1Q01: $903M income before tax, $320M income tax expense.
2Q01: $1.32B income before tax, $470M income tax expense.
3Q01: $785M income before tax, $275M income tax expense.
4Q01: $845M income before tax, $295M income tax expense.
Your political bias is showing. (OK, so's mine. Guilty as charged.;-) But corporations pay assloads of tax too.
> [MD state.gov does all its stuff on paper.] Auditing this information takes months. The savings in
this area alone could justify such a purchase. Auditing time could be cut drastically. Code could be
written to locate discrepancies in the data. This doesn't even take into account things like payroll
systems which could be automated. Doing that would allow the state to eliminate the positions of the
hundreds of people with little-to-no education they have working in their payroll department.
> > Bill Gates (love him or hate him) really hit the nail on the head in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought. It really outlines how technology can be used to increase the flow of information, while at the same time reducing the cost associated with acting on that information. > >Maybe someone in the California government will take charge and turn this bad situation into a golden
opportunity!
Why would they do that?
If a private sector employer did all its work on paper, having to hire thousands of unskilled workers and pay them benefits, it would have to raise prices (making competing products cheaper, driving its own customers away), or go bankrupt due to the higher expenses.
The government can't go bankrupt -- nor can its customers purchase their services from a competing government. It's a monpoly - not in the Gatesian sense, but in the guys-with-guns sense. You can always dump Windows for Linux, but try explaining that "Joe's Auto Licensing Inc" does a better job than your state DMV the next time you get pulled over and asked to show your driver's license!
The more folks a department in.gov hires, the more important the people who run that department become. The department's inefficient, slow, and costs too much to run? No problem! That just means we need more money! Who cares about the costs, we can always raise taxes, the taxpayer's good for the money.
And besides, what are the taxpayers gonna do, buy their schools, roads, and police and fire departments from someone else? That's illegal! (Whew, good thing we make the laws that control that part, or we'd be fucked! OK, you can buy your schools from someone else if you really wanna, but you still gotta pay for ours:-)
And the other stuff.govs do? Taxpayers buying their diversity training programs and social security and sensitivity classes and unemployment insurance and welfare from someone else? Hey, most people wouldn't buy those things at all. (Gee, also a good thing we can pass laws to make buying those things from us mandatory!:-)
Governments will modernize and eliminate waste when they have an incentive to eliminate that waste. The only incentive that's been shown to motivate such cost reductions is the profit incentive. (Kinda a tautology, no? Only people who care about making money care about not spending it.) The government - by defintion - has no profit incentive. The private sector - again by definition - is all about profit incentive.
So no, nobody in any government will "see this as a golden opportunity", because it's not an opportunity, because doing business at the speed of anything faster than a sloth on valium isn't what governments are about.
> [at least the wasted money] went back to the private sector... after how much the US has stolen in taxes over these many years, call it a one time tax cut...
Well, half of it did. Oracle pays taxes on its profits, don't forget.
Lessee. Taxpayers earn $200M. Governments loot $100M. Government spends $100M on Oracle warez. Oracle makes $100M more profit (hey, how much does it cost 'em to stamp 1000 CDs?) Governments loot $50M of Oracle's $100M.
Net result: Taxpayers produce $200M of wealth. Taxpayer-to-Oracle subsidy of $50M. Taxpayer-to-Government subsidy of $50M.
OK, I suppose you're right - that's better than a Taxpayer-to-Government subsidy of $100M. At least...
> I would rather the money be in private hands than in public hands (so do a lot of other people, its called the stock market).
...taxpayers can get some of their $100M back by investing in ORCL:-)
As you say, though, if the net effect is that the government keeps $50M of taxpayer dollars, I'd still much rather the government merely content itself to loot only $50M of taxpayer money to begin with, and let me decide where to put the other $50M.
> Pay typical state wages to those making decisions and get poor decisions in return. When the state becomes wage-competitive with other industries, you'll get higher quality people in state jobs and less sloppy decisions.
Huh? How would raising taxes to pay higher civil service salaries encourage civil servants to spend said money more wisely?
Most.gov bureaucrats would say "Wow, we have more money coming in. Better spend it!"
How about "when the state has to compete like a private industry by providing services in exchange for dollars (instead of just saying "all your tax dollars are belong to us" with the stroke of a pen), you'll get higher-quality decisions."
> Funny, I live in Germany and am married to a German woman who just *loves* Hogan's Heroes. (Dubbed into German, of course.) And she's not the only German I know who likes it or quotes from it. (For the record, Col. Klink is dubbed with a Saxon accent; Sgt. Schultz is dubbed with a thick Bavarian accent. Which is actually kinda cute.)
And to take it one step further - Hogan's Heroes is funny because it mirrors real life in peacetime, not in wartime. I'll draw a more current parallel between Hogan's Heroes and Dilbert:
Col. Klink - the incompetent middle manager (pointy-haired boss)
Sgt. Schulz - the incompetent office grunt (Wally!)
Hochstedter - the guy who believes in enforcing policy and ideology, no matter how crazy (the classic Human Resources/Accounting paradigm)
Gen. Burqhalter (sp) - every once in a while, the CEO shows up, expresses frustration at middle management that the project failed, but can never quite prove that anyone screwed up enough to fire them.
