only two people reading this anymore. But it's been good debating with you. Our threads will likely cross again :)
When I (through voting for representatives who will pass laws that authorize the IRS to) take $1000 out of Bill Gates' pocket to buy me medical care that I couldn't otherwise afford, who's being denied medical care?
The crux of our disagreement is on the notion of "right" is.
So - in my view - Bill's got the "right" to buy medical care, and so do I. His purchase of a CellGenomix SuperGeneHacker2048 to give himself another 10 years of life doesn't affect my right to do the same thing. Bill's right to an SGH2048 denies me nothing.
(Yes, this argument smacks of "Bill Gates has as much right to sleep in a cardboard box as any homeless guy" :)
But I fail to see by what "right" I can take $1000 of Bill's money to buy myself a Ronco Gene-o-matic at WalMart that gives me an extra week or two, and in so doing, deny Bill the right to spend $1000 on the upgrade to an SGH2049?
> Uh huh. In any event, it doesn't take guns (unless Gates decides to fight), it takes a majority in Congress
You mean, if I ignore what a majority of Congresscritters write on a piece of paper, nobody with guns will come and take me away?
When did this happen, and why didn't someone tell me?!? This is so cool! I no longer have to pay any taxes at all, and I'm gonna start distributing DeCSS, and I'm gonna set up a big P2P MP3-sharing network, and...
Oh, wait. There's some folks with guns at my door telling me to stop all that.
Or do you mean that Gates shouldn't (in some moral sense) fight when his rights are violated. In which case, I suppose the DMCA is also just and fair and proper.
(FWIW, I comply with the DMCA for the same reason I do with the tax laws -- not because I believe them to be moral or just, but because it's more expensive, in terms of guys with guns making my life miserable -- to resist than to comply. Bill, on the other hand, might actually be rich enough, and Congress might be dumb enough, to pass tax laws where it would be cheaper for him to build an island outside territorial waters and raise an army of clones to defend it. YMMV. :-)
> So you think that if the rich live for say 30 years longer than the poor, the poor will still feel ok with it because they live longer than the kings of the 1600s? Or because they still live longer than the warlords in Sudan? How about if the rich live 50 years longer?
You're saying you'd rather live in this world:
1) Tack and Mike live to 90. Bill lives to 120.
2) Tack and Mike live to 100. Bill lives to 150.
3) Tack and Mike and Bill live to 80.
I dunno about you, but I'll be quite happy the extra 10 years from door #2, even if it means we all have 20 more years of Outlook worms to deal with :)
Nothing. The spam doesn't come from Hotmail. Spammers forge hotmail.com dropboxes into the headers, but typically spam through dedicated machines hosted by spam-friendly providers.
If someone were to go apeshit with a SuperSoaker full of saline solution in ELI.NET's or Level3's datacenter, for instance, your load of inbound spam would probably decrease substantially.
There are some "ISPs" allegedly in Mexico and Brazil (but hosted via US-based backbones) that are no more than spammer fronts.
If you believe you have an obligation to fund it, cut a check to the Treasury of whatever government you choose. Most tax-collecting agencies have means through which citizens can say "Here, in addition to the money your laws already tell me I owe you, I'd like you to freely give you some more." Research them and pay whatever you think they deserve.
> The more tax-free money spent on the internet = less money to fund services that affect your daily life.
The more tax-free money spent on the internet, the less money to fund pork-barrel programs that don't affect your daily life.
> Taxes are always a necessary evil.
Fair enough, but who defines what level of taxation is "necessary", and how to ensure that every tax dollar collected goes towards necessary expenditures? Do you seriously believe that every dollar collected goes towards fixing potholes and protecting you from crime?
Frankly, given the number of state employees involved in $DUMB_IDEA (At the municipal level, Republicans would find "diversity initiatives" a dumb idea, Democrats would find "shutting down nightclubs due to Ecstasy scares" dumb idea, and Libertarians would find both to be dumb ideas :), I'd say the less tax money the government - any government - has to waste, the better.
The way to cut down on government waste is to starve it at the source. Anything less is like giving a 40-oz bottle of Stoli to a lifetime alcoholic every day, and expecting him to kick the habit.
The inalienable right is to purchase one's own medical care with wealth one has acquired through productive work.
You have a right to purchase whatever medical care you can with the dollars you earn, as do I, as does Bill Gates.