The Allied Prisoners - The people who actually get the day-to-day work done - either behind management's back or in spite of management's best efforts. And when ever that fails, by saving their manager's ass when the CEO's in town, and keeping the gravy train running:-)
Typical dialogue from just about any episode:
Hogan: "See, Klink? The reason you've never had an escape from Stalag 13 is 'cuz even though we're your prisoners, we love you, and you're just too damn good at keeping this place running well!"
Klink: "Ahhh... yes... Yes, you know, Hogan, even though we're on different sides of this war, I think you're finally starting to see things our way!"
Hogan: "The place wouldn't be the same without you, Colonel!"
> I am thinking that creating 'imitation' child pornography is not any better. Somewhat like robbing a store with a fake gun.
Thank you for bringing this up. (And I agree with you).
If you take a potato, carve it into the shape of a gun, and paint it black, and point it at someone, even though it's not a gun, you still go down for armed robbery.
Why? Because the guy you threatened with a potato doesn't have the time to analyze whether it's "real or not".
Because when you get arrested, you can't say "Sorry, Officer, I only pointed a potato at him. Not a gun. Too bad you can't prove it either way because you never found the weapon and the store's surveillance video doesn't make it clear" and get the "armed" part of the robbery charge dropped.
Likewise for Photoshopping kids.
We've all seen the advances in CGI in the past 10 years ("Clinton" speaking in the movie Contact, the real-time alteration of billboards in Times Square on New Year's Eve, etc). 10 years from now, it'll be impossible to tell the "virtual" pr0n from the "real" pr0n.
Today's ruling means that, 10 years from now, some landshark's gonna get up on the stand and convince a jury of 12 that there's reasonable doubt that his client didn't posess a real video - that it was just a computer-generated rendering indistinguishable from the real thing.
And some scumbag - indeed, every scumbag arrested for posession of such videos, whether real or not - is gonna walk free. Because it'll be very difficult to prove beyond that reasonable doubt that the material was "really real" and not "just really sick CGI".
Anyone supporting this ruling should realize that they're arguing that, for all intents and purposes, the posession of real child pr0n should also be legal. (That is, still illegal, but the law will become unenforceable because the DA will never be able to get a prosecution.) While that may be a defensible position, it's not one I agree with, and it's not one I think the voters will agree with. It's emphatically not one that the court believes in; the First Amendment doesn't protect obscenity, and I'm astounded that the Supreme Court didn't realize the implications that easily-anticipated advances in technology have in store for their ruling.
C'mon, Slashdotters - if (as I think most of us are) we're willing to accept that a machine that passes the Turing test (that is, is indistinguishable from a thinking human being) can be said to "think" - ought we not to realize that the same logic applies to pr0n?
> He deserved it. "Scientific creationism" is a contradiction in terms.
Agreed on the latter, but I disagree vehemently on the former.
Taking Forrest Mims' little paperbacks at Radio Shack for example -- the laws that govern electronics are the same whether God slacked off for six days and pulled an all nighter, or if evolution is correct.
I fail to see the relevance of his unscientific beliefs with regards to biology if he's writing a column of hands-on science projects. Sometimes smart people make mistakes outside of their area of expertise.
A similar example would be that of Linus Pauling (winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for chemistry). It appears that Linus Pauling was just plain wrong about vitamin C. This in no way invalidates his other outstanding work as a chemist.
The difference is that Pauling wasn't raked over the coals for being wrong about one particular thing, and Mims was. IMNSHO, so long as Mims kept his creationist beliefs out of his electronics columns (and I can't imagine any project which would require us knowing about them:-), Mims' treatment was unjust.
> Going to have to disagree with you there. I think it depends on the location of the RadioShack and who you speak with when you go.
What you said. I do most of my shopping at surplus electronics stores, but there are still a few (a very few) Radio Shacks that are true to the faith.
My old town: Very much the stereotypical "You've got questions, we've got blank stares" kind of store.
My new town:
Me: [reluctantly goes into RS, hey, it's nearby and I might get lucky and save myself a long drive... yay, I find the parts!]
RS guy: [seeing one of those little 600-ohm telephone transformers and some 10M resistors] So - buildin' a radio or a line finder?
Me: Line finder. Hangin' a painting in a new apartment, but yeah, once I find where my wiring is, I oughta build a crystal radio, I haven't done that since I was a kid - HEY! This is isn't supposed to happen at Radio Shack!
RS guy: (Laughs) - Yeah, there aren't many of us left who still build for the fun of it.
Me: You said it. Nice to see there's still some of us left - you wouldn't happen to know where I could get a $PARTNUM for the vertical deflection on $TV_MODEL, would you? (/me shows datasheet)
RS guy: (nodding) I've seen that - very common failure mode with that set. (/he points at a cap on the reference design page). Usually this cap has dried out, which takes out the deflection amp. We don't have the amp, but [gives name/address of local TV repair guy about 3 blocks away] does. If it's more the amp or the caps, he also does good work.
We talked shop for a few minutes after that, basically the same things as this Slashdot thread, namely that disposable/replacable modules and the shift to SMT and ASICs made repair work easier (swap modules) and electronics cheaper and better -- but that the price was that it was gonna be very hard for anyone starting from scratch to ever "learn it all from scratch" anymore. You can cobble together some neat stuff with TTL and discrete components, but there's a huge jump in cost and learning curve to get from there to playing with, say, FPGAs.
But hey, a couple of days later, I had the picture safely attached to the wall without fear of nailing through a live wire, the TV was fixed, and that Shack had a customer for life.
> Southern Baptist -- "See? They worshipped their gods and look what our God did to them!" >Hindu -- "We were right all along." >Creationist -- "Let's see how long it will be before the evolutionists try to cover this one up." >Evolutionist -- "Where is my shovel?" >Historian -- "Legends really do rave a basis in fact, whoda thunk it?" >Captialist -- "Get your 6 temple tour here today!" >Di$ney -- "We are working on our new film, Searh for the six temples. PLease pay our Congressmen accordingly." >Mafia -- "Oh damn, there goes our hiding spot."
Illuminist: "And those Discordian bastards stole the statues we were planning to sell them!"
Discordian: "Hot shit! 8 months after a splinter group of the Leauge of Assassins goes apeshit, 6 months after we barely catch the germ warfare leaks in time, and only a week after we buy the luxury submarine we read about on Slashdot, and we've got the gold Atlantean statues! Finally, we can buy the Mob back from the Illuminati and stop the power grab in the States. (Dorn, that's your job!) The rest of us will haul ass through the secret tunnel to Lake Totenkopf! Let's move it, we've only got three weeks to go before they immanentize the Eschaton!"
(I gave up on reality when I realized the The Illuminatus! Trilogy, (1975), was a better guide to world events fnord than CNN. Robert Anton Wilson was right -- science fiction fnord authors aren't writing fiction, they're just people who happen to be travelling backwards in time fnord and they're writing their memoirs...)
> "If only they would devote a little bit of the millions of dollars they're spending on
this ad campaign to help stop illegal downloading... but that wouldn't help them sell
more CD burners, would it," said Hilary Rosen"
And mine.
News flash, Hilary. Gateway isn't in business to sell your product.
That's YOUR job.
This is on a par with a news release from the National Deep-Dish Pizza Association reading: "You know, if only Hilary would devote a little bit of the millions of dollars she's spending on buying Congressmen to help buy everyone a pizza. But that wouldn't help her sell more CDs, would it?"
> But really, what is the online-privacy and free-speech fight really? It is large corporations fighting each other to see which one gets to write the laws. There is a debate going on, but we are not really part of it, except as the Prize. If a divorcing couple fight over who gets to keep the Car, they aren't really worried about what the Car wants.
Right. We're the little kids caught in the middle of a nasty divorce.
But if Mommy's a crack whore who locks us in the closet and turns a blind eye to what her "boyfriends" do to us when she needs a hit...
...and Daddy makes $20K/year working 16 hours a day, feeds us pizza, and basically ignores us the rest of the time or sends us off to our aunt's place when he can't make ends meet...
...and our wacky spinster aunt is the crazy one who gives us stuffed penguins, takes us to SCA conventions on weekends, reads stories about gnus and daemons to us at night, and gives us Lego Mindstorms whenever she gets the chance...
...then I don't care that the judicial system is predisposed to letting Mom keep custody. Dad may only want us around 'cuz we're his tax deductions, but he doesn't mind us spending time with Auntie Penguin, and that makes him OK in my books.
Like the other respondent to your post said - maybe Gateway ain't your friend, but right now, that cow is a valuable ally.
"Well, that may be what I wrote, but obviously, you misinterpreted it! It's trivially shown in the literature that it's the deconstruction that's important in Pinky and the Brain - the genius ghost of Pac-Man is now the idiot comic relief, while the fat, pokey Clyde of Pac-Man is the genius who threatens world domination! (Just as Pac-Man itself is arguably the Hegelian synthesis of the American Atari thesis with the Japanese Namco antithesis) You see, I have a Ph.D. in Neo-Lucasian Mythic Literature and you don't!":-)
> Look at what he's really saying here: >
Thesis: Microsoft products >Antithesis: Marketplace > >
Says it all, really:-)
Not quite all. Doesn't it strike you as odd that Microsoft is attacking the GPL as "communistic", while absorbed in some sort of dialectical materialist "Our eventual ownership of 4ll j00r b4se is the inevitable result of the Hegelian synthesis" doctrine?
Remember, kids, when you use Microsoft products, you're using Communism!
> Vader is Lancelot (father that fails) to Luke's Galahad (son who succeeds). > >
All this discussion is just pushing Campbell's thesis. Whether Lucas consciously or unconsciously meant his characters to fall in line with the monomyth is an entirely different question. > >
_Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ also has a great deal of monomythic elements to it, but Joss Whedon has admitted himself that he hasn't read _Hero with a Thousand Faces_.
So does _Pac Man_. Inky, the dark one, Blinky, the red one, aggressive with passion, Pinky - as in Pinky and the Brain - the fast genius who's the greatest threat, and Clyde, for comic relief. All set up in a backdrop of the ideology of mass consumption iconified by yellow, the color of cowardice - we're too scared to confront our desire to consume until we energize and empower ourselves (the energy pills), after which time we can turn the tables on our ghostly enemies and devour them.
It's like astrology. Make your "monomyth" broad enough to include anything, and anything will fit the pattern.
"[Tech firms] seem satisfied to try to attack it in the press rather than trying to make it
[CBDTPA] work," said Sen. Hollings spokesman Andy Davis.
<FLASHBACK>
Imaginary interview with Hollings and Davis:
Hollings: It's like the time we tried to legislate that pi=3, and these stupid tech forms didn't want to make it work! They kept doggedly insisting that it was this long number, like 3.14159something, and that it couldn't be expressed as a rational number!