The medical care I purchase won't be as good as what Gates purchases. If it's not good enough for me, I have the right to do without or save my money. I may not like Bill very much, but I fail to see how I have a right to take money from Mr. Gates to fund my purchase.
> BTW, why are you assuming I'm attacking capitalism? Does "capitalism" require a huge difference between the rich and the poor? Does capitalism require that the rich live much longer and healthier lives than the poor?
I base the assumption on my observation that most who view society as being composed of "the rich" and "ordinary folks" tend to oppose capitalism.
In answer to your questions, (wide wealth gap, rich living longer/healthier) no and no. Capitalism doesn't require these things at all, although I'll admit that these things typically result alongside capitalism.
The problem is, any system that prohibits these things is antithetical to capitalism. I've got nothing against encouraging charity, for instance, as a way for a rich guy to get rid of money he doesn't want. But that doesn't prevent wealth disparity under capitalism, since someone else is always free not to donate.
In order to prevent such disparities, eventually someone's gotta pick up a gun and say "Yo, Gates. Too much money. Too many toys. Too high a standard of living. You're giving that money to charity or we're taking it from you."
I don't have a problem with charity, but I do have a problem with picking up a gun and pointing it at someone and taking his stuff.
> Finally, what is the point of your dystopic vision of a post-nuclear world? Are you saying that the only choice available is accepting gross divisions between rich and poor or nuking the place?
OK, guilty as charged of hyperbole. :)
But that's not too far from we lived up until the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. If it weren't for rich folks funding investments in order to please themselves ("Yo, Mike-lo, paint my chapel ceiling, something with lots of cherubs!" and "Hey, that steam engine hooked up to a spinning wheel and another one hooked up to a loom could replace a lot of manual labor"), that's pretty much where we'd still be.
Witness the former Soviet Union - in their failed attempts to achived socialist utopia, 70 years after "ordinary folks got p***ed off at the rich", all they have to show for it is some good, cheap, reliable heavy-lift vehicles (originally designed for lobbing nukes, not space exploration), a best-on-the-planet biowarfare programme, and a life expectancy not too far removed from that of 300 years ago.
You can argue that "pure Capitalism" is an unreachable ideal, just as "pure Communism" is unreachable. (And I'd agree with both sentiments.)
But if you compare standards of living around the world, you'll find that "the poor" have done a damn sight better under countries with (flawed as they inevitably are) implementations of Capitalism versus any other social system.
Someone living on welfare in America today probably a higher standard of living (more toys, more food, refrigeration, better health care) than most of our grandparents. And as far "living longer and healthier" goes, 400 years of capitalism have left him better off than most kings of the 1600s.
>
> Inevitably, most people would stumble around a bit, and then finally settle on "neither", because nobody wants to live knowing that they'd only have 10 or so years left or this world, nor knowing that each time they stepped on an airplane could be their last.
I'll buy the argument for "method" but have never understood the argument for "date". If we assume our fate is predetermined (which we have to, for the question is meaningless without it), why wouldn't anyone want to know the date of their death?
If I have 80 years to go, I can invest long-term, and should probably keep my current job for another decade or two.
If I have 10 years to go, I can either work for another 5 years and live for 5 years of a moderate party lifestyle, or retire tomorrow and read Slashdot and play CounterStrike for the rest of my days.
If I have one year left, I can tell my boss to eat my shorts now, buy a Ferrari and a couple of hookers tomorrow, and haul ass across America, leaving a trail of burned rubber, pissed-off cops, 10-20 dead Black Angus cattle, and 200 very happy bartenders in my wake. W00T!
Imagine what a wonderful world we'd have if the millionaires of 50-60 years ago had given the money to charity instead of investing in companies that mass-produced cheap effective vaccines against diptheria, tetanus, polio and smallpox.
>A decade? (you're right, probably already there when accidents are corrected out)
> 2 decades?
>3?
Yep. Damn those "rich" people for funding companies like Celera. Damn them to hell! Damn those big pharmaceuticals! Smash capitalism forever!
Life was so much more effective 400 years ago, when the average life expectancy was around half of what it is today.
Yes, I can see your utopia coming true in 30 years. I have visions of a small group of illiterate former humans scrabbling through the ashes of what was once a laboratory. I see one of them picking up a gene sequencer. I see him using the gene sequencer to advance his tribe's position.
Of course, he's using it by shoving it out a broken window so that it lands on top of a neighboring tribe's leader, crushing his skull like a bug. But hey, at least you got rid of capitalism, huh?