Davis: Yeah, I mean, they wouldn't even compromise on the issue - during Congressional testimony, we had Andy Grove of Intel on the stand, and we offered him "3.14?" He said, "no, it's pi" "22/7?" "No, pi is a transcendental number." Utterly ridiculous. As if good Christians should have to put up with this sort of new age Transcendentalist movement. Maybe in California, but not in South Carolina, by gum!
Hollings: And the engineers were worse than the mathematicians. We got letters from all these so-called rational thinkers tryin' to convince us that simple things like the wheel and the suspension bridge weren't based on rational numbers! Can't they see that they're the ones being irrational about this?
Davis: There's just no negotiating with technology people. They don't want to make it work, they don't even want to try to make it work. Why won't they even try to see things from our point of view?
Hollings: So we're moving ahead with the legislation. They kept trying to get us to move from 3 to 3.14whatever? We subtracted double than their beloved 0.14159265whatever, and came up with 2.718281828. They can have pi=2.718 or nothing at all!
Davis: They're bluffing when they say math won't work with our proposal. Maybe it'll just make a few things harder for them in the short term, but when the law makes pi=2.718, they'll have to innovate in order to build anything!
Hollings: Yeah! Now we'll see who really knows how to promote engineering and mathematical innovation our children's schools!
> What is it with these opt-out fanatics? It seems like a pretty bare-faced admission that they know that
people don't want their products/services. Why must the vast majority of us who don't want to be
solicited go out of our way to be left alone? Finally, what does it say about your product/service when
your target audience is too inept to request it?
It says "We're marketers-for-hire! Our job is to con your boss into thinking we can help him con his customers! If your boss, who at lest knows how much his product sux0rz, is dumb enough to fall for this, then surely his customers must be dumb enough to fall for it too!"
> Well... I read his as a quote once and found it rather funny, I don't remember where it was and who it was from but there it goes:
> >
If a large number of poor people contribute, they can make up for a rich man. But than again, it takes a large number of poor people to make a rich man.
Allow me to descend into rampant classism for a moment:
"If you pour a glass of wine into a barrel of sewage, you have a barrel of sewage. If you pour a glass of sewage into a barrel of wine, you still have a barrel of sewage."
(That is, there's such a thing as a point of diminishing returns, and throwing good money after bad.)
In your defence: "Both the millionaire and the pauper have the same right to sleep on the street."
> I agree, I don't want my porno preferences and sleeping arrangements sent to Big Biz, but is there actually harm in letting a little bit of information out? Just wondering....
You've just made your own counterargument.
Information wants to be free. Computers are devices that are designed to replicate and transmit information. Once a copy of the information exists, it can be replicated indefinitely and passed on from person to person.
As a practical matter, there's no such thing as "letting a little bit of information out". It's like being a little bit pregnant.
You can give information to groups you trust not to abuse it, but as soon as you make a mistake, you're fscked.
I choose to give some personal information to Slashdot to set up an account because I trust them to keep it reasonably secure, and to inform me when they're 0wned:)
Likewise, I choose to deny - to the extent that I'm capable - giving information to Doubleclick, Microsoft Passport, and basically anything else with a TrustE seal on it, because the only thing I trust such groups to do with that information is sell it to anyone who wants it.
> In no way am I asking you to renounce anything. [... ] I'm just asking you to
question the assumptions that have been programmed into you. The things that make you say this in the first place. That people must work. That work is good. That making money is good. That making more money is better. That it's really only important how much more successful than your parents you are.
So far, we agree with each other - I'm more than willing to question those assumptions. (I accept the first three and reject the fourth one about being more successful than one's parents; I merely cited it as an counterexample to the assertion that class mobility is impossible.)
> What does the standard of living "back then" have to do with the standard of living today.
Our standard of living today is the direct result of people building cool stuff because they believed that the building of "cool stuff" (i.e. "progress", "making money", "working hard") was a worthwhile pursuit.
A look at societies that rejected this assumption - e.g. the Amish, many Islamic nations, the Soviet Union - reveals a lower standard of living.
The Amish seem pretty happy with their lot. (And anyone who chooses to live that way is welcome to sign up.) The Islamic nations don't seem terribly happy with their lot (and their unhappiest people seem to be willing to kill those who don't sign up), and the people of the former Communist Bloc (who were "signed up" at gunpoint) became sufficiently unhappy with it that they overthrew it and are in the process of trying something new.
> Capitalism HAS done some wonderful things, but in my eyes the injustices commited in it's name [... ] far outweighs the benefits you and I got to be priveledged with, however few, just so we could have a chance to become richer than we were.
And that's where we differ, and why I said "No thanks" to the alternatives.
I happen to think that the improvement in standards of living in capitalist nations over the past century (and the lack of such improvement in non-capitalist nations) means that, at the macro level, the choice is between capitalism/progress and stagnation/starvation.
> starvation is a motivation to earn enough to eat not a motivating factor for gaining more wealth. That's called greed.
If the desire to improve my life over the level of a subsistence farmer constitutes "greed", well then - guilty as charged, and proud of it!:)
> Unfortunatelly the price for YOU TO HAVE ALL THAT is 80% of the world population been poor
and literally "starving to death in the streets" (please, go to Africa or India and you'll understand
what you are talking about).
Let me get this straight. The price for our 20% of the world to have all this technology is that the other 80% of the planet doesn't (yet) have (all of) it (at the same time I have it).
Are you seriously alleging that if the capitalist economies of the world hadn't developed flush toilets, indoor plumbing, antibiotics, refrigeration, jet aircraft, air conditioning, computers, laser printers, (that is, that the First World had chosen to continue to live in a 19th-century agrarian economy), that Africa, India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Argentina, Palestine, and Peru would now have invented, produced, and distributed all of these things?!?!?
Do you expect me to believe that antibiotics rain from the sky like manna from heaven, and that air conditioners and laser printers spontaneously materialize out of quantum fluctuations? (Let's hope it's this way and not the other way around, 'cuz HP Laserjets falling from the sky would suck!)
> wrong. sorry. just wrong. capitalism benefits those who are rich already. the lawers and the doctors of our world are primarily
those people who grew up in upscale middle class homes or mansions with trust funds and trips to new zealand over the
summer.
What the ring-tailed rambling fsck?!
The one lawyer I know personally grew up in a poor community and a family of five.
The three Ph.D.s I know were average joes from blue-collar families who scrimped and saved to get them into university.
I was the first member of my family to go through college. As a result of a good education, I'm making more than my parents combined.
Yeah, I've got it easy today. Yeah, I was born with a hell of an advantage over people in the third world. Yeah, I was born with a smaller advantage (but an advantage nonetheless) over the children of crackheads.
What's your alternative? That I should renounce my advantages and starve, merely so that others continue to starve with me?
No thanks. I choose to use my advantages to gain more wealth for myself, precisely because I don't want to starve.
And incidentally, compare the standard of living of the poorest 10% of Americans today, with the standard of living of the richest 10% of Americans 100 years ago. Capitalism has done some wonderful things, despite the best efforts of people like you.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit.
1Q01: $903M income before tax, $320M income tax expense.
2Q01: $1.32B income before tax, $470M income tax expense.
3Q01: $785M income before tax, $275M income tax expense.
4Q01: $845M income before tax, $295M income tax expense.
Your political bias is showing. (OK, so's mine. Guilty as charged. ;-) But corporations pay assloads of tax too.
>
> Bill Gates (love him or hate him) really hit the nail on the head in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought. It really outlines how technology can be used to increase the flow of information, while at the same time reducing the cost associated with acting on that information.
>
>Maybe someone in the California government will take charge and turn this bad situation into a golden opportunity!
Why would they do that?
If a private sector employer did all its work on paper, having to hire thousands of unskilled workers and pay them benefits, it would have to raise prices (making competing products cheaper, driving its own customers away), or go bankrupt due to the higher expenses.
The government can't go bankrupt -- nor can its customers purchase their services from a competing government. It's a monpoly - not in the Gatesian sense, but in the guys-with-guns sense. You can always dump Windows for Linux, but try explaining that "Joe's Auto Licensing Inc" does a better job than your state DMV the next time you get pulled over and asked to show your driver's license!
The more folks a department in .gov hires, the more important the people who run that department become. The department's inefficient, slow, and costs too much to run? No problem! That just means we need more money! Who cares about the costs, we can always raise taxes, the taxpayer's good for the money.
And besides, what are the taxpayers gonna do, buy their schools, roads, and police and fire departments from someone else? That's illegal! (Whew, good thing we make the laws that control that part, or we'd be fucked! OK, you can buy your schools from someone else if you really wanna, but you still gotta pay for ours :-)
And the other stuff .govs do? Taxpayers buying their diversity training programs and social security and sensitivity classes and unemployment insurance and welfare from someone else? Hey, most people wouldn't buy those things at all. (Gee, also a good thing we can pass laws to make buying those things from us mandatory! :-)
Governments will modernize and eliminate waste when they have an incentive to eliminate that waste. The only incentive that's been shown to motivate such cost reductions is the profit incentive. (Kinda a tautology, no? Only people who care about making money care about not spending it.) The government - by defintion - has no profit incentive. The private sector - again by definition - is all about profit incentive.
So no, nobody in any government will "see this as a golden opportunity", because it's not an opportunity, because doing business at the speed of anything faster than a sloth on valium isn't what governments are about.
Well, half of it did. Oracle pays taxes on its profits, don't forget.
Lessee. Taxpayers earn $200M. Governments loot $100M. Government spends $100M on Oracle warez. Oracle makes $100M more profit (hey, how much does it cost 'em to stamp 1000 CDs?) Governments loot $50M of Oracle's $100M.
Net result: Taxpayers produce $200M of wealth. Taxpayer-to-Oracle subsidy of $50M. Taxpayer-to-Government subsidy of $50M.
OK, I suppose you're right - that's better than a Taxpayer-to-Government subsidy of $100M. At least...
> I would rather the money be in private hands than in public hands (so do a lot of other people, its called the stock market).
As you say, though, if the net effect is that the government keeps $50M of taxpayer dollars, I'd still much rather the government merely content itself to loot only $50M of taxpayer money to begin with, and let me decide where to put the other $50M.
Huh? How would raising taxes to pay higher civil service salaries encourage civil servants to spend said money more wisely?
Most .gov bureaucrats would say "Wow, we have more money coming in. Better spend it!"
How about "when the state has to compete like a private industry by providing services in exchange for dollars (instead of just saying "all your tax dollars are belong to us" with the stroke of a pen), you'll get higher-quality decisions."
Does anyone know how much Gov. Davis got in campaign contributions from Larry Ellison and/or Oracle employees?
Then again, given Gov. Davis's views on whose money it is, the $95M in wasted funds doesn't surprise me even if Oracle isn't a big campaign donor.
And to take it one step further - Hogan's Heroes is funny because it mirrors real life in peacetime, not in wartime. I'll draw a more current parallel between Hogan's Heroes and Dilbert:
Col. Klink - the incompetent middle manager (pointy-haired boss) :-)
Sgt. Schulz - the incompetent office grunt (Wally!)
Hochstedter - the guy who believes in enforcing policy and ideology, no matter how crazy (the classic Human Resources/Accounting paradigm)
Gen. Burqhalter (sp) - every once in a while, the CEO shows up, expresses frustration at middle management that the project failed, but can never quite prove that anyone screwed up enough to fire them.
The Allied Prisoners - The people who actually get the day-to-day work done - either behind management's back or in spite of management's best efforts. And when ever that fails, by saving their manager's ass when the CEO's in town, and keeping the gravy train running
Typical dialogue from just about any episode:
Hogan: "See, Klink? The reason you've never had an escape from Stalag 13 is 'cuz even though we're your prisoners, we love you, and you're just too damn good at keeping this place running well!"
Klink: "Ahhh... yes... Yes, you know, Hogan, even though we're on different sides of this war, I think you're finally starting to see things our way!"
Hogan: "The place wouldn't be the same without you, Colonel!"
Thank you for bringing this up. (And I agree with you).
If you take a potato, carve it into the shape of a gun, and paint it black, and point it at someone, even though it's not a gun, you still go down for armed robbery.
Why? Because the guy you threatened with a potato doesn't have the time to analyze whether it's "real or not".
Because when you get arrested, you can't say "Sorry, Officer, I only pointed a potato at him. Not a gun. Too bad you can't prove it either way because you never found the weapon and the store's surveillance video doesn't make it clear" and get the "armed" part of the robbery charge dropped.
Likewise for Photoshopping kids.
We've all seen the advances in CGI in the past 10 years ("Clinton" speaking in the movie Contact, the real-time alteration of billboards in Times Square on New Year's Eve, etc). 10 years from now, it'll be impossible to tell the "virtual" pr0n from the "real" pr0n.
Today's ruling means that, 10 years from now, some landshark's gonna get up on the stand and convince a jury of 12 that there's reasonable doubt that his client didn't posess a real video - that it was just a computer-generated rendering indistinguishable from the real thing.
And some scumbag - indeed, every scumbag arrested for posession of such videos, whether real or not - is gonna walk free. Because it'll be very difficult to prove beyond that reasonable doubt that the material was "really real" and not "just really sick CGI".
Anyone supporting this ruling should realize that they're arguing that, for all intents and purposes, the posession of real child pr0n should also be legal. (That is, still illegal, but the law will become unenforceable because the DA will never be able to get a prosecution.) While that may be a defensible position, it's not one I agree with, and it's not one I think the voters will agree with. It's emphatically not one that the court believes in; the First Amendment doesn't protect obscenity, and I'm astounded that the Supreme Court didn't realize the implications that easily-anticipated advances in technology have in store for their ruling.
C'mon, Slashdotters - if (as I think most of us are) we're willing to accept that a machine that passes the Turing test (that is, is indistinguishable from a thinking human being) can be said to "think" - ought we not to realize that the same logic applies to pr0n?
Agreed on the latter, but I disagree vehemently on the former.
Taking Forrest Mims' little paperbacks at Radio Shack for example -- the laws that govern electronics are the same whether God slacked off for six days and pulled an all nighter, or if evolution is correct.
I fail to see the relevance of his unscientific beliefs with regards to biology if he's writing a column of hands-on science projects. Sometimes smart people make mistakes outside of their area of expertise.
A similar example would be that of Linus Pauling (winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for chemistry). It appears that Linus Pauling was just plain wrong about vitamin C. This in no way invalidates his other outstanding work as a chemist.
The difference is that Pauling wasn't raked over the coals for being wrong about one particular thing, and Mims was. IMNSHO, so long as Mims kept his creationist beliefs out of his electronics columns (and I can't imagine any project which would require us knowing about them :-), Mims' treatment was unjust.
What you said. I do most of my shopping at surplus electronics stores, but there are still a few (a very few) Radio Shacks that are true to the faith.
My old town:
Very much the stereotypical "You've got questions, we've got blank stares" kind of store.
My new town:
Me: [reluctantly goes into RS, hey, it's nearby and I might get lucky and save myself a long drive... yay, I find the parts!]
RS guy: [seeing one of those little 600-ohm telephone transformers and some 10M resistors] So - buildin' a radio or a line finder?
Me: Line finder. Hangin' a painting in a new apartment, but yeah, once I find where my wiring is, I oughta build a crystal radio, I haven't done that since I was a kid - HEY! This is isn't supposed to happen at Radio Shack!
RS guy: (Laughs) - Yeah, there aren't many of us left who still build for the fun of it.
Me: You said it. Nice to see there's still some of us left - you wouldn't happen to know where I could get a $PARTNUM for the vertical deflection on $TV_MODEL, would you? (/me shows datasheet)
RS guy: (nodding) I've seen that - very common failure mode with that set. (/he points at a cap on the reference design page). Usually this cap has dried out, which takes out the deflection amp. We don't have the amp, but [gives name/address of local TV repair guy about 3 blocks away] does. If it's more the amp or the caps, he also does good work.
We talked shop for a few minutes after that, basically the same things as this Slashdot thread, namely that disposable/replacable modules and the shift to SMT and ASICs made repair work easier (swap modules) and electronics cheaper and better -- but that the price was that it was gonna be very hard for anyone starting from scratch to ever "learn it all from scratch" anymore. You can cobble together some neat stuff with TTL and discrete components, but there's a huge jump in cost and learning curve to get from there to playing with, say, FPGAs.
But hey, a couple of days later, I had the picture safely attached to the wall without fear of nailing through a live wire, the TV was fixed, and that Shack had a customer for life.
How's this... oops, how's this? :)
>Hindu -- "We were right all along."
>Creationist -- "Let's see how long it will be before the evolutionists try to cover this one up."
>Evolutionist -- "Where is my shovel?"
>Historian -- "Legends really do rave a basis in fact, whoda thunk it?"
>Captialist -- "Get your 6 temple tour here today!"
>Di$ney -- "We are working on our new film, Searh for the six temples. PLease pay our Congressmen accordingly."
>Mafia -- "Oh damn, there goes our hiding spot."
Illuminist: "And those Discordian bastards stole the statues we were planning to sell them!"
Discordian: "Hot shit! 8 months after a splinter group of the Leauge of Assassins goes apeshit, 6 months after we barely catch the germ warfare leaks in time, and only a week after we buy the luxury submarine we read about on Slashdot, and we've got the gold Atlantean statues! Finally, we can buy the Mob back from the Illuminati and stop the power grab in the States. (Dorn, that's your job!) The rest of us will haul ass through the secret tunnel to Lake Totenkopf! Let's move it, we've only got three weeks to go before they immanentize the Eschaton!"
(I gave up on reality when I realized the The Illuminatus! Trilogy, (1975), was a better guide to world events fnord than CNN. Robert Anton Wilson was right -- science fiction fnord authors aren't writing fiction, they're just people who happen to be travelling backwards in time fnord and they're writing their memoirs...)
And mine.
News flash, Hilary. Gateway isn't in business to sell your product.
That's YOUR job.
This is on a par with a news release from the National Deep-Dish Pizza Association reading: "You know, if only Hilary would devote a little bit of the millions of dollars she's spending on buying Congressmen to help buy everyone a pizza. But that wouldn't help her sell more CDs, would it?"
Right. We're the little kids caught in the middle of a nasty divorce.
But if Mommy's a crack whore who locks us in the closet and turns a blind eye to what her "boyfriends" do to us when she needs a hit...
Like the other respondent to your post said - maybe Gateway ain't your friend, but right now, that cow is a valuable ally.
Oops. Good call. Uh, I mean...
"Well, that may be what I wrote, but obviously, you misinterpreted it! It's trivially shown in the literature that it's the deconstruction that's important in Pinky and the Brain - the genius ghost of Pac-Man is now the idiot comic relief, while the fat, pokey Clyde of Pac-Man is the genius who threatens world domination! (Just as Pac-Man itself is arguably the Hegelian synthesis of the American Atari thesis with the Japanese Namco antithesis) You see, I have a Ph.D. in Neo-Lucasian Mythic Literature and you don't!" :-)
But, uh, yeah, thanks for calling me on it :)
> Thesis: Microsoft products
>Antithesis: Marketplace
>
> Says it all, really
Not quite all. Doesn't it strike you as odd that Microsoft is attacking the GPL as "communistic", while absorbed in some sort of dialectical materialist "Our eventual ownership of 4ll j00r b4se is the inevitable result of the Hegelian synthesis" doctrine?
Remember, kids, when you use Microsoft products, you're using Communism!
>
> All this discussion is just pushing Campbell's thesis. Whether Lucas consciously or unconsciously meant his characters to fall in line with the monomyth is an entirely different question.
>
> _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ also has a great deal of monomythic elements to it, but Joss Whedon has admitted himself that he hasn't read _Hero with a Thousand Faces_.
So does _Pac Man_. Inky, the dark one, Blinky, the red one, aggressive with passion, Pinky - as in Pinky and the Brain - the fast genius who's the greatest threat, and Clyde, for comic relief. All set up in a backdrop of the ideology of mass consumption iconified by yellow, the color of cowardice - we're too scared to confront our desire to consume until we energize and empower ourselves (the energy pills), after which time we can turn the tables on our ghostly enemies and devour them.
It's like astrology. Make your "monomyth" broad enough to include anything, and anything will fit the pattern.
<FLASHBACK>
Imaginary interview with Hollings and Davis:
Hollings: It's like the time we tried to legislate that pi=3, and these stupid tech forms didn't want to make it work! They kept doggedly insisting that it was this long number, like 3.14159something, and that it couldn't be expressed as a rational number!
Davis: Yeah, I mean, they wouldn't even compromise on the issue - during Congressional testimony, we had Andy Grove of Intel on the stand, and we offered him "3.14?" He said, "no, it's pi" "22/7?" "No, pi is a transcendental number." Utterly ridiculous. As if good Christians should have to put up with this sort of new age Transcendentalist movement. Maybe in California, but not in South Carolina, by gum!
Hollings: And the engineers were worse than the mathematicians. We got letters from all these so-called rational thinkers tryin' to convince us that simple things like the wheel and the suspension bridge weren't based on rational numbers! Can't they see that they're the ones being irrational about this?
Davis: There's just no negotiating with technology people. They don't want to make it work, they don't even want to try to make it work. Why won't they even try to see things from our point of view? Hollings: So we're moving ahead with the legislation. They kept trying to get us to move from 3 to 3.14whatever? We subtracted double than their beloved 0.14159265whatever, and came up with 2.718281828. They can have pi=2.718 or nothing at all!
Davis: They're bluffing when they say math won't work with our proposal. Maybe it'll just make a few things harder for them in the short term, but when the law makes pi=2.718, they'll have to innovate in order to build anything!
Hollings: Yeah! Now we'll see who really knows how to promote engineering and mathematical innovation our children's schools!
</FLASHBACK>
It says "We're marketers-for-hire! Our job is to con your boss into thinking we can help him con his customers! If your boss, who at lest knows how much his product sux0rz, is dumb enough to fall for this, then surely his customers must be dumb enough to fall for it too!"
Someday, I'd love to see a graph showing weekly sales of Ayn Rand books. $1000 says there's a spike every year around April 15th :)
>
> If a large number of poor people contribute, they can make up for a rich man. But than again, it takes a large number of poor people to make a rich man.
Allow me to descend into rampant classism for a moment: "If you pour a glass of wine into a barrel of sewage, you have a barrel of sewage. If you pour a glass of sewage into a barrel of wine, you still have a barrel of sewage."
(That is, there's such a thing as a point of diminishing returns, and throwing good money after bad.)
In your defence: "Both the millionaire and the pauper have the same right to sleep on the street."
You've just made your own counterargument.
Information wants to be free. Computers are devices that are designed to replicate and transmit information. Once a copy of the information exists, it can be replicated indefinitely and passed on from person to person.
As a practical matter, there's no such thing as "letting a little bit of information out". It's like being a little bit pregnant.
You can give information to groups you trust not to abuse it, but as soon as you make a mistake, you're fscked.
I choose to give some personal information to Slashdot to set up an account because I trust them to keep it reasonably secure, and to inform me when they're 0wned :)
Likewise, I choose to deny - to the extent that I'm capable - giving information to Doubleclick, Microsoft Passport, and basically anything else with a TrustE seal on it, because the only thing I trust such groups to do with that information is sell it to anyone who wants it.
So far, we agree with each other - I'm more than willing to question those assumptions. (I accept the first three and reject the fourth one about being more successful than one's parents; I merely cited it as an counterexample to the assertion that class mobility is impossible.)
> What does the standard of living "back then" have to do with the standard of living today.
Our standard of living today is the direct result of people building cool stuff because they believed that the building of "cool stuff" (i.e. "progress", "making money", "working hard") was a worthwhile pursuit.
A look at societies that rejected this assumption - e.g. the Amish, many Islamic nations, the Soviet Union - reveals a lower standard of living.
The Amish seem pretty happy with their lot. (And anyone who chooses to live that way is welcome to sign up.) The Islamic nations don't seem terribly happy with their lot (and their unhappiest people seem to be willing to kill those who don't sign up), and the people of the former Communist Bloc (who were "signed up" at gunpoint) became sufficiently unhappy with it that they overthrew it and are in the process of trying something new.
> Capitalism HAS done some wonderful things, but in my eyes the injustices commited in it's name [ ... ] far outweighs the benefits you and I got to be priveledged with, however few, just so we could have a chance to become richer than we were.
And that's where we differ, and why I said "No thanks" to the alternatives.
I happen to think that the improvement in standards of living in capitalist nations over the past century (and the lack of such improvement in non-capitalist nations) means that, at the macro level, the choice is between capitalism/progress and stagnation/starvation.
> starvation is a motivation to earn enough to eat not a motivating factor for gaining more wealth. That's called greed.
If the desire to improve my life over the level of a subsistence farmer constitutes "greed", well then - guilty as charged, and proud of it! :)
Let me get this straight. The price for our 20% of the world to have all this technology is that the other 80% of the planet doesn't (yet) have (all of) it (at the same time I have it).
Are you seriously alleging that if the capitalist economies of the world hadn't developed flush toilets, indoor plumbing, antibiotics, refrigeration, jet aircraft, air conditioning, computers, laser printers, (that is, that the First World had chosen to continue to live in a 19th-century agrarian economy), that Africa, India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Argentina, Palestine, and Peru would now have invented, produced, and distributed all of these things?!?!?
Do you expect me to believe that antibiotics rain from the sky like manna from heaven, and that air conditioners and laser printers spontaneously materialize out of quantum fluctuations? (Let's hope it's this way and not the other way around, 'cuz HP Laserjets falling from the sky would suck!)
What are you smoking, and are you sharing?
Hell, I'd settle for just the US adopting th
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What the ring-tailed rambling fsck?!
The one lawyer I know personally grew up in a poor community and a family of five.
The three Ph.D.s I know were average joes from blue-collar families who scrimped and saved to get them into university.
I was the first member of my family to go through college. As a result of a good education, I'm making more than my parents combined.
Yeah, I've got it easy today. Yeah, I was born with a hell of an advantage over people in the third world. Yeah, I was born with a smaller advantage (but an advantage nonetheless) over the children of crackheads.
What's your alternative? That I should renounce my advantages and starve, merely so that others continue to starve with me?
No thanks. I choose to use my advantages to gain more wealth for myself, precisely because I don't want to starve.
And incidentally, compare the standard of living of the poorest 10% of Americans today, with the standard of living of the richest 10% of Americans 100 years ago. Capitalism has done some wonderful things, despite the best efforts of people like you.